Cool House Plans

The simple beach cottages which dot Southern California’s sunset coast are the material of romance.  Native Southern Californians believe that these cottages originated locally.  Laughably tiny, even dollhouse-like, often sagging, faded, and peeling due to disregard, the clapboard coastal cottage house plan homes occupy many beach communities from Laguna Beach to Venice and beyond.  Many people look down at these boxy and low profile cottages, which are a haphazard mix of Spanish, bungalow, and Cape Cod architecture.  They are just a tad above shanties, and they reflect a time when people had to do with less and were jammed up together.  Nowadays these dwellings, barely of a size to be considered homes, are the nests of college kids, surf bums, or the local psychic reader, rather than residences for grownups.

In the nineteen-teens and -twenties, English country cottage house plans on the Southern California coast were mainly built as second residences for well-heeled inland-city folks from the likes of Pasadena or Hancock Park.  Coastal residences were popular as summer refuges for city folk, since the cool ocean breezes were a welcome respite in the hot days before the advent of air-conditioning.  In California cottages were built inland as far as the cool onshore breezes extended.  Coastal cottages are actually described better by the term coastal-weather cottages.

Beginning from the elaborate early country house plans cottages of wealthy city-dwellers, the building of cottages exploded with the developments and tracts in Los Angeles and beyond.  One famous example is Abbot Kinney´s Venice – a planned community built at the beginning of the twentieth century – with its fanciful canals.  Kinney was a tobacco magnate who had himself built a cottage near Santa Monica prior to his grand vision of building a kind of European carnival resort on the coast of Los Angeles. Read the rest of this entry »

You will save hundreds of dollars by opting to build a Do-It-Yourself dog house, rather than buying a pre-fabricated one at the store. Raw materials are cheap, and high quality dog house building plans can be instantly downloaded from the internet. This article discusses the basic aspects to building your own dog kennel, and directs you to the next logical step in this excellent DIY project.

Obtaining Free Or Discounted Lumber

To start with, I’m going to discuss how to get low cost lumber. Traditionally you would have to buy in bulk in order to get any substantial price cut from your local lumber yard. However, we’re only just coming out of a devastating recession, and I think you’ll find that merely asking for a discount will work 90% of the time. If not, you could consider buying extra wood for other DIY projects. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re planning on building your own dog house, it’s really important to look for insulated dog house plans.

That’s because your dog is going to need some protection from the elements in both cold and hot weather. If the dog house is well insulated, it’ll keep him warm in winter. Just as importantly, it’ll help keep him cool in summer.

If your plans have good insulation, and the house is a good size for your dog, that’s probably all you’re going to need to keep him at a comfortable temperature, unless you live somewhere really freezing, in which case you’ll need to give him access to some protected area of your house in any case (such as the garage or basement). Read the rest of this entry »