A little model will be of the greatest service in determining whether the shape and proportions of your house are good. A model is easily made of paste-board with sufficient accuracy for this purpose. It is quite remarkable how different many objects appear when actually made, from the way one thinks they will appear, in spite of the most careful drawings; therefore do not despise this simple precaution of making a model in cases where attractive appearance is an element, for it may save you from putting up a structure which will be a continual eyesore.
The amateur (like many professional builders) is much more liable to make his work too elaborate and with too many attempts at ornamentation than to make it too plain. So give your first attention to the block-form, and then to the details. Do not cover your house with an embroidery of jig-sawing, fanciful turning, superfluous brackets, and the like, in the effort to make it pretty or to imitate the vulgar details of inferior summer cottages. The amateur is also liable in the case of very small buildings to make them too tall in proportion to their ground dimensions. A tall, narrow house is seldom homelike or attractive, whether it be six feet square or sixty.
Finally, be simple and modest in your designing, avoid meaningless "gingerbread" work, do not set your house up on stilts, as it were, but hospitably near to the ground; have generous doors and windows, avoid flashy and gaudy colours in painting, cultivate plants and vines to run over the outside, and keep the surroundings neat and tidy.
The variety of small structures from which to select for your early attempts is almost endless. You can find many ideas for your designing and the construction in every town and in various publications. Only simple types will be treated here, involving merely such principles of construction as you can readily apply to such other designs as you may wish to carry out. As it is impracticable to repeat all the suggestions and details under each structure treated here, the prospective builder who should begin with any of the later examples had best read these chapters through from the beginning before starting on the actual work.
One of the simplest and most easily built small structures that you can make is that with a single-pitched or shed or "lean-to" roof; that is, with the roof slanting only one way. This style of construction, though commonly applied to a rather humble class of buildings, is by no means to be despised, the ease with which it can be built by boys or amateurs being one of its marked advantages. You will find this simple form of building capitally suited to many purposes, and a good type with which to begin.
A Play-house or Play-store.—You know that an ordinary wooden building has a framework of timbers,—a kind of skeleton upon which the boarding is nailed. This will be shown in the following chapters, but a very small house or cabin, like that shown in Fig. 363, suitable for a play-house for boys and girls, can be built very well in a simpler way by making the four sides separately and then nailing them together as you would do if making a box. There is no floor (except the ground), and the roof is to be nailed down on top of the four sides as you would nail the cover on the box.
Fig. 363.
A little house, with trees a-row,
And, like its master, very low!—Pope.