Tools and Resources

The Owner-Built Gallery
Where owners share their projects.

Project links: Cleghorn cabin, Nash cabin, The Missouri House Journal , Carol's "Little House In Bynum".

Books, software & resources

Our best suggestions on books for country home building. Short reviews of each. These are the ones you will want to own.

Our Best web Resources
to other sites and on-line building resources.

Best Web Resources

These resources will help you find information on the web. Email new suggestions.

Home & Land Finding Tools

How to find your own "best place" to live.

Outline of Steps: 1. Find the area, region or landscape that most energizes you. 2. Find a community within that area that combines feelings of stimulation and connectedness.... more

Text links & Building Ideas

• A Natural House is a house with soul

• $2,000 Home Building Project is a small retreat cottage I built with my two boys.

• 3D Home Architect is inexpensive and easy to use home planning program. See what you can do with it, explore the competition.

• Discussion Group see the questions and answers others have about building and planning a house.

Ideas and articles

• Vintage Farm Plans - download magazine DIY articles from the 1950's & 60's

• Politics made easy a one page graphic "ideagram"

• New Homesteading and the current back-to-the land movement.

• Evolution and technology long wave social trends of history, motivation and technology - or how sex and religion got us where we are.

• Our Caretaker Future where the Internet and human evolution may be headed.

• Why Buildings Thrive Two ways to make sure your house has a long life and that the building is right for the way you want to live.

• When you are past your fifth decade you find you are not as interested in the earlier distractions of physical life (usually sex, drugs, and rock n' roll). These essays are my poor attempt to make sense out of a crazy world and specifically how we got into our present pickle and what it might take to get us out.
  
  It's something to do when you can't dance.

Personal Notes

• About the Designer - meet John Raabe

• The Whidbey House - a solar saltbox home we built in 1983 on an island in Puget Sound.

• Thoughts about design - keeping a notebook of ideas.