We are in the process of building a simple house. The house we are building will have a 950 square foot main floor and another 450 square foot loft. We plan on having a basement but leaving it undeveloped until the kids get bigger or we start yelling and complaining about stepping on each others toes. I’m not sure if everyone would consider a 1400 square foot log house a small house (especially when we’ll have an undeveloped 1000 square foot basement). For example, check out this hobbit hole my good friend from high school sent me info on. (He will now be named Dollar from here on out on The Simple Farm,  new addition to Who’s Who.) I’m not sure it’s a compliment that Dollar said he thought of us when he read about this place but……I did think it was cool. Maybe I’ll do this for a guest house for all the many visitors we are bound to have come check out what crazy stuff we are doing. Anyways, I digress. I keep thinking “We should make this place just a bit bigger. Couldn’t we just cut out a big hole in the wall and extend more living space if only we acquired a few more logs.” Milly assures me that is not going to happen. Since we have already committed to buying walls made out of logs and the size of the logs are not going to change we have our playground set and everything we do needs to fit inside this space. This has actually been a blessing for us. There is no size creep. It would be very easy to just add size to fit in everything we want. It has actually been fun so far to take all that we want and package it into a simple small home. Another thing that is happening by keeping this place small is we are planning on having a much nicer place than we would if we were just to build big. For example, we are already using handcrafted logs and we are looking into a masonry stove as a heating source and design center piece. Tell me these bad boys aren’t cool. Here’s a link to someone that built a stove DIY style. Not quite what I’d want it to look like but good info on how it’s built. So simple and small doesn’t necessarily mean inexpensive and cheap. We are certainly doing it as inexpensive as we can but that mostly means we are searching for good material at decent prices and doing a lot of the work ourselves (at least that is my pipe dream so far.) I still have dreams of a yurt or if I get really adventurous I might try the hobbit hole in the side of our hill. After all, I wouldn’t want to disappoint Dollar or all of you that envision us as crazy hippy radicals.