“Small Houses”

Small Houses. Newtown, CT: Taunton, 1992. Print.

This book came up, either on LibraryThing or Amazon, as a book I might be interested in.  Given all the small house books I’ve been reading, that wasn’t a stretch, and was true!

This is a typical type of book from Taunton; it’s a collection of articles from Fine Homebuilding magazine.  The introduction says that the articles are from “the first 10 years” of the magazine, so I assume it’s something along the lines of 1980 to 1990, given the 1992 publication date.

The angle of homebuilding (as opposed to interior design, say) is clear from the articles.  Many articles show details of wall and roof construction, or carefully point out that they used 2×10 joists with a 2×12 ledger, or whatever.  There were times when I wanted more interior pictures, because my focus is on how the space is used.

The 29 articles span a wide variety of types of houses.  Most consider the whole house, although some are as simple as a family that carved a new room out of a landing and part of their basement.  One article is mostly about the gardens surrounding a 1920s cottage (I liked the kitchen cabinets they built in that one).  My favourite house is probably one that’s banked with earth and built mostly from salvaged materials – it’s quirky and not nearly as dark as you would think.  I only saw one house in the book that I’d seen before – by Kelly Davis, in Wisconsin.  I must be getting to the end of my small-house mania, because I can actually see his point that below 1000 square feet or so, you face diminishing returns.  As he says, “Heating, electrical and plumbing systems are all givens, and beyond a point, they don’t get substantially less expensive with a reduction of square footage”.

Contains an index, but no further reading.