The Tiny Cottage in the Big Woods is where we live on Sugar Mountain. We built our ultra-high mass, super insulated masonry cottage in the late fall of 2005 and have only spent about $7,000 for materials.
It is so thermally efficient that it takes only a fraction of a cord of wood a year for heating. Due to the large thermal mass the cottage stores the day time passive solar gain and heat of the small wood stove to make it energy efficient. The roof is a unique 1.5″ thick barrel vault ferro-cement architecture. This makes it strong enough to hold the deepest snow depths and eventually to be bermed into the earth. Being made of stone, brick, glass, concrete and cedar the cottage is low maintenance, easy to clean and minimal impact.
Most of all, it’s comfortable and a lovely place for us to come in from the weather. From here, nestled into the mountain ridge, we can see the beauty of the sunrises, sunsets and rainbows.
There are a lot of posts about our Tiny Cottage here on my blog. Here are a few key ones:
First Cottage Post – Pouring the slab
Nano-House Models
Dog House
Slab Poured
Walls Rising – Floor Plan
Back Arch Up
Front Arch Up
Taming Trusses
Trusses for Roof
Barrel Vault 1st Layer
Capped
Closed in
Bed and Bath Arches
Ceiling Thoughts
Bedroom Ceiling Pour
Master Bedroom Inlayed Ceiling
$6,000 Mark
One Year Mark
Moving In!
A Wife’s View
Firewood Usage
Earth Air Tubes
Three Year Update
Five Year Update
From these pages move forward and backward through the posts to see what is around those key points of construction.
Is it possible to get a blueprint and a materiallist? We are looking for a “green” home easy to build and cheap.
I don’t have blueprints or material lists available but there are lots of posts that go into the various details of how we did things. See the Tiny Cottage in the tag cloud at right or by using the search box at right. You can find a rough floor plan in this post. Construction is fairly simple and straight forward. Easy enough that as a family of five (with two being young children) we did most of the work in two months.
Very nice cottage, what is the price for that ?
Thank
It cost us just over $7,000 for the materials. We supplied all of the labor, taking about two months to go from ground to closed in and then a bit more work at a much more leisurely pace before we moved in.
What a beautiful, practical home! When my husband and I first married, we lived in a third story apartment. We made the move to buy a home so we would have room to garden, get chickens, and take steps toward a more self-suffi cient farm life. Currently we live in a conventional (1950′s ranch) home on 2/3 of an acre within city limits – we aren’t free to do everything we’d like with the space and residential code restraints in our current location, but we have raised chickens, rabbits, quail, and a vegetable garden. Ultimately our goals include a tiny home on more land, and for this to be a full-time venture for at least my husband (and maybe me, if we can get to a place where we can support ourselves on just the farm income). I was wondering what your life was like before you moved into your small home, and how the “downsizing” experience was for you & your family.
Those are great animals to start with on a small space. Rabbits make lovely fertilizer pellets that don’t burn the plants.
Prior to moving into our cottage we lived in a 1777 farm house just down the hill. We did a lot of work to try to make it air tight, renovating and all that but it was really just about impossible to heat. The cold came in right through the walls following the old beams and nails. It was technically about 2,700 square-feet including the shed but we only really used about 700 sq-ft so moving into the 252 sq-ft tiny cottage wasn’t such a shocker. Quite importantly is that our cottage is just us. Livestock aren’t supposed to come indoors. We use the old farm house as a barn for our farming now. If we need to shelter an animal extra then it can go in there. When we lived down there we also had animals in the kitchen when they needed hatching or hospice. I’ve very glad not to share space so much. :)
The other detail about the old farm house was it was impossible to clean for two reasons:
1) It was right next to the dirt road so fine dust was constantly billowing up from the road and into the house during the non-winter months.
2) Since that had been going on for over 200 years there was fine silt in all the cracks of the house. You just couldn’t get it to be clean.
The cottage is much easier to maintain and clean. Check out this article about A Wife’s View of the Tiny Cottage.