My childhood cabin, revisited

[flexagon]

Did a weird little project this week. I was reading A Little House of My Own: 47 Designs for 47 Tiny Houses, when one of the rough little wooden sheds reminded me wayyyyy too much of the tiny cabin I grew up in. I thought, for the millionth time and with the usual anger, about how one opened the door to see the garbage and the laundry; how there was no place to gracefully put down the things a person brings in from the car; how clutter spread out from every corner and almost everything was made of bare wood or bare concrete (uncleanable -- talk about a bad idea, when you own and work in a machine shop). And I looked at the other tiny houses and thought there were 375 square feet there! It must have been possible to live more gracefully in that.

Next thing I knew, I was researching different ways to model the old cabin, which I lived in with my parents until I was 12 (after that we added a 16' x 16' addition, half of which was considered part of the house). I knew it might upset me on some level, and sure enough, I did have a few nightmares about that place and my parents this week. But I settled on www.floorplan.com and created this based on memory and pictures:



Although that's an insanely plasticky, cleaned-up version of real life:

• That thing in the lower right is a woodpile for the stove. The black thing is a wood-burning stove.
• Around the stove we usually had some wood (and boots) standing up to dry.
• Everything was dirty. Everything was cluttered. The table was covered in crap aside from a crescent in center front that was big enough for my dad's plate and book.
• The beds were bunk beds, with the tops used for storage; floorplanner.com doesn't seem to know about bunk beds. Also, see how big they were? They were made from 4x8 sheets of plywood.
• There was a curtain over the bathroom door.

Then I took on the challenge: I would not change the cabin's footprint, or move the door or the window (well, not much) and I would keep the plumbing all at the left end of the cabin -- I would even keep the keyboard -- and I would STILL do better. Here's my first attempt:

• I added an entrance area, with a brick wall directly behind the stove that could be used for hanging up wet mittens and boots to dry.
• Alcoves for the beds, separated by closet space. (We had NO closeable storage space.)
• A shower instead of a bathtub -- showers worked much better given our tiny hot-water heater anyway.
• A long shallow counter (that can fold up or down against the wall), instead of a deep table that collected stuff.
• A door for the bathroom.
• Need I mention? In this cabin the walls are finished on the inside, and so is the ceiling. No insulation visible to the naked eye here.

It's not clear why I did this exercise. I thought it might be good for me to not demonize the place just for its square footage, to imagine a small-scale but dignified childhood life there. And maybe it was. I could do better yet by allowing myself to loft certain areas (there would have been vertical space to do so) or allowing more windows, etc. However, now I'm pretty into www.floorplan.com, and while I've never needed a ton of space, I'm not interested in moving to anyplace under 600 square feet, either. So I want to spend the time modeling my current place, instead.

Comments

[flexagon]

Thank you. You're right... the sad thing is, I really think that my dad could have evilled up any amount of space. And conversely, the floor space we had could have provided a more graceful living situation, if he'd cared about making one -- I just proved that to myself.

I guess more space would have allowed a little more privacy. Our house tended to be oppressively silent, since anything you did would be overheard by everyone else, and music wasn't allowed. So, in retrospect, that would have been one nice thing.