Tiny House Blog

It is going to be my full time home as soon as I get the propane hooked up. Right now I live next door with my parents during the work week and at the cabin on the weekends, as my original farmhouse burnt down. This cabin is on my farm property. It is 10 x 12 with a 4 foot overhang porch. It is heated with a small woodstove and I have more than enough wood on my property.

The cabin is insulated inside and out with isoboard, and the siding is 12 inch rough lumber board and batten. The roof is metal and is insulated conventionally with battens.

The cabin was built in the pole barn fashion, not framed. I started it in September ‘11 and was putting the roof on in December. The hardest part was getting the framework square and it is not 100% square. The floor is a raised platform suspended from the poles, it is rough lumber with isoboard and vapour barrier over, and then plywood and clickflooring. The space under is gravel with a plastic barrier over it. Continue Reading »

by Brian Cobble

I’ve been reading your blog for a while, and enjoy the pictures and stories of little houses… I thought I would share one of my own…

I was able to find an affordable (and remarkable) private lakehouse for rent on property that bordered the farm, and realized that I needed a storage solution for stuff accumulated over the past 10 years. One of the problems I had found in the past, is that every time I purchased a tract of land, I felt a need to have some sort of a structure on it, and always built the structure in a permanent manner on the property that had just been acquired.

Also, with my modest budget, the only way to aquire bigger tracts of land, often meant selling the smaller tracts, once they had been partially developed. The solution was to construct a portable building, in a way that was rock solid, yet still able to be transported. My solution is included in these photos. Continue Reading »

My friend Julie’s family comes from a ranching family in eastern Nevada and various antique items have made it into her home including a full-size sheep wagon that now sits comfortably in her backyard. The wagon was formerly used by her husband and father to camp in while they went hunting in the wilderness of the high mountain state. Julie would eventually like to turn the wagon into a place for people to stay and get a taste of the Wild West.

The wagon (which dates around the early 1900′s) has a metal roof that has been painted, the original wood and a full size bed in the back. It also contains the original wood stove and a small table that covers up a storage cabinet and lowers down in front of the bed. Many original sheep wagons did not have a sink, but Julie’s does. It’s covered with a wooden food prep board and the water drains out onto the ground. The sheep wagon shares the yard with an tin-roofed outhouse that she picked up for free. Continue Reading »

Dimensional lumber — 2x4s, 2x6s, etc., are about as ubiquitous as suburban sprawl is in America. (Maybe there’s some kind of relationship there..?) 2x4s are an industrial product, only becoming a dominant building material in the last century. As priorities have shifted to speed, uniformity, and ease of production, more traditional building styles have fallen out of favor.

However, it is almost certainly time to rethink how we build our homes, addressing not only downsizing possibilities, and the size and efficiency of spaces, but how we build houses themselves, and what materials we use. I believe timber framing, and specifically roundwood timber framing, fills a great need, enabling more holistic and sustainable home construction.

Building Locally?

Here’s a great passage from the USDA Forest Service’s “History of Yard Lumber Size Standards” (warning: PDF link) that hints at industrialization beginning to seep into the world of construction:

Until the middle of the 19th Century, building lumber was usually produced in a locality close to the place where it was to be used. Sizes were not a problem. The needs of builders in the locality were well understood and carpenters were accustomed to much more hand fitting on the job than they are today. As the forests were cut back from the centers of population, lumber had to be shipped greater distances. By the last few decades before 1900, lumber was no longer a locally made commodity. It then became apparent that the sizes used in different trading areas were not uniform and as a result sawmills had to cut lumber for the markets they wished to serve. Continue Reading »

It’s no secret to any of my friends or family that I love tiny houses. This very post from your Tiny House Blog is the one that took me from tiny house dreamer to small-living adventurer!

Months after entering Sylvan Sport’s Coolest. Contest. Ever. Adventure Contest! I opened up an email that began, “Hello Meghan, It is my pleasure to inform you”. That’s about as far I as got when recognition hit that my essay had actually been chosen. I began squealing in delight, much to the amazement and joy of the five sheltie puppies I was pet-sitting at the time. Continue Reading »

19th century household from Rpciuni, Neam, County, Romania, exhibited in the Village Museum in Bucharest. The small house is very interesting and I would enjoy learning more about it.

If you can find out more info and share it below I will repost it here. Thank you!