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We’re so excited to have the shell of our new cabin completed. It is absolutely amazing. To be quite honest, it is beyond anything we could have imagined.  Are you ready for a tour?

This side of the cabin is the bedroom end. While it’s just a big box right now, eventually we’ll have an upstairs and walls. It will be three bedrooms, 2 downstairs and 1 up, plus 2 bathrooms (one on each level).

Here is what we think of as the back yard. It’s the side that is the southern exposure and we’ll have our kitchen garden, outdoor kitchen and outdoor dining in this area.

This is the main entry. Eventually we’d like an arctic room on this side to help with keeping the house warm during the winter.

I’m sure you are amazed by my drawing abilities. 😉 This is our proposed floor plan. Again, at the moment the cabin is just one big room so you’ll need to use your imagination, along with my floor plan, for the tour.

The kitchen will be to the left of the main entry door.  While not huge it think it will be perfect sized at approximately 12 x 12 feet.

We’ve been storing this antique wood cook stove for years. It needs a little cleaning up (and the stove handle reattached). It will definitely be the star of the kitchen.

To the right of main door we’ll have the eating area. I anticipate this will be a well used area.

Here’s the back door. Between the two windows on the right, will be the wall that will separate Christopher’s room. We plan to be a little creative with this wall and make it part of the the Rocket Mass Heater. If you’re interested in Rocket Mass Heater’s I have several Pins on my Off Grid board on Pinterest.  We also bought the book Rocket Mass Heaters by Ianto Evans and  Leslie Jackson (that’s an affiliate link to Amazon) to help us with our plans and the building process.

This corner will be Christopher’s room. We tried to angle the house well to pick up passive solar heating and added a nice big window to this room. We’ll add some kind of thermal drapes to trap the heat in at night and with the heater on the other side of the wall he should stay plenty warm.

The extra bedroom is in this section. It’s essentially the northwest corner of the house. The window in this room is much smaller since the north side of the house isn’t suitable for gaining solar heat. We’re not worried about this since it is near the heater and is also a guest room so won’t be used too much.

The section between the two beams will be a small hallway plus the bathroom and the utility room. The utility room will have fun things like the batteries for our solar system, on demand water heater and a 55 gallon water cistern. We’ll have another, much larger, cistern outside but for our planned on demand water system a second inside seems smart. Above the bathroom on the main level will be the upstairs bathroom.

Another lovely drawing. This is our upstairs. It’s L shaped with part of it open to below. Our bedroom, a second bathroom and a loft/sitting area will be upstairs along with storage.

The sitting area will be directly above the kitchen. The sitting area will also be additional guest quarters for when we have family visit. With 4 grown daughters, one son in law and a soon to a second son in law our family is rapidly expanding! I love it. 🙂

Our bedroom will be upstairs directly above the two downstairs rooms. Because of the slope of the roof we do lose a little space. Good thing I’m short!

While we do have a plan in place to finish the inside of our cabin, it will be quite some time before it is all completed. We need to put the utilities in before we can really do much interior work. First up, the county required septic system. Then a small solar system that can be added on to as money allows. In the beginning it will be sufficient for my work, minimal lighting and possibly a chest freezer. Once our well is in place we’ll expand it to accommodate the well pump. We’ll also be putting in a phone line and internet. And  there is, of course, all of the outside stuff that needs to be done like housing for chickens, ducks and goats planting trees, vines and bushes, putting in the kitchen garden plus main crops, setting up the water harvesting features and so much more.