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Log Cabin Style Doors, Trim And Handrails

Updated: May 2, 2023


After you have the basics of your Log Cabin Style Interior set, the next step in the process is choosing doors, trim and handrails that will enhance the log cabin style feel of your home.


All of the steps that we will talk about here will probably apply to either a new build or a remodel since, by their nature, we are talking about a fairly deep level of construction here. These are much more involved than just a coat of paint for example.


Doors


With that being said, let's start with your choice in doors. We will be talking about interior doors here as we have covered exterior doors in another article.


Trying to decide what doors to choose for your Log Cabin Style Remodel makes for an interesting discussion. Here's why.


When it comes to interior doors, you basically have your choice of two types, Solid Wood or Hollow Core. While solid wood doors are definitely the more rustic looking and fit the Log Cabin Style best, they are much more expensive than hollow core doors. Like about four times more expensive!


Hollow core doors with a molded masonite panel on each side have long been the industry standard for most new homes up to and often including your higher end custom homes. For a cost comparison example here, as of this writing, a standard six panel molded hollow core door runs about $85. In contrast to that, a solid wood knotty pine six panel door starts at somewhere around $250 and goes on up beyond $500 depending on what you are getting!


That's why this makes for such an interesting topic when you are trying to convert to or create a Log Cabin Style Feel in your home. Let's say that an average three bedroom two bath house has about 10 interior doors or so. At $85/door, that costs you about $850. However at $250+/door, that comes out to $2500-$4000 instead! Pretty significant, right?


That is why we need to have this discussion so that you can decide whether to spend that kind of money on doors or figure out some other option.


It should be pretty obvious that a nice, rustic looking knotty pine or knotty alder door will bring the most Log Cabin Style ambiance to a room if compared to a painted hollow core door.


So to take the easy, but more expensive route, if that fits your budget, we need to follow the same thinking process as we have discussed in the kitchen cabinet article. Choose a wood door with lots of character in its grain pattern. You want lots of color variations and plenty of knots and other "defects".


As far as color goes, either just finish them with a nice satin clear coat or add your favorite stain color before the clear.


This will give you a door that can actually become a focal point of your cabin style room. It brings a lot of ambiance to the decor all by itself. If you follow this line of thinking, it becomes easy to see why, if it fits your budget, stepping up to solid wood doors may be a great value for you in the long run.


Now, what if that kind of expense just in your doors alone could torpedo your project? Don't despair. That's where hollow core doors and the right choice of paint color can save the day.


As with some of the other areas that we discuss in other articles, achieving a Log Cabin Style look to your home can be accomplished by multiple, but very different approaches. Rather than making your doors a focal point of your decor, why not take the emphasis off of them and make them blend in while focusing on something else like your curtains or furniture?


In order to accomplish that, let's discuss two different areas to focus on, the style of door and the paint color.


Hollow core doors come in many different styles. For the sake of time and space, let's focus on the three most common realizing that if you look through the catalogs, you might stumble upon another style that really suits your fancy. Go for it!


So the three most common styles that you will find in most home improvement stores and lumberyards would include your basic plain flat panel door. We highly recommend that you stay away from these. They give your room a very cheap look and usually only save you $10-$15 per door. In the long run you will wish you had spent the few extra bucks.


The next option and by far the most common choice throughout the industry today is the six panel style. After trying several different styles and trying to keep the budget down by not stepping up to the solid wood doors, this is the style that we finally settled on using most often. While six panel doors have a more formal feel to them than would be typical of a cabin style home, we spent our time and budget doing other things to decorate the room and take the focus off of the doors. It works out nicely and saves a ton of money if that is one of your criteria.


The third option for us is a style called (at least by some manufacturers) the Santa Fe. Instead of six panels, it has two. The bottom one is basically a large square and the top one another large rectangle with an arched top. Inside of these two areas is a series of vertical grooves approximately 3" apart, simulating individual boards. This is actually a much more cabin-looking style of door.


Why did we not use it more? Basically for two reasons, both of which are probably irrelevant to the homeowner. First it took more time to get all of them gathered because while most were in stock, they weren't as common as the six panel style and inadvertently we had to order a couple and wait for them. Secondly, as we were building spec homes where every dollar counts, they were $10-$15 per door more expensive.


If we were building our own log Cabin Style Home and needed to stay within a hollow core door budget, we would take the extra time to order if necessary and spend the few extra bucks to get this style of door. Go to your local supplier and see what they look like, then you can make your own decision.


Now for paint colors.


When choosing these hollow core doors, by their very nature they need to be painted, unless of course you choose to leave them in their factory applied white primer. But assuming that this approach doesn't fit your decorating plans, choose a color of paint that either blends in with the surroundings, such as using your wall color on the doors, or choose a contrasting color such as a sage or green or some other nature oriented color. A little color here can make the door an accent without making it the focal point of the room.


Since we have dedicated an entire article to paint colors in another place, we won't spend a lot of time on that here. The basic guideline is to keep your colors in a natural hue and probably on the lighter side so that they don't become overpowering. Our personal preference is a light tan color on the walls with either matching doors or a darker contrasting color for them.


Trim, Base And Casing


When it comes to what trim to use to trim out your windows, doors, baseboards, crown molding and chair rail, there are only a few options that work well with the Log Cabin Style and we are very partial to one specific style. First we will describe a couple of other viable options and then share our favorite one with you.


When it comes to base and casing styles, if you go to any home improvement store, you will find enough choices to make your head spin and that is only scratching the surface of the vast array of different styles available.


Let's help you quickly narrow down the field here. If you are trying to convert a room to a Log Cabin Style Look, think rustic not formal, and natural wood not painted wood trim.


Almost all standard trim styles are designed to add formality to a room not to make it more rustic. Their profiles are specifically designed to dress up a room and add style or class to it. Those tend to be moves in the opposite direction from where we are trying to go. If you do choose to go that route, choose the nice stain grade natural wood designs instead of the white primed ones. A dark stained and cleared natural wood profile is a nice touch in a cabin style room. Probably it is going to be very difficult to use a painted piece of trim as a way to convert the feel of your room to a rustic Log Cabin Style.


If you do choose to go the premade wood trim route, the more knots, defects and color variations you can get in your choice of pieces, the better.


Also be aware that there is a style of production in the natural wood trims called finger jointed pine. It is made be milling "finger joints" in very short scrap pieces of wood to glue them together into a longer piece before milling the profile into it. These are intended to be painted rather than stained. Just an FYI.


Secondly, another choice that we have seen in many older cabins is the home made split rail look style of trim. This is much more common to the DIY'er built cabin. It tends to be very time and labor intensive. Someone has to go out and find small trees of the right diameter, fell them, dry them, and the rip them into lengths and widths that will work, as well as install them. Typically this would have been done by someone who had an abundance of small trees on their property and was trying to build their cabin on a tight budget with all natural materials. If you choose to hire a contractor to do this, be prepared to pay... a lot!


It makes for a very unique and a definite Cabin Style Look, just be aware of what you are getting yourself into.


Thirdly and by far our favorite choice is to use dimensional lumber.


1x4's and 1x6's make a very nice and very rustic Log Cabin Style Trim with much less labor and expense than the split rail style and much more rustic looking than the standard trim profiles. Plus to us the uniformity of it's look is more pleasing than the randomness of the split rail style. That might sound kind of counter intuitive at first, but we just feel it looks better. Personal preference there.


We first started out by using clear coated 1x4's for all of our trim. You don't need to miter any of your corners. Just use butt joints. It adds to the rustic feel. Even on your door and window casings, run the tops and bottoms long and set the sides inside of them. On your top piece of trim on your header, you may want to add a 22 1/2 degree angle on each end to give a little character. We used the same width of boards everywhere for base, casing, crown and chair rails.


The next step in our progression was to change out the top header trim pieces on our doors and windows to a 1x6 instead. It added a little bit more character to the look without much more cost.


Now a word here about materials for this part of your project. 1x4's and 1x6's tend to be the least well prepared lumber that you can buy at any lumberyard. They have lots of knots and color variations for a truly beautiful rustic look. The biggest problem is that they are not dried very well and the minute their bundle is opened, they start to move around. They warp, twist and bow enough to make you wonder how that piece of lumber ever came out of a nice straight pine tree in the first place!


One other factor to consider is that they tend to have square cut edges on them unlike a typical 2x4 or 2x6 that you would see. These square edges don't look quite right as trim and tend to be a breeding ground for splinters and cuts. Not a good combination in a home setting.


This problem was solved for us when we discovered that one of our suppliers was purchasing their material fro a different mill. Their 1x4's and 1x6's for some reason were much nicer. They were sanded better and had all four edges "eased" or rounded off just a little. These better boards made for a much better installation when it was all said and done. Take some time to look around and see if you can find a supplier with the higher quality boards.


Here are a few tricks that we have learned over the years to get better over-all results.


Whichever type of board you can get, start with the best boards in the bunch. Try to only get your boards from a freshly opened bunk of lumber if possible. Choose the straightest boards out of the bunk. Reject anything that is warped, bowed or twisted to start with. After all you are paying for nice straight lumber. Don't be pressured into taking bad material.


Next keep your material out of the sun and the rain. Believe it or not, direct sunlight is more harmful to a fresh board even than moisture is.


Prestain and clear coat your material ASAP. This tends to slow down the warping process by sealing and protecting the boards from the sun and rain.


Lastly, get it on the wall ASAP too! The quicker you can get from bunk of wood to trim installed on the wall, the better your results will be. There will still be some waste. There always is. But this process will keep it to a minimum.


When you have a cut edge that shows unstained wood, simply brush on a little stain and wipe off the excess. It works great. You won't have to clear coat these spots unless you just want to. Also, because we are shooting for a rustic look here in the first place, it is not necessary to fill all of your nail holes with colored putty unless you are just obsessive about those kinds of details. You are the only one who will notice!


For our final iteration of this trim style, as mentioned above we started staining it instead of just clear coating it. After about a year of building these Cabin Style Homes, we had a chance to go back through some of the first ones we built and we realized that the clear coated knotty pine had already begun to yellow. This doesn't bother many people, but we really like to avoid it as our personal preference.


What we came up with ended up being a solution that we have liked much better than the original product from the day we first started doing it. That was to stain it.


Since we have always liked the look of different colors of natural wood used to complement each other, we decided to try it out with stain colors on our pine.


What we did was to stain all of our tongue and groove pine that we used to cover the walls and ceilings with Minwax brand's lightest colored stain called Puritan Pine. Then we chose Minwax Dark Walnut for our 1x4 and 1x6 trim pieces. That left us with a really nice contrasting but complimentary color scheme that took our cabins from looking simple and generic to looking warm and rich and still completely retaining the rustic feel of the natural woods. The best part was, we got rid of that pesky yellowing tendency, or at least slowed it down significantly.


We have even used this color combination on some pieces of furniture that we have built and the overall effect is very attractive there too.


Handrails For Stairways And Decks


If you have stairways and decks in your home, the handrails that are required around them for safety are an excellent place to quickly change the look and feel of a home.


Many people will assume that the only way to achieve this is by using a full blown log handrail. These are beautiful and also quite expensive. Also they are not really DIY friendly. You really ought to have some experience and the right tools to get the best results in this area.


If your budget allows and you choose to go this route, you will never be sorry. They are truly a work of art and practically shout Log Cabin!


Be aware that they generally come in two different styles. The first and top of the line would be the all natural log balusters with only a tenon turned on the end to fit into the mortises on the natural log rails.


The next step down the price ladder is the turned log style. This is where the logs are all milled to a similar size, shape and uniform diameter. Again they are fitted together in the mortise and tenon style and should be installed by someone with experience for best results.


The only difference between these and the more expensive version is that they lack the full on natural look of the unturned logs.


Actually there is a third option. We created this as a less expensive and more DIY friendly method of using the natural log balusters. Instead of buying the pre-drilled log top and bottom rails, we created our own out of some nice 4x4's which we then sanded and shaped to look more like natural logs and less like dimensional lumber. For the finishing touch we stained the top and bottom rails a dark color and the balusters a very light color. If you look closely at the picture above you will see how this worked out. Also note the use of some posts with the branches still left on them.


Down the scale of price and difficulty of installation is a style that we adapted from its normal use as a deck railing and used to create some very simple but still quite beautiful natural and rustic looking Stair Rails for indoors. This style consists of some nice 4x4 posts with a top and bottom 2x4 rail, 2x2's used as balusters and a 2x6 top plate to finish it off.


These can be made out of your basic Douglas Fir conventional lumber or from redwood. Either of these choices ends up with a very attractive finished product if you take your time to carefully sand and finish all of the pieces before assembly.


This would also look exceptionally attractive with the stain combination that we discussed earlier. Do the light color on the balusters and horizontal rails, the dark color on the posts and top rail. What do you think of that? This style is also very DIY friendly for those of you who enjoy that sort of thing.


Wrap Up


Your interior doors, trim and handrails are a really powerful way to convert the feel of your conventional home to that beautiful rustic look of a real Log Cabin Style Home! We hope there have been some ideas here that have inspired you!

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