General Discussion & Chat: Permanent residence in a log cabin???, 1 by Wingnut

Wingnut wrote:
That's a gorgeous cabin! I would LOVE to live in that! It is kind of small, but if you all have gone camping in a small cabin and got along fine, I think you can do it. :) Two bedrooms on the first level ~ one for each kid, right? The loft for you and your DH? I think it would work, but everyone would have to stay organized and pick up after themselves or you would slowly be driven insane. LOL!

Kenny and I have wrestled with living in small spaces for a year now (30 foot travel trailer while we plan and build the big house). We've both learned that the little things we used to leave laying around add up QUICK in a small space and make it look awful ~ things like leaving our dishes on the end tables after having dinner in the living room, taking our shoes off at the couch instead of by the door, not filing away the day's mail right away. And the kitchen! You REALLY have to stay on top of that or it will look seriously bad in no time flat. We've learned to just put those things away right away and do the dishes immediately and it's not bad at all!

The flip side is that it doesn't take long to clean house! The place looks pretty good after half an hour and we can clean EVERYTHING (including dishes, dusting, mopping, bathtub, toilet, windows, EVERYTHING) in only three hours ~ that's a deep cleaning with both of us doing it. Not bad!

Getting one of those little cabins as a guest house would be a stroke of genius! When you live in a small space there truly is NO ROOM for a guest. Your family will be in their own groove of keeping things in their place and another person who isn't used to that will throw a serious monkey wrench into the works.

I love that staircase coming down from the loft, but it just looks too big for the room. Is there any way you can replace it with a spiral? It would cost more, I'm sure, but you'll cut the floor space it takes up in half. It would probably fit right in the space taken up by that first landing (as you're going up). You can still encase it in the cedar, making walls around it halfway up. Or you could use rollaway stairs ~ they're stairs that have wheels on the end where they hit the floor, brackets on top where the top slides up when not in use and a lever that raises the wheels when in use so it doesn't move when you go up it. You just roll them out at night when you go to bed and roll them back against the wall like a ladder during the day. If you don't have good balance, I'd go for the spiral as the rollaway stairs don't usually have handrails. If you are seriously considering these instead of the spirals, I'll try to get pics of the ones at the local fire hall so you can get the idea.

The kitchen as it shows in the floorplan gives me pause ~ it's AWFUL small for everyday living. Maybe that's why they didn't show a pic of it? I would put a big window right over the sink to help with the smallness of it. And if you go the circular or rollaway stairs route, you could use the rest of the space previously taken up by the stairs to enlarge the kitchen ~ put a counter/bar in there with storage underneath. Add some barstools and you'll have more seating, too. And look up for storage ~ have you seen those gorgeous iron racks with hooks for hanging pans and large untensils? The ones that hang from the ceiling ~ I LOVE those. :) If you enclose the spiral stairs, you can put shallow shelves along the kitchen sides of that enclosure ~ canned goods on the side facing the outside wall and spices facing the "new" counter. You might could even put the stove in that "new" counter so the chef'll feel more like part of the family while they're cooking ~ facing the living room. They make smaller apartment sized appliances you might look at. The smaller refrigerator may not be a thing you can use with a family of four, but an apartment sized stove that's about 2/3 the size of a regular stove would work great! I have one and the only thing I don't like about it I can't bake a 30 lb. turkey in it. But how often do I need to cook something that big? LOL! It would do JUST fine for a family of four everyday, but not for a big gathering at the holidays. You could always wing it by cooking the turkey (or ham) outside on the BBQ pit or deep fry the bird in a turkey fryer. If it'll just be you and your family for Christmas, you can just get a smaller bird to bake! LOL! If you want to use a soup pot and big skillet at the same time, you'll have to put them on burners diagonal from each other, but they'll fit!

I fiddled around with the floorplan pic to try to illustrate some of what I'm talking about ~ it's attached below.

Good luck! I think it's a great idea!

I forgot to tell you something, so this is edited to add that in this first pic, I've put the stove in two places so you can choose which would work better for you. If you'd like it better over by the sink, you may want to move the sink over towards the fridge.

This message was edited Monday, Dec 23rd 3:05 PM