In Log Home Building Class, one of the things that they stress over and over is the invaluable importance of building a model before build the real thing. It is a small, minimally time-consumng project that will reveal problems with your design you were never aware of, and give you lots to think about.
This proved to be the case with my model-building endeavor: I made one small mistake that I don't think I'd ever have made in real life - one log was (in scale) a foot away from something it was supposed to be pressed up against. You might notice that if you catch one of the pictures where the loft's front girder misses the vertical log near its center. I also figured out a few small design alterations that I wanted to make - this on one side of that rather than the other, because it just seems to make more sense that way. For that same horizontal girder at the front of the 3rd story Loft, I'm going to have the girder pass on the front-of-the-house side of the vertical Ridge Pole Support Log (RPSL), rather than the rear side, for two reasons: First, it will give me about 60 more square feet of space. And second, the cantilevered 4x10's that hold up the platform at the top of the stairs to the loft have to project two feet less distance past the girder, thereby dramatically decreasing the stresses that they are subjected to.
Such changes to the house are the kinds of things that the class teachers expected that we might encounter, so I have to agree with them: building a scale model of the house is VERY worthwhile.
While I spent a good two years doing the planning for this project, half a year of which took place after the model was built, normally you'd work on planning next