The Beekeeper’s Bungalow | THE small HOUSE CATALOG
Shawn Dehner of THE small HOUSE CATALOG has sent us photos of the recently completed Beekeeper’s Bungalow, named for his beekeeping wife Jamie. Shawn and Jamie built the cottage themselves, doing all the work other than the concrete foundation and roof shingling.
Being a bungalow, the floor plan is set up for single-level living with a ground floor bedroom and bathroom. As such, the design supports aging in place. However there is also an attic bedroom large enough to be shared by two or three small children, making it a viable plan for young families as well. The centrally-located stair divides the upper level into two areas, allowing part of it to be used for a separate sitting room, home office, nursery, etc.
The cottage features handcrafted details inside and out. The exterior is dressed up with brackets supporting the roof eaves, and there are Doric-style columns on the front porch. The galley kitchen, the stairs and the hearth for the propane stove were all site-built from solid wood by Shawn and Jamie. They also handmade the interior doors from solid wood then added salvaged hardware to complete the traditional look.
The ground floor is 576 ft2 (53.5 m2) and the upper floor is a bit less. However with the low ceiling areas where the roof comes down to the upstairs floor, the property tax assessor deems it to have a total of just 765 ft2 (71.1 m2). The usable floor space looks quite a bit larger than that though, so it seems that there may be tax advantages to building a one-and-a-half story design in some jurisdictions. If the floor area is the primary means of assessing property taxes, it may be worth finding out exactly how the taxable floor area is calculated before commencing a new build.
If you’d like to build your own Beekeeper’s Bungalow, the plans are available for FREE on THE small HOUSE CATALOG’s website.
Have a great weekend!
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Photographs by Shawn and Jamie Dehner.
Text copyright 2014 SmallHouseBliss. All Rights Reserved.
Regarding the square foot issue, many jurisdictions require a minimum floor to ceiling measurement before it counts as usable floor area. There is also usually a minimum ratio of usable floor space to actual floor space that needs to be considered.
The upstairs is code-approved habitable space. You can tell this too because stairs are required wherever habitable headroom is met on an upper floor. They’re not permitted to upper levels where headroom has NOT been met, hence the use of ladders (not in this house). The sq. ft. requirement has also been met on the upper floor bedroom side while the loft side is just that, a loft. This house was permitted and inspected to code with no violations. I design for a living and practice code on a daily basis. Code issues are not murky as they’re often construed to be.
Gorgeous!
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Could you please let us know when the plans are available.
Hi Douglas, It will be available for free beginning September 1.
I am thrilled to see a small house that I would consider building,to live in. Do you have the cost approximate for this home?
I would like to know what it would cost to have a two bedroom built on some land?
There are many variables to consider to make an informed reply. Please feel free to email from my website contact.
Also, time to build would be a great piece of information. With that garden, did you add anything like a root cellar or storage shed?
It took around 20 months to build, just the two of us. No root cellar, a crawl space was the deepest we could go down by the water b/c our topsoil is sandy for about a 24″ and then it’s all hard clay!
That’s great! Were you able to live in it while finishing construction or did you complete it then move in?
For the most part, we actually lived in our “rolling bungalow” builder’s cottage while building the Beekeeper’s Bungalow. But we did move in before it was finished, once the dust had mostly settled and we were on to the finishing work. To date we’ve done all our houses this way, remodels and new!
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Hi! This is beautiful. We like to know when the plans are available. (From Chiloé island)
Please visit the website to download the plans, they’re already available. http://www.thesmallhousecatalog.com. Shawn
and thanks for the nice words!
Love the colors…would you please share the paint colors used on the exterior? We want to build your adorable house for our new home.
On the first day that I started looking it was the first house that I saw and I fell in love with it. My husband thought it was perfect and we didn’t continue to look at houses! Do you have any more pictures of the house…
Please visit the website, you can download the plan for free and see photos! You can email us via the website as well…
More interior pictures with furniture in the living room would be great and could you please tell me the colors you painted the exterior?
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I really like the catches on this image.
Please can you let me know where I can purchase them from?
What kind of a live load is this roof designed for? Here in my area of Alaska, the ground snow load is 70#. Will this roof handle that, or would I need to decrease width between each rafter? Are there any detailed photos of the roof construction? Thanks
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