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simplicity

The (new) Hedge Society

The Hedge Society has been re-launched as a group blog.  It’s a little blog about a lot of things and I will be posting some of the fun stuff from Jordon Cooper Outfitters over there as well as some of the stuff that may or may not end up here.  I’m kind of excited about [...]

Affordable Rental Suites in Winnipeg

For all of the news about affordable housing in Saskatoon, most of the affordable housing units are still over $200,000.  There is still a huge need for low rent units.  A company in Winnipeg is solving both the problem of creating low rent apartments and finding a solution for how to build on narrow abandoned [...]

The Crib by Broadhurst Architects

I posted more about it here.

Katrina Cottages

I just blogged about this over at The Cooper Cabin.  They are Katrina Cottages and are low cost but significant upgrades over the FEMA trailers designed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  As soon as I saw them and some other low impact houses over the years, I can’t help but think of them as [...]

My favorite designs from the Cooper Cabin blog

When we bought the cabin, I put up a quick free blog hosted on Blogspot to post photos to so we could show the changes the cabin has gone through.  While we have done that, I have posted a lot of design and architecture links to it as well which has generated a growing amount [...]

One year later

A friend of mine asked me the other day if we had any regrets about purchasing our cabin last summer.  The discussion revolved around the size, the restrictions on use, and the idea of the being permanently anchored to one place for vacation. The Size There are four of us using under 300 square feet.  [...]

Cabinology

I just finished up Cabinology: A Handbook to Your Private Hideaway by Dale Mulfinger and just posted a short review of it over at the cabin weblog.  If you are a cabin owner or just a fan of simple and rustic architecture, you will want to get a copy.

When a park is no longer a park

While we lived in Calgary, our sub division was too new to have much for parks, we had a large field which was rectangle and had grass but that was it.  It allowed us to play baseball, soccer, football, and race our bikes and did everything a park needed to do.  The other extreme are [...]

The doom and gloom of retail at Christmas

So early reports are that sales are down 4% this year retail wise compared to last year.  While that doesn’t sound like that much, it is if you are a store owner who depends on Christmas sales to make or break your year.  Wendy and I were in Sears in early December and we were [...]

The Tumbleweed Tiny House Company

Over the years I have become a big fan of Tumbleweed Tiny House Company designs and what Jay Schafer is doing there.  Not only does Tumbleweed design great homes, I have really come to appreciate their website.  It is an excellent design with a great CMS and uses web services like Flickr really effectively.  I [...]

Make Something Day

There is only 26 more days until Make Something Day. From the site. In response to the over-consumptive habits of western culture, Adbusters magazine has been promoting Buy Nothing Day for years now. The Friday after Thanksgiving in the U.S. is typically marked as the busiest shopping day for Americans. But we live in a [...]

The moral of the housing crisis

Michael Lewis on the sub-prime mortgage crisis The real moral is that when a middle-class couple buys a house they can’t afford, defaults on their mortgage, and then sits down to explain it to a reporter from the New York Times, they can be confident that he will overlook the reason for their financial distress: [...]

Too busy

"We can talk on the phone as we eat fast food while using the ATM. Not only are we better at multitasking and becoming more productive and efficient, along with the increased pace, more is required of us. And so we hurtle through life faster and faster, becoming busier and busier. The result is that [...]

My Gadgets

I was called a bit of a hypocrite for my last post because of my own perceived technology usage.  I assume that some think I have a disposable collection of iPhones but in reality I am a bit of a luddite.  Here is my list. Samsung flip phone| 3 years old and is a pay as [...]

Review: Life on a Diet

While I was up at the lake, Dennis lent me his copy of Put Your Life on a Diet: Lessons Learned from Living in 140 sq Feet by Gregory Johnson.  I read it a couple times now and I liked it a lot.   After a divorce, the author found himself living in a small studio [...]