As one might expect, in order to make a log home, you kind of need a lot of logs.
One of the things they talk about in the LHBA class is how to get ahold of your logs for the best possible price. Many of my friends scoffed at the idea of getting logs for free, but I have to say, it's true that it is possible. There are forests that are selectively harvested so as to promote the overall health of the forest (That's actually one of the jobs that the National Forestry Service was created for: cultivating national forests so that the wood could be used for beneficial domestic products. If a house isn't a beneficial comestic product, I don't know what is! But that is only narrowly available, and only if you go about it the right way.
You can also hire a logger to clear some land - assuming that you own some land with trees, or the logger does - and then you have to pay the logger for his or her work, plus the cost of transporting the logs, cleaning up the mess, and in some cases, pay the pand-owner for the privalege. Or, in some cases, charge the land owner for the service. Or, in other cases, say "Thanks for the logs!" to the land owner, and shake hands as they, in turn, say "Thanks for clearing my land!" You never really know how it's going to go.
Sometimes you can call a logger, land clearer, tree removal service, or something similar, and tell them what kinds of trees you need - and find out that they are working a land-clearing or tree-felling job just that very week that will yield 150 logs exactly like you need! And while normally they would chip up the logs into mulch, or put them on dumpster trucks (like a dump truck, but 30 feet long) and haul them to the wood chipper, you can offer to beat the wood chipper's price, and get the loads of logs delivered to your house instead.
I did a little bit of each of the above, sans the forestry service, since there are no husbanded forests in the part of the country that we were building, according to my wife, who did the research. I, the truly social creature of the two of us, called loggers, land owners, and tree clearing services, and in the end we arranged for a whole bunch of logs to be delivered to the property on which we'd be building.
As you can see, the first pile of logs covers the driveway. Luckily, this is a bid driveway with multiple entrances to the street, so it wasn't a problem.
This photo was taken while I was standing on top of the second pile of logs. The nearer pile was a third load of logs that I got from a nearbye land owner who wanted the trees taken off his property. As it happens, the land owner was also the guy who works for the county who inspected my building plans and approved them for building permits. We got a good laugh out of that! And in the distance, that small pile of about 10 grey-ish colored logs are the oak trees that used to be taking up the front yard where all these piles of logs are now sitting.
See how those oaks are up on three logs, raising them off the ground a little bit? That's called putting the logs up on "racks" or "rails" - putting a little bit of distance between the logs and the dirt, so that they will be less accessible to stuff that causes rot, and less likely to trap water beneath them - thereby again reducing the liklihood of rot. More on that soon.
Just for a sense of scale, take another look at those three piles of logs...
So, where are we going to put this thing?