Imagine if you were challenged to come up with the best window that you could imagine… what would it be like?
And then, when the comes time to build your next home… make sure that dream comes true!
This attractive log home fascinates me.
One of the many design “rules” in building an attractive log home is to properly size the front porch of a cabin.
Through decades of observing old log homes, and in building traditionally designed new ones, I have observed that…
A six foot porch, which is common on many new homes built today, is unheard of and impractical on a country cabin because it is simply too small to be useful.
Whereas, an eight foot porch is ideal, being visually appealing and offering plenty of room for rocking chairs, porch swings, and guests to stand on.
A wide ten foot porch is rare and often too large, appearing somewhat awkward and overbearing on any cabin other than the very largest of ones (20 feet or wider). These oversized “ten-footers” do offer the benefit of abundant exterior space, enough that a picnic table or even sleeping cots can be set up, and thus an outdoor space can practically become an exterior room.
As useful as these wider porches are I have often encouraged people to stick with the traditional eight-foot porches.
But here on this cabin we have what appears to be a unheard of fourteen-foot porch!
I can think of no other cabin like it.
If someone had told me of such a thing without seeing this image I’d probably have chuckled at the idea of how odd it must look.
But I would have been wrong… this cabin looks great!
Perhaps, rules are meant to be broken.
And, that when one breaks the rules, they need to be bold about it!
I believe that more than half of the parcels of land that I have built on over the years have been half wooded and half cleared… these are easy properties to pick the house site as a cabin looks best when it is nestled close to the tree line where field and woods meet, much like you see here in this image.
Today I’d like to focus on the second floor windows of these two homes.
Actually, the windows themselves are fine, but there is a problem with the second floor profiles of these structures.. An oversight has been made that visually detracts from the potential charm that these two houses could have offered.
The first home, an old frame structure appears odd in it’s presentation, doesn’t it? This oddness comes from the second floor area. But exactly what is the problem? And how could it have been built differently?
The second home (a newer log cabin built using antique logs) appears to have a visually overpowering porch roof. And yet this roof is not inappropriately too large. So again, what’s the problem?
It turns out that both houses suffer from the same aesthetic design “issue”, each displaying opposite extremes of the same problem.
I have found that the front profiles of houses look best when there is about an eight inch space between the second floor windows and the roofs above and below… any wider of a space and the house looks odd, as if the windows are floating above the porch roof… and any less of a space and windows look “crunched” and the porch roof below becomes visually overpowering.
It’s a simple design consideration, it doesn’t cost any extra money to implement, but one that makes a big difference.
Can you guess which chimney is the newer one?
Houses, as the years have gone by, have grown more comfortable with the addition of modern plumbing, wiring, temperature controlled interiors, but the quality of design and materials has severely dropped off as illustrated in these two chimneys.
What a nice log cabin… (even though I didn’t build it)… lol
If I had to guess I would say this cabin is likely about 20 years old and was built using antique logs. The growth of the shrubs, the mix of early 1800’s strap hinges on the door with 20th century z-bracing on the window shutters, and a chimney without any crowning at the top, are all clues.
I’ve spent my career building cabins… I admire anyone that does the same… and I especially admire anyone that can build a cabin and leave no clues as to it’s age (almost impossible to do).
But here the one clue that cries the most to it’s age is the front porch roof… see how it extends beyond the log cabin where the two come together? I’ve never seen one like that on an old cabin… it draws the eye and once spotted distracts the viewer from fully appreciating what would have been a nearly perfect project. The builder/designer of this cabin was focusing on the porch floor, not the larger porch roof that would be built above it.
The solution to this problem would have been to build the porch floor system shorter than the length of the cabin, much like you see in how the back addition to this cabin was built. I generally build the front porch two feet shorter than the cabin (a foot or so shy of the each end).
I have yet to build a hobbit style home… I so hope to do so… one day.
But hoping won’t make it happen, I need to start planning towards it, so that is what I’m now doing.
Now, will my wife want to live in hobbit home?… likely not. But fortunately one of the keys to building a handmade house is the freedom to combine several types of construction formats… build a home that is part this, and part that… perhaps have a log cabin den, a post-and-beam kitchen and maybe a hobbit guest room?
A woodstove within an inglenook… incredibly attractive… and a wonderful source of heat.
