Happy unions - joining two logs together.

Yesterday's image and post and all its varied notch work got me thinking about two hewn cabins I have seen in the last couple of years.

Why join logs together?

Joining logs together in an old log building could have happened for many reasons.

This log building not to far from my home (and featured on Barnwood Builders once) is one example.

Now I know for a fact that these logs are not configured in the way that the original building was built.
At one time it was a much larger two story building and the central home on this farm.
Over the years the family has made several attempts to save as many logs as possible to keep some family history alive where the farm use to be.
Way left you can see the logs that form an interior wall. You can just make out the ends of the logs.
These logs have a 'V' notch in them. You could not add a 'V' notch to make an interior wall after the cabin was built. So these logs were either in this configuration when it was first built (I doubt it) or were notched in to make a second room during one of its renovations (which I believe happened).
The project was either something the Barnwood people did not want to take on, or it was going to be to expensive for the home owners. There are three sides of good logs, but the right most ones in this photo are pretty bad.

 Two other reasons to join logs are;

You may not have had logs long enough to do the walls with long logs (rare).

Or you need to add another room at a later date.

This cabin is one county away from where I live, and not to far from our cabin.
At one time it had two stories as you can see the second floor joists above the door.

But you can also see where a second room was added and logs joined at the 'V' notchs.

None of these logs are especially long, so the lack of long enough logs would not have been the reason for joining two logs together. At the most that is a ten foot span, and those logs would have been easy to find.
At some time the builder needed to add another room.
Or after putting up a small house when he first started farming, eventually he had more time to work on his house and was able to make it bigger.

On the logs running left and right in the picture they alternate between having the top 'V' removed or the bottom one. So that at least everyother log remained attached to the original structure.
If added later, these notchs would no longer be very secure if your foundation started to shift.

We can not see the sill log to tell how or if it was joined to the main house or not.

Dog-trot cabins are fun to explore because some are built with no logs connecting the two cabins and some are built with joined notchs connecting the two pens or really long logs running the whole span of both pens. That is really neat to see.