Care and Maintenance
Forest Products can provide you with comprehensive advice on the types and quantities of finishes you will require to complete the installation of your building.
Before applying a colour finish it is important to firstly treat the timber with a good preservative. This helps reduce the risk of blue stain or fungal attack and helps to reduce movement within the timber. A good preservative makes an ideal base for the application of paint or stain colour finishes.
Our recommended products are less harmful to the environment, easier to use, offer quicker drying times and best of all will out perform most solvent based finishes.
If you prefer, the factory can treat your building with all the required coats of stain or paint, this ensures that all the timber, both inside and out, is fully coated with the preservative stain.
There are several colours available and all windows and doors are sprayed before the glass is fitted, ensuring a very high quality finish.
If you prefer to paint the building yourself, Forest products stock a wide range of paints, stains and preservatives usually available ex-stock. Colour charts are available on request.
Floor treatment
Care of the internal floor is just as important as the outside of the cabin. To this end we can suggest a number of possible finishing products to give either a clear or a stained finish.
We would never recommend the fitting of lino products to the flooring as this does not let the flooring breath and can trap moisture leading to rot. We also do not recommend the use of most varnishes, they tend to stick the boards together and prevent the natural movement of the flooring, far better to use a good flooring oil product.
Fire retardant treatment for wood
For log cabins that require Euro class B Spread of Flame we recommend HR-Prof.
HR-Prof is a clear water based solution that is absorbed into the surface of the wood. It is easy to apply and has non-flammable properties which restrict ignition and spread of flame. It also offers excellent preservative properties as well and can be fully over-coated with wood treatments as mentioned above.
Natural movement, cracking and shrinkage
Log cabins and other timber buildings are made of a natural material that is prone to movement and shrinkage or cracking. With log cabins, the individual wall logs will change in height slightly dependant on moisture content of the wood from season to season. Because there are several wall logs in the height of the wall, there will be an accumulative growth or shrinking of the wall height which could be up to 50mm. This is considered normal behaviour and allowed for in the original log cabin design.
The attachment of furniture or equipment to cabin walls needs to be done with care to make allowance for such movements. To ignore the natural rise and fall of the wall by incorrectly fitting furniture or equipment can cause gaps to appear in the wall or can cause damage to the furniture or equipment.
As an example if you wish to fit shelves to the wall logs with brackets that only cross one or two logs, that is fine to do so. If however your shelving unit is free standing on the floor, it is bad practice to fix it rigidly to the walls at the top. This would hold the high wall log in position whilst the wall logs below it might all shrink a little and would cause a gap in the wall or excessive movement. The same would be true in the case of a shower unit, internal partition, cupboards etc.
There is a correct way to accomplish these things and we would be happy to discuss this with you at the time of purchase. Any 'fixing' of logs found to have been done by the customer can definitely effect any warranty claim so it is worth finding out the correct way to do it.