Neither of you have ever tried building a house out of pistons before, have you?

Practice with those, and I guarantee log-building will come more easily.

In other news, I'm thinking about building a small CTM-style survival map. Since MCEdit is still a rather unstable release, is there another external program I could use to mapbuild? I don't want to use VoxelSniper, since it's an in-game editor; I need something that can do "illegal" things like placing still water/lava in the air, making a column of ladders for Vechs' bridging bombs, etc.