One of our goals for this year is to start breaking ground on our dream home, aka the forever cabin. That means we’ve finally decided on a plan for it! We had a lot of things we needed to consider, from foundation to plumbing to electrical wiring, just like building in town. Except our goal was to minimize costs, materials we needed to haul out, and minimize future water and electricity use. We’ll be building most of this ourselves, without being able to get contractors to our property. Though we do have a lot of friends who are excited to help it come together  😀

This is our hand drawn design for what we finally decided on:

Please excuse the spilled coffee and eraser marks. It took us a long time to agree on how everything would go!

Because this is the dream home, it won’t look like the average cabin in the woods.

Since we are planning to live here forever, Kyle and I both put together lists of things we had to have. A mudroom to keep dirt out of the main house, a master bathroom, a solarium for house plants, an unheated pantry area, radiant floor heating. And Kyle refused to go square just because it’s easier to build, so an octagonal-ish house it is!

We wanted space for the kids and visitors, so there are 2 bedrooms, a master bedroom, and a spare room for guests. The entry will be unheated and do double duty as a pantry/food storage space. We’ll leave the door to the house cracked for heat exchange in winter if temperatures get too low, but most of the year it will be just fine. The living room, dining area and kitchen will share one open area centered around a wood stove (for backup heat, and just because I love them). This area will have a vaulted ceiling to the roof (Kyle’s idea!).

We intend on mixing cordwood and log cabin building to complete our dream home.

The entire cabin is going to sit on a gravel pad and concrete slab, with radiant floor heating through a portion of it. The bottom floor will be post and beam construction, with cordwood walls. The second floor will be built like a log cabin, with 4 sided milled trees from our property. Our reasoning with this plan is that we can use a lot of materials directly from our land. This will add time, but cut costs in a big way since we won’t need to purchase and haul certain materials out.

Why not just do a log cabin?

We decided to mix these design elements for a few reasons. A big one is that wood just doesn’t have that great of an R-value, so log cabin homes lose a lot of heat. The R-value of spruce, which is what we have the most of out here, is >1 per inch, and we don’t have many big trees. Plus, big trees are hard to lift into place without equipment, anyway! Cordwood walls allow us to make the walls as thick as we need to get the R-value we need. 16″ thick walls will give us a real R-Value of 24, vs our current cabin walls R-value of about 10. Our “effective” R-value in the cordwood walls will be significantly higher due to the thermal mass of the wall. This means we won’t need to purchase or install insulation on the first floor walls.

If cordwood is so great, why have any solid log walls at all?

Our main reasoning for building the second floor in a log cabin manner is speed. Building cordwood takes a lot of time. From cutting and drying the wood to stacking and letting the mortar dry. We plan on adding insulation to the second floor and paneling the interior with wood from our sawmill.

Our second consideration for completing a log second floor was weight. Cordwood walls weigh a ton, literally! In researching cordwood, I’ve seen quite a few that are 2 stories, but we didn’t think we were up to that challenge as first time builders. A 6 X 6 piece of wood weighs a lot less than 16″ of stacked wood, mortar and sawdust!

After much testing of online design programs, I was able to make this layout of our dream home:

 

I think this gives a much clearer picture of what our finished cabin will look like. While it is by no means perfect, I’m pretty happy considering I have no building or designing experience. I did remember to include things like putting all the water on one side of the house, so the entire thing doesn’t need to be plumbed. The odd shape will make for some interesting interior design though, with triangle shaped showers in both bathrooms. And I want to include some things I’ve learned from living in our current tiny home about storage and space saving. We’ll have a chest style fridge under the kitchen counter, rather than a standing fridge, so we have more counter space. Same with the washing machine being tucked under a bathroom counter.

Due to electricity and water constraints, some things will be a bit… different.

One of the things we will be doing is either composting toilets (Amazon link) or incinerating toilets rather than flushing toilets. Even with low water use toilets, we don’t want to have to put in a septic system. We are largely leaning towards incinerator toilets at this point in time, though they can be spendy. Composting toilets aren’t perfect, and I often hear complaints about smells from them. With full-time use from 4 people, it just doesn’t seem like the best option.

With an incinerator toilet, the waste ash is completely sterilized and can go directly to a compost pile. They do require electricity to incinerate waste after flushing, but I don’t expect needing to incinerate after every use. The choice between the two will probably be decided when we are ready to finish our bathrooms. And we might start with composting and move to an incinerator toilet later down the line if we feel we need to.

We also plan on using Energy Star appliances, from washing machines to dish washers. What we are specifically looking for is the combination of low electricity and low water use. For now, the plan is no dryer, even though air dried towels just aren’t the same! We’ll also be using an instant hot water heater to save on electricity there as well.

We have an entire room set aside for power storage and our well.

While we still haven’t gotten this 100% figured out, we’d like to at least have the well housing included in our house, rather than needing a separate well house. We’ve learned through our water system shed that heating a separate building for water storage doesn’t make sense out here. So our well will probably be close to the house and come up directly into it. We’ll have any electric things up off the floor completely and install a drain in the floor as well. That way, if something breaks it’ll be less of a mess to clean up. This room will house a small water catchment and well tank, our battery bank from our solar panels, our radiant floor system, and our hot water tank.

And I’m sure during building some of these ideas will be completely scrapped.

We’ll find something that didn’t work the way we wanted, or just wasn’t practical after all. It happens every time we take on a project out here! Learning to roll with the punches is just part of the adventure. And I’m sure I’ll blog about all our misadventures in building this too  😉

While living in our current tiny home has been fun, I’m excited for the ground to thaw out so we can start moving on our dream home!

Update: We’ve changed our design from cordwood to all log cabin. Why? Simply put, cordwood is very time intensive. I’m leaving the post as is though. I did a lot of research on cordwood and someone else may find that helpful. Also, we’d like to build a cordwood sauna because cordwood is still my favorite building style and I want something cordwood at our place!

Update #2: The borough built the road out closer to us at the same time an ocean view lot came up for sale further out. We jumped at the chance to buy it. And it has a pre-Alaskan statehood cabin on it already for us fix up into our dream home!