Wooden house life is not just a hobby or a way of leisure, but also a passion. Rebecca Abel, for example, took the wooden house life to the extreme. In Port Orchard, Washington State, Rebecca used her time, talent and energy to build a fairytale-like wooden house in the jungle.
Rebecca has always loved designing unique spaces and landscapes. She had been very interested in small spaces for as long as she could remember, and had always fantasized about living in a log cabin in a large forest. Her father was a very visionary architectural designer who taught his daughter from an early age how to design roofs, how to make concrete materials, how to make furniture and house structures.
To date, Rebecca has designed and built eight different styles of wooden houses and villas, ranging from small shacks to timber-framed villas on the shores of Puget Sound. Therefore, Rebecca naturally wanted to build a house of her own. She has had the knowledge and passion to build houses since she was a child, and she has since learned a lot of design and construction knowledge and skills from books, magazines and the Internet. She gained a lot of experience in actual construction, because there is nothing more rich than the experience gained in actual hands-on work.
After six years living in a timber-framed house on the waterfront, Rebecca discovered something interesting. Her house was only 1600 square feet (about 148.6 square meters) at the time, which was much smaller than most houses on the Puget Waterfront. But even then she found that she didn't make good use of a lot of the space in the house, so she wondered if she could drastically reduce the size of the house and live in a house without a housing loan.
To achieve this goal, Rebecca developed a four-year plan. In the first year, she saved enough money to buy a few acres of land in the woods. The following year, she saved money to build a log cabin and connect it with water and electricity. In the third year, she built the main wooden house. In the fourth year, garages and workshops were built. After building the main chalet, Rebecca proudly announced that it took only three years to complete the goal.
Rebecca spent months searching for suitable land to build her cabin. By chance, as she detoured through an area under construction, she saw a sign that read "For Sale" hanging from a gate. The area was on the outskirts of the city, and Rebecca loved it.
It was already overgrown with weeds, and there was a farmhouse and three cabins. The farmhouse burned down in the 1950s, and the remaining three wooden houses were littered with rubbish and dilapidated. These houses must be cleared out first. But fortunately there are three acres of cedar, hemlock and fir trees here, and the scenery is great, which is perfect for Rebecca to build a wooden house here. There is even a meandering stream next to it that flows through the canyon from here.
Rebecca built her first wooden house in 2012, which she called the "Owl Chalet." It was 12 by 16 feet, a total of 200 square feet, which she had built in two months. The wooden house was originally built as a storage room for tools and materials, but Rebecca decided to expand it with a toilet and sink. Then someone gave her an old-fashioned wood-burning stove, and she built a stone chimney for the stove, and built it with cobblestones to make an old-fashioned kitchen, and she installed half of the kitchen with a table and a closet. While building the other cabins, Rebecca had been living in the small attic of the previous owl cabin. Now the wooden house has become a guest bedroom and Rebecca's studio. The walls of the wooden houses are made of cedar logs.
The walls of each wooden house rebecca built are different, making each cabin different in style. She used hand-chiseled logs as siding for the main wooden house, and used log stakes to make columns and railings to highlight the contrast and fun of the house. She decorates all the cottages with green paint and cedar, and the combination of the two forms rebecca's unique "fairy tale look style" wooden house feature.
The smallest of these wooden houses is an 8 by 10 foot pump room (also built by Rebecca in 2012 over a month) with walls made of circular slices of cedar wood. Rebecca used construction glue to glue these log slices into the shell of the OSB (synthetic plank) and filled the gap with sand and stone paste to form a firewood-like appearance.
Rebecca's main chalet, called the "Squirrel Cabin," is 13 by 18 feet, plus an 8 by 9 feet (about 1.8 meters) log cabin with a main building of 302 square feet and a sleeping loft area of 130 square feet (about 1.2 meters). The front porch of the house is 8x13 feet.
In 2012, Rebecca bought all the land she had saved, and in 2013 she saved up money to start building a wooden house. The wood used to build the porch was made from the ground and dried and stored in a mill in Port Orchard for nine months. The railings of the porch were built by Hand by Rebecca using mortise, and each piece of wood was polished by hand to serve as a pillar of the porch. The stone chimney was also built by Hand by Rebecca, and round stones from the river were used to build the outer surface of the chimney and cover the entire floor of the house. The walls of the room were made of 2 by 8 inches of fir wood, and Rebecca built them with nails and filled in the gaps in the middle.
The living room of the squirrel chalet is very spacious with a ladder leading to the bedroom in the attic. Rebecca wanted to keep some traces of her father's work in the cabin, so she asked her father to help build the ladder. The kitchen of the chalet is full of artistic atmosphere, designed by Rebecca herself, and is equipped with a cupboard, an old-fashioned sewing machine, and old-fashioned lead-glass door panels. The Heb Chalet Company in Port Orchard uses Rebecca's unique kitchen design style, which is well received by customers.
Rebecca loves her kitchen so much that she goes out of her way to buy a lot of high-end kitchenware for the kitchen, such as Viking's stove and KitchenAid's cupboard refrigerator. A white ceramic sink was also installed, and a maple tree cutting board from John Boos (a high-end kitchenware brand) was bought. The range hood was also painted with classic watercolor car paint from the 60s, which was Rebecca's favorite color.
The bathroom has a custom tiled shower, and the toilet and sink are antiques from 1927 that Rebecca collected.
To maximize the interior space of the squirrel cabin, Rebecca exposed the area where the roof rafters and the attic connect. The walls are made of 1 by 6 inches thick pine wood, which Rebecca polishes, paints and bonds the crevices with polyurethane. The floors inside the house are all made from recycled floors from an old house from 1927. When Rebecca found these floors, it was covered with a carpet and glued to the floor with glue and nails, Rebecca pulled out thousands of nails on them, and then polished them with her own planer, and got these beautiful free floors.
In 2015, Rebecca built an 8 by 9 foot wooden house next to the Squirrel Cabin, which was used as a dining room and bedroom. Once Rebecca invited her friends to a party, and everyone sat on the floor for dinner. After the party she decided to build the wooden house, which could indeed be expanded for dinner, but rebecca watched TV here most of the time.
Rebecca now plans to build another additional wooden house, which will be connected to the exit of the bathroom. She planned to remove the toilet, extend the windows into a door, and transform it into a comfortable bedroom, the same size as the wooden house that had been built. The toilet will be moved to a small room in the bedroom. Rebecca is very excited about the expansion and plans to complete the foundation this year and the entire wooden house in July next year.
Rebecca attributes her achievements in design and construction to a strong belief in independence and self-sufficiency, as well as a spirit of not being afraid of failure to achieve goals and the value of life. More recently, she has been studying the techniques and art of wood carving, forging and weaving, hoping to combine these techniques and art forms with future plans to build wooden houses.