Shoestring Homes and Small Building Designs is the result of years of frustrating searches for a small, affordable cabin plan. Everything my wife and I looked at was either too big, too small, too expensive, too ugly, or too poorly designed to suit our needs. Finally, I decided to take my decade's worth of producing construction documents for architects and use it to come up with my own design.
Affordability was still an issue though, until one day I happened across a shed building company that built suitably large sheds of high quality at a very reasonable price. To see the sheds I'm talking about, click on the link that follows and scroll down to the bottom of the page. Their "Monarch" is my Thoreau, their "Garage" is my Muir, and their "Barn" is my Emerson. To see them, click here. They build in 13 states from Maine to Virginia, plus the Disttrict of Columbia. You may need to enter a zip code from one of those states in order to view them. You can use my plans to build in any state you want, but you'll have to hire your own contractor or build it yourself. I took one of their two story models and used it as the basis for a vacation cabin. It was built very well and quite inexpensively.
Encouraged, I set out to design some sort of living quarters for every model and every size "shed" they built. They ranged in size from single level with less than 200 square feet to two levels and more than 1,000 square feet. Once I had a portfolio of 16 sets of plans, I contacted the shed company. They asked me to show them the plans. They liked the designs too, and encouraged me to consider other uses for the buildings. They then suggested that I start a website to market my designs and said that if there was enough interest, perhaps we could do business together.
You are looking at the website that grew out of that conversation right now. I thought that the shed company's idea was a good one and I thought of numerous other possible uses for the buildings. As I formalize the various plans, I will make them available here on this web site.
If you like what you see, tell your friends and check back often as I expect to keep adding new designs and uses. If you have a blog or other website of your own, please create a link from your site to mine as this will "drive more eyeballs" to my site to help me stay in business. Soon I will create a "links" page and if our sites seem compatible, I'll link to you as well.
