Tiny Home Drawings in Shelter by Bob Easton

In 1973, Bob Easton and I decided to make the central theme of our book Shelter a series of small buildings. We encouraged people to start learning to use their own hands in creating shelter.

So that people with no building experience would understand the basics, Bob drew every piece of wood in these little buildings; this took some of the mystery out of building one’s first structure. People look at these drawings and say, “I get it.”

We encouraged people to start small, and learn as they proceeded. A garden shed, studio, a small barn — a tiny home. (This was over 40 years before the tiny house movement.)

The principles are still the same. Your computer is not going to build a structure for you. You still have to use your hands. Analog in this digital age, yahoo!

Here are the pages out of the book — four tiny homes, if you will. On each page are photos of various buildings with the same roof shapes.

I would put rafter ties across (plate to plate, as shown in the gable roof drawing) in this structure. (One thing we learned in all the dome building was the strength of triangles.)

The simplest roof shape

For those with circle madness

I’m going to follow this up in a future post on what I’ve learned in over 50 years of producing books on owner-built homes, and what I would do if I were starting out to create my own shelter in these very different times.

And yeah, I’d encourage you to get a copy of Shelter. It’s more than a book; it’s an odyssey, a love letter to creativity and imagination. There are over 1,000 photos, over 200 drawings, and 250,000 words. If you get the book and are not delighted, contact me and I’ll refund your money immediately. But above, here is a lot of information free of charge.