Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
planned to rebuild the transplanted log house we had
in Missouri as half a dogtrot, adding the other half as
the material and time became available but keeping
the breezeway open (read “historically accurate”). My
wife, who at the time had never seen a dogtrot house,
decided that going up, across and down, or out
through the weather in order to reach point B from
point A was a masochistic trip. So we located the cabin
in another spot that allowed a lean-to but would have
been impossible to build a dogtrot on. After two exten-
sions of the lean-to, both of us were sorry we didn't
have more room to grow. There's a moral: Build where
you can add, in one way or another, without removing
select trees or parts of a mountain.
Look at pictures to decide on a basic style. Get in
your car, on your bicycle or horse, and go hunt up
some specimens. Ask around — the natives are used
to cabin-hunters by now. Take pictures; visit ruins.
Harass the history or folklore professors at the nearby
college. Find out what you're doing before you invest
part of your life in this madness.
Avoid precut cabins (and preplanned houses of any
kind) as consumer rip-offs. Because they use second-
growth, smaller trees and generally unseasoned wood,
these cabins tend to shrink, twist, crack, and leak. You
pay for the nostalgia of the log cabin mystique with-
out the craftsmanship. Borrow features and ideas,
none of which is new, but let your site tell you what
and how to build. That also goes for stone houses,
glass, cathedrals, and motels. You're going to live with
those trees and that hill a long time, so don't
“magazine-house” them to death.
Consider Basic Family Needs
But, of course, you will have basic needs. Your family
size will dictate a need for so many square feet, divided
into rooms of whatever description you require. The
business of good design always means intelligently
and artistically integrating the requirements of the
occupants with the allowances of the site in a style of
their preference.
If you have a washer and dryer, for instance, you'll
need a place to put them. A separate laundry shed
would preserve the authenticity of your log house, but
you'd clock a lot of miles over a period of time, going
there and back. So put them in the lean-to.
And do something clever with the space under the
roof slope; give it an upstairs. Slip in a mini-room for
your youngest. Give the child a dormer window to let
The 1788 Captain Beadle house in Virginia was
an adventure in design. We increased the living
space with two additions — a frame lean-to and
another restored log cabin.
