Concrete logs, he says, are "worry free".
But he points out that concrete logs don't require the cutting of trees, whereas construction of the average log home requires 100 large logs.
When most people dream of a rustic log cabin getaway in the mountains, it's probably not built of concrete logs.
Throughout the night, black-clad riot police with assault rifles patrolled; residents of poorer areas improvised roadblocks from concrete, logs or twisted car chassis.
But Stewart Hansen, a co-founder and the president of EverLog Systems, the Missoula-based company that has been selling concrete logs since 2004 and that made the logs for the Cooks' house, thinks it should be.
Building a house of the same size with EverLog concrete logs, on the other hand, could cost as much as $600,000, Mr. Hansen said, which is close to the cost of a real log home, and about 25percentt more than traditional construction.
Jon Sellers, the vice president for marketing for Rocky Mountain Log Homes, a builder of real log houses based in Hamilton, takes issue with a fundamental premise of the concrete-log camp, that wood logs are highly flammable.
It had a similar log, concrete stone, and tile construction.
And in Tecumseh, Okla., Stanton Pace, a contractor, has been creating sprayed concrete facades with fake log finishes since 2003.
Yes, there will be "a vegetable plot and fruit trees," he said, but also a concrete birdbath resembling a log, painted black, and chain link-fence topiary skeletons.
