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Tools and Resources

building books and resources
BOOKS
(on Land, Home design & Building)

Books for Building

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

cottage and cabin web links

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

Best Web Resources

These text links will help you find information on the web.

cabin cottage and small home plans
Home & Land Tools
Click here for help finding and buying Property and building the Right House
FREE TOOLS

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

Home Design

  • A Natural House is a house with soul
  • A $1400 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 and explore the competition.

  • Vintage farm plans won't help much with house building, but it has plans for other useful and fun things.

Ideas and articles

    Somewhere around your fifth or sixth 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. This is a PDF copy of what I wrote up for new design clients when I first started out in. Still makes sense, I think.

John Raabe
Just an old white guy

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