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For Love of Wood
Joe and Lucille DiLorenzo's log home is a showplace built on a budget.

by Joyce Marcel
Photos by Rich Frutchey

Sometimes, when the universe is in tune, a house brings everything together: the people who build it, the materials they love, the furniture and objects they've collected through the years and the life they lead. That is when a showplace turns into a real home. Case in point - the stunning log house Joe and Lucille DiLorenzo built four years ago on a quiet, 11-acre lot in Waterford.

Joe, 52, and Lucille, 50, are warm, open, comfortable Vermonters who have been married since 1996. It's a second marriage for both. Between them, they have four children and two grandchildren.

They met when Lucille started working at a sawmill Joe once owned.

"We worked together for about nine or ten years, and Mother Nature took over after that," Joe said.

Log homes are not for everyone. Cynics call their owners "cowboy wannabes," and a recent headline in The New York Times about the proliferation of log homes read, "A Return to Nature, Mostly by Cutting it Down." Although log homes, with their cathedral ceilings and generous floor plans, are spacious and open, some people find the idea of living surrounded by wood - walls, floors and ceilings - monotonous or boring. "We've had guests who ask, 'When are you going to wallpaper and paint?'" Lucille said.

The DiLorenzos, however, decided to build their log home just because they are in love with wood. "We've both worked with wood all our lives," Joe said. "I've worked in sawmills, I've run sawmills, I've worked in the woods, I've run skidders, I've hauled logs, and my original degree was in forestry.

"Now I work in the finish end of a furniture plant. You've got to like wood to do this."

Typically, log homes are kit homes, and the DiLorenzos bought theirs from Northeastern Log Homes in Groton. Before they ordered it, they spent two years working with sales consultant Mike Cassidy to make the floor plan their own.

They added six feet of depth to the kitchen, changed the location of the bathrooms, and most importantly, eliminated the second floor.

"We decided not to have two stories, because we plan to be here forever, and when we're in our 70's, we don't want to climb stairs," Lucille said.

In a log home, the inside walls are also the outside walls. The outside of the log is milled curved, and the inside is milled flat. In the case of the DiLorenzo house, the logs are six inches wide, eight inches high, and natural insulators.

"Wood is made up of millions of little cell structures, and when the moisture leaves the wood, it leaves behind all these dry air cells that trap air and provide insulation," Cassidy said.

This Waterford house has about 1,850 square feet. Finished, including land, appliances, deck and railings - but not landscaping - it cost about $250,000 to build.

From the outside, the house seems to go on for miles. It has a central, long, one-level, flat-roofed, ranch-style building balanced on each end by a high gable turned to face the front. One gable contains the high-ceilinged living room, which is anchored by a giant fieldstone hearth and chimney. The other holds a huge garage and a stand-free Taylor outdoor furnace that heats everything - the house, the hot water, the garage and the full basement. A generous deck runs around most of the house. The outside wood is stained a warm honey pine.

Inside, all the walls are eastern knotty pine, and except for ceramic tile in the kitchen and bathrooms, all the floors are hardwoods. The wood surround gives a warm, glowing feeling and has more than enough visual interest, making paintings and pictures seem superfluous.

The entrance to the house is a breakfast nook. "In the original plans, it was a mud room, but we thought it was too much wasted space," Joe said. "We use the garage as the mud room, because it's heated."

Next to the nook is a showplace kitchen where the DiLorenzos spend most of their time. "We both like to cook," Joe said of he and his wife. "It's our hobby."

The kitchen's center island holds an electric stovetop, a slab of soapstone for hot pots, and a piece of marble that serves as a pastry board. Hanging above it is a large wooden rack holding at least 30 pots and pans on pegs.

All the appliances - the stovetop, the built-in microwave, the oven, the double-door refrigerator - are black. Running along the walls are many cabinets, light Corian countertops, a window that overlooks a meadow, and twin sinks.

"The cabinets were built by a local cabinet maker," Joe said. "It's ash. I like ash, although a lot of people don't. I like the grain texture, the dark and white woods." The kitchen shares an inside wall with a large, rough-beamed guest bedroom and bathroom. The DiLorenzos turned one of the bedroom closets around and made it into a copious pantry for the kitchen. A second bedroom is used as a study.

Next to the kitchen is a long dining room leading to the living room with its cathedral ceiling. Here, the high wood walls, the large windows, the glass-paneled double doors with an arched glass window above it, create a sense of light and vastness. From the couch, the view is of mountains and distant pines. The fieldstone hearth dominates one wall; its mantle is a piece of oak that Joe had sawed in a sawmill back in the early 1970's. He lugged it with him for almost 30 years before he finally found it a home.

In fact, Joe's love of wood and his knowledge of construction can be found throughout the house. "See the round circles going up those posts?" Joe said, pointing to the wide posts that frame the living room doors. "Those aren't knotholes. They are cherry dowels. There are bolts behind there that hold the post to the wall so the wall can't flex. In most log homes, the black bolts show. But I changed that. This is what makes this place mine instead of somebody else's."

Fabrics - a flowered green rug, a delicate lace cloth draped over a plant stand made by Lucille's mother - soften the wood-dominated ambiance. The pine furniture is old, but not antique. "This furniture is on its third generation of kids," Lucille said. "I bought it when my now-grown children were young. So there's the grown-up family, the teenagers, and now the grandchildren."

Behind the living room, sharing the carrying wall that supports the high ceiling, is the master bedroom and bath. The primary decoration here is Lucille's large collection of teddy bears, some of which wave down from the 17-foot ceiling.

By the bedroom window is a telescope. "We can look out at the deer in the field, and my daughters like looking at the moon," Joe said. "One November morning we woke up and there were seven deer sleeping in the yard," Lucille said. "It was beautiful. We also have a bear. We haven't seen it, but he's destroyed our bird feeder and pooped on the lawn. We hear coy dogs in the night and we see wild turkeys. Northern Lights are not uncommon."

The house has become a gathering place for family and friends. "People may never have been in a log home before, but they're very comfortable when they come in here," Lucille said. "Our friends and family bring their friends and family here. Sometimes we have 15 sitting down for dinner."

The DiLorenzos built the house so it will age as gracefully as they hope to. "We decided that at our ages, we wanted to move in and be happy," Lucille said. "We ran into a lot of, 'Do this now and redo it later.' How much later are we going to have? We wanted something we could be comfortable in, without worrying about fixing, repairing or remodeling. That's why we took a couple of years to design and redesign it."