New Home Design features Granny Flat!

Simply Elegant Home Designs is now offering a new house plan featuring an above garage "granny flat" apartment - The "Deephaven Eclectic Cottage".Earlier this year one of my designs was featured in a new book called "In Laws, Outlaws and Granny Flats" (Taunton Press, by Michael Litchfield).  The book features ways that folks can add value to their homes by adding second dwelling units.  This seems so relevant to me given our current economic climate.  Therefore I decided to develop our first house plan that features a second dwelling...

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Tiffany Blue Inspiration

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Home Inspection video checklist

 A must see for Home Buyers and AgentsAt House Detective, Dan Wos and his team are always contributing in positive ways to the Real Estate industry. House Detective is not only a Home Inspection and Appraisal company, but a source for education and a wealth of knowlegable people. Here is a video that will be helpful to Real Estate agents as well as home buyers. It's about 9 minutes long and points out the 5 most important areas of a house to look at prior to signing a deal. Please remember, an actual Home Inspection goes into much more...

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NAHB Predicts New Homes in 2015

We may not know how many new homes will be built in 2015, but we do know what they will look like.  The National Home Builders Association’s Economics and Housing Policy recently asked 3,019 builders, designers, architects, manufacturers and marketing specialists in various locations to describe the  likely characteristics of the average, new single-family detached home in 2015.The findings have some surprising, and not-so-surprising, results:The average new single-family home will be smaller, between 2000 square feet and 2,399 square...

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Paper engineering

: : amazing paper art by .matthew shlian. He's a paper engineer, what a cool profession. Might need to save up for this one thou...

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kitchen details & info

Here is all the info on the kitchen renovation that I did for the beach cottage with the help of John (the shop carpenter).  The new kitchen was done on a very tight budget and the total cost came in under $7000.  I designed the kitchen cabinets, shelving and concrete counter tops and we made them in our workshop.  The upper cabinets were removed and we added a step back cupboard pantry for extra storage.   The wide plank pine flooring was purchased at Wightman lumber for a bargain price and we installed, stained and did the...

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Iron Door

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Iron Door

Iron DoorIron DoorIron DoorIron DoorIron D...

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