Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/89420
This page: The dogtrot room with Williams' first homemade red-cedar furnishings, a bench and side table; and the living room/loft and its three-years-in-the-making fireplace and chimney. Opposite: The kitchen's between-beams cabinetry, a Williams-made bed and night table, and a sky-lit spot on the loft. Most log cabins started out as a single room or "pen," the homeowner explains, but as families grew larger, they often built a second pen parallel to the first and joined them together with a roof. Typi- cally, he says, the separation between the pens — the dogtrot, or breezeway — was "about enough space to park a wagon." As the old log cabins were restored, the dogtrot was enclosed for additional living space. Te design Williams eventually chose consists of two pens measuring 18.5 feet square on the interiors, connected by an enclosed 14-foot dogtrot. Te cabin is sit- ed on a south-facing hillside to catch the winter sun and sits on a pier foundation made of concrete blocks he constructed himself using cardboard boxes for forms to level the piers. For the logs, he purchased rough pop- lar and pine and hired a Scottsburg, Ind., man with a portable saw mill to cut them at the Clark County site they were har- vested. Williams then transported them to his property. For the chinking, he cut steel-mesh hardware "cloth" into three- foot strips, drove nails up and down and bent the mesh inward to create a deep concave surface. Te recipe for the chink- [138] LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 11.12