Small House Building Blog » house plans

Palladio’s Escape Cottage

Anne — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 19:29:34 +0000

Is this cute, or what? One of my readers let me know about this interesting little pre-fab cabin designed by Ricky Newcomer. He calls it Palladio’s Escape Cottage. It’s 412 square feet within a very architecturally interesting design. They offer both a planning e-book if you want to try it yourself, and the build-it-for-you option. The only downside I see here is that they say it requires a crane truck to assemble the building parts on-site. That probably wouldn’t be a big deal if you live close to a building supply store where you can rent one, but if you want to put this structure way out in the woods you may have a tough time getting a crane in.

Cudos on a very unique design! I love it!

DIY Home Building

Anne — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 01:37:39 +0000

Ron Czecholinski over at www.diy-home-building.com has been working on re-tooling his site (no pun intended!). It’s starting to look really beautiful! He has categories like “Build Your House”, “Design Your House”, “Green Home Building”, “Home Building Kits”, “House Building Plans”, “Remodeling”, and “Resources”.

Very Small Houses– For Kids

Anne — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 02:24:11 +0000

A Wood Manor playhouse.

Thought you’d be interested in a peak at some serious playhouses for kids! This would make a pretty cool Christmas/holiday present!! Kits, pre-builts, and plans are all available at Wood Manor Playhouses for Kids.

Tiny Free House Plans

Anne — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 19:01:00 +0000

Michael Janzen has been putting in a lot of time working on his tiny free house plans. His design is intended to be put on a trailer, much like a Tumbleweed home, but you could build it on a permanent or semi-permanent foundation. The roof lines are very innovative with a standard gable design on the ends and a shed style roof in the middle. This allows for some great window space for some nice solar gain, although with the amount of windows in the plan as it is would probably lead to too much heating for the smallness of space inside. I’d probably go with half that window area for the south side and add a generous overhang to shade the windows in the middle of the day.

Michael Janzen's tiny free solar house plans.

And he did it all with the free version of Google Sketchup! There is a paid professional version, but Mike says the free version is just fine for the purposes of rendering drawings for a simple house like this.