Our $150 Home In The Woods
(Page 2 of 7)
March/April 1972
By Mary Lee Coe
We spent two months—June and July—living in airy tunnels made of bent saplings and plastic, gardening on soil that had never been cultivated before, gathering our second-hand materials and laying out the dimensions of the glorified cabin in an irregular shape to fit the slope of its site: 25' from northeast corner to southeast, 12' from southeast to southwest, approximately 25' from southwest to northwest and 18' from the northwest to northeast corner. We had no further plans or designs for the house beyond these dimensions except for filling the 12' south-facing side with windows. Van and I wanted the structure to grow with us as we were shaped by living and homesteading in the woods a mile from the nearest neighbor.
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From August 1st to 15th, we poured foundation posts of concrete mixed with small rocks collected from our garden (there's plenty of free rocks in New Hampshire!). Being overcautious amateur architects, we made 15 of the supports (far more than we needed) and I became supremely bored with the job. I also disliked buying the necessary four bags of cement after receiving all that free lumber. What a pleasure it was to finish the last post and get on with the sills!
Sills are the horizontal beams which support a house's framework and we cut ours from heavy barn timbers, laid them on the foundation posts and creosoted them against rot (the creosote was our second store-bought item).
With the sills in place, we started on the framework . . . which required decisions about ceiling height, roof slope and the number of levels we'd have in the house.
Rex Roberts, advocating the ease of living on one level with its simplified heating and building problems, warns against second floors. Roberts' reasoning had us convinced that a full second level could well confine our stoves' heat to the ground floor . . . but we still wanted to live as far above the ground as practical. So we settled on the idea of a loft covering only one-fourth of the house's area (8' x 12') with an opening across its front through which warm air could rise to heat the upper reaches of our edifice.
The idea was not only a good one, it was too good . . . because we soon realized that—while heat would surely rise from the stoves to our 8' x 12' loft—the warm air would also rise to the unused, open, three-quarters of the second level . . . leaving most of the ground floor too cold. Van finally solved the problem with the brilliant solution of building the structure with two different roof levels.
We divided the projected house in half and, knowing that most of our time on the ground floor would be spent in the kitchen, faced that room to the south (for maximum light) and topped it with a low roof (to insure warmth). The other (north) end of the lodge was allowed to soar to a height of 15' on its west side to accommodate a west-facing loft.
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