Mr. Considine Builds His Dream House

Building log homes is more than a business for Dick Considine: It's a way of life.

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On a blustery day in February 1975, in the heart of one of upstate New York's most economically depressed regions, Dick Considine, the 42-year-old proprietor of the Paul Bunyan Hardware Store Inc., drew up to his glowing woodstove and took stock.

On the credit side: He owned a house in an area he considered the choicest in the country and about 2,000 acres of Adirondack woodland, he had solid business experience under his belt, and he was solvent. On the debit side: He had sunk just about all his capital into land he couldn't develop and couldn't sell; he was frustrated and bored.

Two and a half years later, Considine was enthusiastically directing a carpenter and two laborers as they stacked logs of fragrant eastern white pine. They were building the North Gore -- Considine's first design for a do-it-yourself log house. By the end of the day -- through word-of-mouth alone -- he'd made his first sale. By the end of 1981, his Lincoln Logs Ltd. had racked up revenues of $4 million on deliveries of about 250 houses, and had an additional $1 1/2 million in sales.

Considine sees his company as the perfect expression of his values, an enterprise that lets him use all his strengths and skills, while giving him the way of life he wants. But he wasn't always so turned on by what he did. His career, until he founded Lincoln Logs, ran a jagged course, though selling of one kind or another always dominated it. He discovered he was a natural at sales when he left a milk route in 1961 for the more lucrative life of an Encyclopaedia Britannica salesman. From door-to-door book sales, he turned to insurance, from insurance to real estate.

At the start of each of his ventures, Considine was convinced that it would be the business to bring him both financial success and emotional satisfaction. He'd plunge in with the eagerness of a long-distance swimmer about to brave the English Channel, but, like the swimmer, he frequently found he couldn't go the distance.

The problem wasn't lack of business sense, it was temperament -- Considine simply got bored.After two years, the real estate firm he started was turning a profit, but Considine was tired of the drudgery of running it.

An ad in the New York Times, announcing an auction of Maine land for $10 an acre, sprung him from the office routine. He went to the auction, and, although he decided not to buy, his interest was aroused. So a month later he bought an oceanfront lot for $3,000. He sold it a few months later for $30,000. Then he went to work for the auction agency as chief project negotiator.

Considine loved the adventure of buying huge parcels of wilderness in upstate New York and New England at rock-bottom prices and reselling them -- often the next day -- for a hefty profit. So he moved his family from suburban Long Island to Chestertown, N.Y., a sleepy town surrounded by 6 million acres of Adirondack splendor. He found within himself a deep love for the land. "I'd been a hunter most of my life," he comments, "and I just felt like I was in paradise. I owned about 2,000 acres of woodland, close to springs and streams and lakes and rivers all through the Adirondacks."

At midlife, Considine was reasonably content. He was living as he wanted, hundreds of miles from sprawling suburbs and overcrowded cities; he worked at a profession that challenged him; and he had a measure of security.

Then in 1974 his world was rocked. The Arab oil crisis made people think twice about buying vacation spots in the distant Adirondacks. Worse, New York State announced plans to restrict land development and use inside the Adirondack Park, where Considine owned all his acreage. The land market became depressed; Considine knew he wouldn't be able to sell his property, and that he needed to find another line of work.

That's when he realized that heading his list of priorities -- before financial success or entrepreneurial excitement -- was love of his home. "There was no thought of leaving the area," he says. "I just couldn't. I loved it too much." Buying a hardware store was his temporary solution to fiscal difficulty; he recruited his entire family -- stepfather, mother, and wife -- to help him run it. "In the beginning," he admits, "I didn't know beans from apple butter about hardware, but I figured I could learn."

Business was moderately brisk -- thanks in part to Considine's brainstorm of selling woodstoves during the slow winter months. But Considine's youthful visions had never included retail shopkeeping, and the prospect of eking out a living peddling screwdrivers and nails for the rest of his days struck him as pretty bleak. While he added up prices for pliers and hammers, stovepipes and dampers, he was continually alert for a new opportunity.

"I was leafing through a wood products magazine and saw an article about a man in Blackfoot, Idaho, who'd developed prefabricated log homes," he says. "It excited me. I felt log houses would be a great business for the Adirondacks, because they fit in so well with the environment. Besides, my land and real estate experience helped me spot a trend. Housing was becoming more expensive all the time, and it seemed that log houses might fill a gap for people who were being squeezed out of the traditional housing market."

A few months later, he flew to Blackfoot to investigate for himself. "Lewis Youngstrom was a real country guy.," recalls Considine. "He showed me through his plant where he'd built a machine to make perfectly round logs. He was building houses throughout Idaho. I saw no reason why I couldn't do the same thing on the East Coast." Before he left, he'd signed a contract giving him the right to sell Youngstrom's design in nine northeastern states.

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