Tiny Homes (142)

Tiny House with Hammock Loft



This home is the cross between a tiny house on wheels and a kid’s dream fort! The entire open area between the two sleeping lofts of this tiny home is filled with a giant hammock providing an amazing place to relax while adding a tonne of usable space in the home!

This 24 × 8.5 ft (7.3 × 2.5m) tiny house is the brain-child of Whit and Cody, two dynamic friends who have called this project ‘Smore Life.’ The smore reference comes from the Shou Sugi Ban technique of charring the cedar to help seal and protect it, which reminded the friends of cooking smores over the campfire…

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Small Homes Featured in Latest Mother Earth News + 50% Discount on Books for November

The December/January issue of Mother Earth News has a 5-page article on our book, Small Homes.

Note: We are offering a 50% discount on our books Small Homes, Tiny Homes, and Shelter for the rest of November, with free shipping.

Christmas gifts?

Details at: www.shelterpub.com/building

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Ballintomb Cottage, Scotland

We received this letter from the owner of a 1914 home in England that was a prefab shown in our book: The Gardeners’ Poultry Keepers’ Guide. This was a turn-of-the-century catalog from London of prefab greenhouses, farm buildings and — in this case — homes.

Hi,

I have just bought Ballintomb Cottage, a 1914 William Cooper Corrugated Iron house.

After searching for an Old William Cooper’s catalogue, I came across your reprint of it, and to my delight, Lloyd’s forward mentions the cottage sale in 2007.

In the last 10 years the previous owner has done nothing. The sale photographs are identical between 2007 & 2017.

Inside the building is pretty much sound. All but the lounge is still original wood panelling. The lounge was knocked through into the kitchen in the 1970s, and all the timber cladding removed and replaced with gyproc board.

I would like to restore it back to timber.

Keep up the good work — I have and often re-read most of your publications.

Regards,
–Ian Gilbert

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The Laughing House

…Walls are cob and straw bales, structurally bonded (“BaleCob”). Almost all of the materials are either from the site — the ground under our feet, or snatched from the commercial waste stream. The foundation is “urbanite” (recycled sidewalks), most wood is unmilled roundwood or is reused…

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Cabin on Lake Superior

This disused, but still sound, cabin is located in the forest a few yards above Twelve Mile Beach on Lake Superior at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

We have hiked by for many years and it never seems visited. It is truly one of America’s most beautiful wild beaches. You can walk for miles and see no other humans.

–John

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Sauna on Haida Gwaii, BC, Built by Colin Doane

Note whale jawbone front rafters, big bone door handle.

…That’s one of Colin’s buildings on the land we live on (North Beach, Haida Gwaii). Pictures never really did justice to this sauna, none that I’ve seen anyway.

We were in Victoria on Christmas Day when we got the phone call from our caretaker that the structure had completely burned down. Hard come, easy go…

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Little Cabin up the Lake

Located on Powell Lake, BC

… Our cabin is small (20′ × 21′), but complete. The downstairs has two bedrooms, one of which we use for storage and a bathtub. The main downstairs is a great room design including kitchen, dining, and living areas. The large upstairs loft is our bedroom. It’s plenty of space, especially since we have the whole outdoors at our doorstep. The main float is 40′ × 40′ and we have additional floats for a variety of purposes: a dock, a floating woodshed and my floating vegetable garden…

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Stunning Treehouse



There is something about the idea of a treehouse that truly captures the imagination. For builders, it’s a licence to let their creativity run wild and construct something which is playful and adventurous. For years now the team at Nelson Treehouse and Supply (better known as the Treehouse Masters from their hit TV show) have been doing just that. This week we were fortunate enough to be able to visit one of their latest projects in Seattle, Washington.

The treehouse is accessed by a rustic set of stairs which wrap around the trunk of the tree and curve down to the ground below.

The exterior of the treehouse is exquisitely finished, with spectacular yellow cedar shingles. A large porch area provides plenty of space to relax, entertain and enjoy being up amongst the trees…

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Forest Cabin Built from Salvaged Materials



For a student without a lot of money, the idea of being able to avoid rent by building a cabin in the woods may sound like a far-fetched dream, yet for a young Jacob Witzling it was the perfect solution. Earlier, we visited some of Jacob’s incredible cabin projects where he lived later in life but in this feature we go all the way back to where it began; a beautiful and secluded woodland cabin that Jacob constructed for an insane figure of only $800 and which he lived in during his college years in Olympia, Washington…

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