One vital tool to erect your log house is the triple block pulley. With several of these you can actually hoist all of your logs into place without the use of any large equipment. Many people wonder where to go to buy these old farm implements. Ebay has been a trusty source to find these going on 10 years now. Here is one I found just today on there.

What you will end up doing is buying 8 triple block pulleys on ebay as you will find them quickly and usually get them for about $30 a piece which isn’t too bad. You will pay about $240 for all your pulleys. If you were to buy these new you would likely pay that much for one. The way you use these things is you will use them with 4 poles about the length of a standard wood telephone pole. You will dig 4 holes near the interior corners of your pier and beam foundation. To clarify, near each corner of the house you will place the pole in the hole so that it stands up vertically in the interior part of the house where the floor will eventually be built. You will have a pulley chained to the top of the pole threaded with some of that affordable polypropylene rope you can get at Lowes and Home Depot. That rope will hang down on the ground and be threaded to another triple block pulley at the bottom. You will hook the bottom pulley to a chain on the end of a log you want to have hoisted onto the pier and beam foundation of your house. You will do the same at the other end of the log and then grab the loose end of the rope and hoist the log up with the help of a friend or truck. The log will move up and on to the foundation easier then you might expect. You will continue going around your house hoisting one log at a time onto your house until you have stacked them all up.

You may be asking, how do the logs stay in place? That question is best answered for a later time or you may want to visit the Log Home Builders Forum to learn the finer details of this construction process. There are a lot of good guys on their like, engineers, 6th generation log home builders and the like that will give you a good jump onto the right direction.