I know some of you are going to question my judgement and choice for a picture. Isn’t this supposed to be some beautiful setting with some gorgeous little house somewhere? Especially since several of you sent me some great pictures recently.

Be sure and click on the image so you can see all the detail. I stumbled across this picture yesterday while doing some research and just couldn’t pass it up. Jerry Waters the photographer gave me permission to use it and he will tell you a little about it.

As many of you know I am very fond of floating homes and shanties and have been debating about starting a blog about them. However this one is keeping me so busy, that I don’t see it happening any time soon.

Here is what Jerry says about these shanty boats. Be sure and visit his website to see more cool pictures and learn some history of his neck of the woods in West Virginia.

“I remember a few Shanty Boats on the Elk River when I was a kid. At one time, these houseboats stretched from the mouth of the Elk all the way up to the Trolley bridge. These were very tiny, usually one or two rooms at the most. The bathroom was the river, usually an “outhouse” built right in to the boat that dropped into the Elk. This photo shows the last of the Shanty Boats just before early Urban Renewal.” -Jerry Waters – My West Virginia Home

by Kent Griswold (Tiny House Blog)

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The other day I received a package in the mail from Shelter Publications, located in Bolinas, California. They had contacted me earlier in the week to see if I would review some of there books and that they have a book on Tiny Houses in the works.

They sent some terrific books and I have decided to share with you the oldest one, because it has some neat ideas and really gets back to the basics of building construction.

In the classic book Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties: And How to Build Them, D. C. Beard covers a wide array of possibilities for building your own dwelling out of nothing but materials provided by nature. This book was originally published in 1914 and Shelter Publications has chosen to reprint it and make it available again.

D. C. Beard explains how to construct a variety of worry-free shelters appropriate to a natural environment that is by turns both friendly and foreboding. Included are a sod house for the lawn, a treetop house, over-water camps, and an American log cabin. I even found a shanty plan that looked remarkably familiar to the Sonoma Shanty. It just had a lower pitched roof, otherwise the dimensions are almost identical.

Fully recognizing that the outdoorsman builds a shelter with the intention of inhabiting it, Beard explains how to build hearths and chimneys, notched log ladders, and even how to rig secret locks. Illustrated throughout with instructional line drawings, Shelters, Shacks and Shanties goes back to the can-do spirit of the American frontier and belongs in your library of tiny house books.

I really like this book, the sketches are wonderful, the information is timeless. If you are looking for a book to get you back to the basics, this is it.

by Kent Griswold (Tiny House Blog)

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