Lake of the Woods

The first contact John & Nancy had with Pioneer was with General Manager André Chevigny on February 21, 2006 after they became aware of Pioneer Log Homes of British Columbia through word of mouth. Initially John provided Pioneer with a napkin sketch of their dream home and spoke of their incredibly pristine piece of property, remotely located on the Lake of the Woods, Ontario, where it would be built. Working from this napkin sketch Roy Keats (Pioneer's Manager of Design and Architecture) was able to interpret exactly what John and Nancy's dreams and visions were. The resulting preliminary drawings then became the basis for a very interactive design process between John, Nancy, André and Roy, where fine tuning every detail resulted in two amazing structures. The first, a log post and beam boathouse and a second, a massive Western Red Cedar fully scribed log home. It took approximately ninety days to complete the boathouse plans and approximately one hundred sixty days to design the full scribe log home and have plans ready for engineering.

Through discussions with John and Nancy the team figured it would be best to deliver the two structures in phases. The first phase would be the log post and beam boathouse which would be delivered on water barges in the summer of '07 and in the second phase the main structure would be delivered by truck over an ice bridge the following winter.

On July 31, 2007 the log package for the boathouse was completed at the Soda Creek building site, just outside of Williams Lake, British Columbia. Thorough planning began on the logistics of getting the logs delivered to the owner's remote property. The structure was loaded onto four trucks and once in Ontario the loads had to be broken up to fit onto smaller trucks that could go onto water barges for the 37km journey to their final destination. John's very professional crew from Lake of the Woods, Ontario was led by his General Contractor, Don. They had the boathouse foundation ready and provided labour and support in the delivery and re-erection of the incredible log post and beam package. The building site for the boathouse on this remote island property was solid rock, which made the foundation an engineering marvel of steel pilings that were drilled in and attached to the rock. With the logs re-erected Don's crew were able to get to work on completing the structure and sheeting over the beautiful log rafters.

Next: Part 2