Customer Reviews

Cabins: A Guide to Building Your Own Nature Retreat

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is an absolutely essential guide for anyone planning to build a getaway home. It takes you, step-by-step, through the process of choosing your site, planning and designing your cabin and then building it. It includes plans, details and do-it-yourself hints on building all types of cabins: pole-frame, A-frame, timber-frame, log, stick and stone. Designs included range from Thoreau's 10'x15' cabin on Walden Pond to a big, comfortable lakeside cabin with all the extras. If you're dreaming of a little place in the country, get this book.

I have always enjoyed books by Stiles and her group of architects. I built a tree house from one and a play structure from another. This is the most thourough book I have seen by her. Lots of good tips, superb drawings, construction details, etc. This is not just a pretty picture book (although there are some of those, too. This is a book for the real do-it-yourselfer.

This book is wonderful. It contians all the information you could possibly need for building a cabin, whether you want a one room hut with no amenities, a two-betroom beach house with running water, electricity, and a bathroom or something in between. It covers everything I can think of and gives clear instructions for projects.
This book lives up to its title: it really is for someone who is serious about building, with more diagrams than "arty" pictures of the wilderness. However, there is a nice section of color pictures in the middle of the book to give a taste of what sort of results you can expect from your efforts.

I'm tending to agree with both sides here! And I think it's a great book. I have been reading building and cabin books for a year (we're building this Summer). This one is pretty great - a good way to inform yourself about options, the decisions you need to make, kinds of cabins, etc. Another reviewer writes as if I were going to go out and build my cabin based on the info in this book. Now that would be silly wouldn't it? I need architect drawn plans. So read this wonderful book, and go buy some plans. No, yt's not a how-to, and it shouldn't be used that way. But it's still a great book.

As others have noted, this is a useful book for generating ideas and getting the creative juices flowing. I bought it to obtain those features, and it did not disappoint me.

The Stiles are, apparently, a prolific couple on this and similar topics, and they certainly deserve credit for effective packaging and marketing. David Stiles has filled the book's pages with material--some good, some irrelevant, and some good for entertainment--but he certainly has filled it nonetheless. The layout and tone of this book is vaguely reminiscent of a copy of an early 1970s Mother Earth News. The reader's challenge is to extract the kernals of insight from the volumes of chaff. What the book lacks in detailed engineering and construction discussion and techniques it makes up for in peripheral and, in some cases, funny advice. Consider the detailed description of the electronic vehicle-arrival and gate-unlocking monitors--this in a book purported to find ways to get one in touch with mother nature and perhaps forego electricity entirely. Or the sketch plan for the garden-hose remedy against racoons infiltrating your metal trashcan. The advice is intriguing enough, but one suspects that a bit more discussion on well-installation or obtaining running water might be in order before turning to a technological solution involving the use of pressurized water for a racoon problem. Given the Stiles' ties to Manhattan, maybe the accepted security measures of their current environment don't seem quite as ridiculous or irrelevant as they probably do to anyone who actually lives in a rural area. Or consider their admonition against Coleman lanterns being "Scary and hard to light." Hmmm, I, too, have fears and I'm certainly not the most dexterous fellow, but I've learned that five minutes of hands-on practice can turn even the most hardcore urbanite into a safe and proficient Coleman-lantern lighter. Something tells me Mr. Stiles has not taken the time to do the same, and this casts a disconcerting pall over the value of much of his other advice. How much of it has actually been tried?

But this book is valuable for the focus it gives to architecture and perhaps encouraging one to pick up a tablet of graph paper and start sketching floorplans or facades; extract those ideas and use them as fodder for formulating your own. Read the rest with a grain of salt. For a more focused, pragmatic, and obviously tested perspective on cabin-building, get a copy of G. Wayne Fears' "How to Build Your Dream Cabin."

This book has been quite valuable to me as I plan my cottage in Canada. While it is not totally comprehensive, it does a very good job of explaining many of the relevant concepts of cabin planning, design and a fair idea of the building process. Some useful details concerning construction techniques are provided, as well.

Other reviewers have argued that much is left out--correct, given that the book only runs 240 pages. I think that those reviewers misunderstand the intent of the book: to give the reader ideas, not to hand-hold them through every single step of the process. For example, many of the building plans that are provided are lacking in some key details. So what? I intend to have an architect draw up my plans anyway.

At minimum, I know a heck of a lot more after reading the book than I did beforehand.

A very well written book. The authors have covered many details, some of which, I wouldn't have thought of until too late. I feel confident that I could build a fine cabin with only these instructions.

Many great tips are also included that can be used around the garden and some for remodeling.

I highly reccommend this book.

Ive begun a mission to build a small cabin on some family property here in Oregon. Recently, Ive done a good deal of research and purchased 5 notable books on how to build a cabin/small dwelling.
Upon reviewing this material it looks like its well thought out, but is lacking in alot of depth. Gives a wonderful representation of what could be done, and what is possible (something which other books lack).
Out of these 5 books, Ive got two which will carry me to the end with great depth, and 3 that will be "reserves" for ideas. This is definitely the top of my reserve pile, and my first for pictures of ideas.

We used the ideas in this book to add nice touches to our Mt. Rainier cabin rental. The photos are great and the projects well described. the ideas are very creative.

This book is subtitled "A Guide To Building Your Own Nature Retreat".
The problem with that is that it is not really a "guide", it's more like an "introduction to a guide" or "an overview". That is, while it does contain specific information about building doors, frames, etc., I doubt anyone who has not done so, could use this information to actually DO it. The information given is way to sparse to do any real good, it's more of an intro or overview.

The book does at least give some actual designs which might be helpful if you happen to like those designs.

One thing none of the cabin books I have found do is to give info about cost. I realize that costs vary in different states and that the book wants to be valid years from now when prices change. However, it seems reasonable to me that if the author were to state "At the time of this writing the prices were $x.xx per board foot for [type of wood] and so on, and the final cost to build this was approximately $xx,xxx.xx, that would be very helpful. Even if this info were only in an appendix!

People like myself on a limited budget would really like to know how much $ it will cost to build, and even a ballpark idea would be very helpful.

I think this book tried to do too much. Rather than give sparse info on cabin construction that does not really give ENOUGH info to actually do the work described, I'd rather it had given more designs with blueprints and talked about the relative variance in price among the different designs.

The bottom line here is that it seems to me this book does not give ENOUGH info to be entirely useful, in ANY of its chapters, and could have been much more useful if it had eliminated that aspect and concentrated on a thorough discussion of designs and cost and subjects such as plumbing and septic tanks, or other important info one needs to know such as best ways to heat a cabin, which stoves or heating systems are best, etc.

I feel this book is nearly useless in that it does not cover ANY aspect in enough detail to really be useful. It's more of an introduction and if it were titled as such I would not give it so much negativity.