“…The planning stage is my favorite part of any project, and this porch was no exception: I thought about an upgrade for some years before we finally decided how we wanted to fix it. When someone gave us a slue of pallets, we had our solution: Fix the porch with pallet wood. Most folks, when they first see our pallet-wood porch, think we just laid whole pallets on the porch. Well, no, that’s not how it happened: My husband laboriously and patiently took the pallets apart and de-nailed the boards. Then he planed them.…”
From yesterday’s Oregon Live, one of Charles Finn’s cabins on wheels.
“The cabins’ size, he says, is chosen for ease of transport. The cabins can be left on the trailer or moved onto a foundation. The fully insulated cabins are equipped with, among other things, a wood stove for heating and a two-burner propane stove for cooking, and a pair of oil lamps. Doors and windows are reclaimed or handmade; the metal roof has a skylight, and the interiors are all wood, “of mixed species,” he says.
They have neither electricity nor running water. He writes, “And trust me on this, you won’t miss them. In fact, you will come to relish not having them. Hang out on even one snowy night with the wood fire going and oil lamps burning and you’ll see what I mean.”
The price varies, but he gives a ballpark figure of about $14,000, not including the trailer.…”
Charles’ work was included in Tiny Homes (pp. 174-75). His website here.
“Always with 100% Reclaimed Lumber from Heritage Timber”
In November I got an email from Peter Meehan, who, along with David Chang, is co-editor of Lucky Peach, a quarterly foodie magazine published by McSweeney’s. They were doing an “apocalypse” issue and wondered if I had off-the-grid photos they could use.
A few months later, Christine Boepple, an LA-based writer, came up and went through about 10,000 thumbnails (in binders) of my photos.
Here’s the result, just out in the magazine. Kinda strange for me, having someone else do layout of my photos. I ended up liking what they did. The shelter stuff they chose is all pretty funky. Also pics of food from the wild and garden, preserves, roadkill furs, and kitchens from both our homestead and other places I’ve been.
My name is Heath Redding and I work with…Tiny Texas Houses. I wanted to inform you of our Kickstarter that we have just launched! We are taking our houses to the road and building the first Tiny Texas Roadhouse. The kickstarter we have set up is to help fund the tutorial video series that we want to release explaining the whole construction process. Our plan is to post these videos online so everyone can have access to them and do-it-themselves.
I wanted to kindly ask if you might post the information on your blog to help spread the word and get this project viral. We have some really cool ideas for this whole endeavor so please check out our kickstarter page!
Hi Lloyd,
…I wanted to share with you and your readers some photos of the hand-built house I recently finished. (Prior to this I had only built some crummy plywood furniture and a couple of sheds.) As with so many of us who read your blog, the design of this house was definitely inspired by Shelter books. When making design decisions I often looked in Builders of the Pacific Coast and asked myself which choice would result in something that felt like it could be in your book – I love the feel of those homes.
A few things that are unique about my house:
– It’s solar-powered
– The vertical redwood on the outside (and interior wainscoting) is from a really lucky find: I was able to buy a few hundred square feet of redwood T+G from a friend’s landlord that had been sitting unused in a barn in Fort Bragg for 30 years!
– The tiny wood stove is called “The Hobbit” and it’s from England and it’s awesome.
– The house is insulated with discarded sheep’s wool.
– I’m 6’6″ and the house is big enough for me! (I can stand under the loft and sit up tall in the loft)
“Scott Newkirk… spends every weekend living off the grid at his 300-square-foot house in Yulan, New York. There’s no electricity or running water, no TV, no computer. There he can slow down, sleep late, and take his daily bath in the nearby brook (weather permitting).
Newkirk had been living close to the land on the property already, in a wood-frame tent, but it burned down. Not long after, he came across the 1973 classic eco-architecture book Handmade Houses: A Guide to the Woodbutcher’s Art, which celebrated small, handcrafted houses constructed out of recovered and scavenged materials. That got him thinking about building a house on his property with the same innocence and integrity he was reading about.…”
Bill and Athena Steen and their son Benito visited us a few weeks ago. They’re the folks that started the strawbale movement with their book The Straw Bale House, written in 1994. I’d been to visit them 3 times at their end-of-the-road compound south of Tucson, but this was their first visit here. We had a lot of fun. We have a lot in common. Bill shot all his photos with an iPhone.
We had a great day yesterday. North into farmland, to Sebastapol and the Harmony Farm Supply, what a great place. Good tools, good additives, seeds, irrigation, etc. No foul chemical smells. Knowledgeable staff.
Then to the National Heirloom Expo in Santa Rosa. Unique event. Yesterday was the last of 3 days (Tues-Wed-Thurs). Tons of different heirloom fruits, vegetables, cheeses, on and on… goats, sheep, cows, turkeys and a huge display of bantam chickens. Food booths (and samples) up the kazoo. It’s a very together farming, gardening, food preparation and preservation show. Real food and respect-for-earth concepts and practices have come a long way in the last 25 years — progress. I’m going to this for sure next year, and we’ll probably get a booth and sell building books. Our kinda people.
Back through Petaluma and Heritage Salvage, huge amount of recycled lumber, including some stunning old barn timbers.
Got a lot of good pics yesterday, no time to do anything other than this with 3 of them:
This was on back road between Petaluma and Sebastapol.
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