Professional Remodeler Magazine has given Alure Home Improvements the honor for being the best remodeler in the U.S. for the year 2005. Aside normal justifications like Alure being excellent company and doing good job, the extra kick to gain this placing came from their high visibility in Extreme Makeover series. This was the key to tip the scales – good publicity for the whole remodeling industry.

If your log home needs some remodeling, this company can help you, although they do not specialize on log structures, indoor remodeling isn’t rocket science. Structural changes for log homes and log cabins do come close to that though.

Centex Homes and Meritage Homes have both published excellent financial results for the first part of the year. These two companies are among the biggest homebuilders in the U.S. Therefore one could suspect that the past year has been good times for homebuilding companies. It is easy to show profit when the finished products sell at stellar prices.

Now there might be some clouds gather to the horizon, for example, according to the Building Online, Centex Homes has started an extended employee pricing for the homes they build, so that if you order now, you get 5% discount. Could this be that classic trick of closing as much sales as possible before a drastic turn in market climate? You are all welcomed to give your opinion, just comment freely.

Honka started their U.S. market push with a bang. NFL star Steve Young was used as a PR case to increase the visibility of Honka log homes. This was year 2001, and after that, things have progressed slowly and the visibility of Honka is still rather low in the States.

Honka is the biggest industrial log home manufacturer in the world. Company is about four times bigger than their closest competitor, so for me it is quite baffling that they are still relatively unknown in the States. However, they seem to be making some progress in building their distribution network. Time will tell how they fare against local competition in the U.S.

U.S. has been imposing punitive tariffs on Canadian lumber shipments. This artificially increases the price of Canadian lumber and U.S. consumers are not able to benefit from free trade.

This situation shows also in log home industry. Log homes tend to use more wood (I’m not counting the logs here) on interior decoration than other types of housing. Therefore, among house owners, log home owners carry lion’s share of skewed market price.

Why is it that lumber industry is able to arm-wrestle with much bigger interest groups? Perhaps nobody cares, well Canadian wood producers do because it costs lot of money for them. Wood users in U.S. are much wider group and during the recent housing bubble, raw material prices sink in easily. I spotted a news article on this at Building Online.

Housing market keeps on going strong in the U.S. All three figures – Building permits, Housing starts and Housing completions for September 2005 were higher than estimated.

Earlier I have recommended treading lightly, because I feel that the drop might be very close ahead. Seems like I am wrong, the market keeps on surprising me every time that new figures are published.

This is good news for log home lovers. It means that we can keep on signing those huge mortgages that we need to finance our dream houses, without the fear that as soon as we get the house up and standing, its value tanks and we loose it to the bank. Detailed data can be found here.

ABC network has a TV series that fixes up housing for people down on their luck. Series got massive publicity by giving 500.000-dollar log home for Mr. Goodale. Mr. Goodale lives in Maine and has had his share of bad fortune.

Now it seems that it is Extreme Makeover series’ time to get a streak of bad luck. Mr. Goodale seems to have a criminal record and this puts series into very odd light. After all, series is not called Extreme Criminal Makeover. This makes you wonder, if the whole purpose was to get maximum amount of publicity – first the good news and then the scandal and coming in next episode the apology. Boston Globe had this article on the story.

Restoring log homes draws lot of publicity in the States. This new country doesn’t have long withstanding architectural history and therefore log homes are a big part of historic American way of life, just as cathedrals are in Europe. Identity and traditional values seem to matter more and more, could this be a counter-acting trend for globalization?

An annual Log Cabin Day has been held at Muscatatuck National Wildlife Refuge east of Seymour - a quaint little place, somewhere far away that I can’t exactly put on the map. Read about artisan skills and old way of living in this news article.

This is a wonderful way to promote all that down-to-earth living that log homes are associated with. Nostalgia makes us appreciate log homes, but at the actual point of purchase, we choose to take the high-tech road. Image and comfort combined.