So my latest “make” obsession is building a tiny cabin on some land we own to the north. I need to keep the size under 100 square feet to avoid increasing my taxes from a purely agricultural plot to a residential one. I’ve been following the tiny house movement for a while and have always been fascinated by small dwellings, forts, cottages and camper conversions so I’m hoping to get this tiny cabin built before the snow flies this year.

I’ve been designing in Google SketchUp using a framing plugin called House Builder which does a lot of the work of modeling lumber for you. I’ve found it to be fairly accurate in terms of measurements, although I’ll be doing the real math again once we’re standing at the mitre saw later this month. What it IS good for is estimating lumber costs and basic design principles as they apply to building codes and the like. Here’s a few screen grabs from the model so far. I can update with another post once the building is underway.