It took Steve Hedrick nearly five years to build his house, working on it whenever he had enough time and money. Constructed of yellow pine logs, one log spans the length of the entire house, 48 feet.

“I think someone told me I couldn’t do it,” Mr. Hedrick said. “That’s why I did it.”

Mr. Hedrick, who retired from McKee Baking Company in 1989, is self-taught in the art of home building. He and his wife, Nancy, previously lived in another log house. It sits across the two man-made ponds in the 10-acre backyard, where a large water wheel also stands.

Mrs. Hedrick’s garden, flowering with Knockout roses, wisteria, rhododendron and monkey grass, is surrounded by a handmade rock wall. The Hedrick’s son, who lives in Minneapolis, helped build the rock waterfall above the garden. A hand-dug well was transformed into an outdoor camping and cookout area.

The waterfall leads down to one of the ponds, complete with a wooden dock and slightly beat-up canoe. It is a source of entertainment for their 18-year-old grandson.

“It’s so cute,” said Mrs. Hedrick. “He always brings his friends over, and they think it’s pretty cool.”

While the words “log cabin” might hearken images of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Abraham Lincoln, the Hedricks’ home challenges the stereotype of winter winds whistling through cracks between the logs. It is not surprising that people have mistaken their home for a bed and breakfast.

Inside, the house looks like a ski lodge, smells like Vermont and is filled with stories and history. Mrs. Hedrick’s schoolmarm aunt’s desk sits in the living room. An armoire purchased at an Amish fair in Columbia, Tenn., on an excursion to one of their sons’ baseball games stands in the corner of the master bedroom.

“I just love the warmth and coziness of log homes,” Mrs. Hedrick said.

There’s a lot of laughter at the Hedrick’s as well. Married nearly 40 years, they have learned by trial and error.

“We just made it so hard on ourselves,” said Mrs. Hedrick, of the decision to marry young (he was in college, she was just out of high school).

“I tried to give her back, but her dad wouldn’t take her,” Mr. Hedrick joked.

In the living room, several deer heads are mounted on the wall, and an antler chandelier hangs from the ceiling. Mrs. Hedrick flat-out refused to let her husband hang one in their home. So he went into the garage and built one anyway.

“I’m not a very smart guy,” Mr. Hedrick said.

Now, his wife admits, she wants another one.

Above the living room is an open loft bedroom. All the beds in the house are queen-size except the one in the small master bedroom. They get teased, they said, but Mrs. Hedrick likes it.

“It keeps us close, I guess,” she said.

On a the lower level of the two-story living room, a Rumsford fireplace keeps the house as warm as the owners, who enjoy winter mornings sitting in Amish rocking chairs in front of the fire, drinking their coffee. It is also one of Mrs. Hedrick’s favorite reading spots. Her subjects of preference include alternative medicines, the Bible and cookbooks. She loves to cook, she said, also a talent learned by trial and error.

Mr. Hedrick installed his great uncle’s Home Comfort wood cook stove in the basement screened-in porch. It still works, but Mrs. Hedrick didn’t know how to use it at first. She wasn’t a prodigy on a modern stove either, once upon a time.

“I’m the one who didn’t know how to boil water,” she said.

“Nancy started the trend of blackened food,” Mr. Hedrick added.

The basement itself is a small apartment within the larger house, with a living area, ante-kitchen and bedroom, where their younger son and his wife stay, with daughter Kennedy, when they visit.

The Hedricks have spent the majority of their lives together, but they might have met even sooner than they did. They were delivered by the same doctor. Decades later, they are enjoying life in their self-created log home, in which they have lived for three years.

Or maybe it was two. They debated back and forth, never quite coming to a consensus.

“You can start to tell how old we are,” Mrs. Hedrick said good-naturedly.

However long they have lived there, they remember one golden rule that was told to them. A woman in Minnesota once told Mrs. Hedrick: “Honey, when we live in a log house, we do not disturb the dust.”