BUILDING A SMALL HOME: A YEAR IN THE MAKING
The Steep Hill Heirloom Sleeping Cabin site at the start of excavation and after completion of the build.
In many ways, building a small home is exactly like building a conventional home. The difference comes down to scale. Small homes involve the same major construction stages, the same trades, and the same sequencing as larger projects, but everything is compressed in relation to the building size.
As total building area decreases, so too does cost, schedule, and site impact. This is one of the major advantages of small homes. They are manageable projects, but they aren’t necessarily simple projects.
The Steep Hill Heirloom Sleeping Cabin during the framing stage after the ridge beam had been installed.
In this article, we are going to look at what is involved in building a small home, with the goal of setting realistic expectations around time, complexity, and overall project scale for those considering a small house or cabin of their own.
Below, we will walk through the primary stages of small home construction, with typical timelines and the key factors that influence schedule. We’ll be using the Heirloom Sleeping Cabin, which was built over the course of about a year, as a case study to illustrate the various stages of construction.
Dave reviewing an outcropping of rock that impacted the positioning of the Steep Hill Heirloom Sleeping Cabin.
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