When one thinks back on early Europeans arriving in North America, before our countries beginning, what most often accompanies this recollection is the memory of the log cabin. New settlers, striking out into the unknown, armed only with a rifle and an axe, and staking claim to an idyllic piece of land untouched by civilization. By the mid to late 1700s, however, the “backwoods” cabin and frontier living had all but been abandoned for the more civilized homestead. Cabins and outbuildings were built with a future vision in mind of a sprawling farmstead complete with fields, a barn, a toolshed, a spring house, a cellar, a forge barn, an ice house, a pond, a main house, and whatever else was necessary to sustain a growing farm and family. With this new and improved arrangement, the cabin was often a temporary dwelling until the ideal home was built on the property. In some cases, the cabin was built on the homestead first and then added onto as features of it improved throughout the years. Often, the first cabins were designed with their later use in mind, most frequently, the forge barn. Prolific author, Eric Sloane writes in an Age of Barns, “In many cases, the forge barn was used as the dwelling while the farmhouse proper was being built. This explains why the few remaining forge barns…so often resemble tiny dwellings, with their windows and doors shaped differently from those of other farmyard outbuildings.” After the family relocated to the newly built farmhouse, the forge barn was put to its intended use; “a storage place for tools, a little factory where new implements were made, a place for broken farm implements to be reshaped into new ones”, and often, “the farmer’s business office”, writes Sloane.

    Country Carpenter’s takes this age-old tradition and adds its spin on it for the modern age with the Country Cabin. With the Country Carpenter’s Country Cabin, you can build you very own place to live on your newly purchased property while the main house is being completed. With a loft and built in cabinet options as well as Country Carpenter’s line of Traditional Furnishings, you can feel right at home like the early New England pioneers did in your own cozy and nostalgic cabin. Then, reminiscent of the self-reliant folk of old, once the family is moved into the main house, the Country Cabin can be converted into an ever-useful Garden Shed or Pool House on your very own, expanding, modern, homestead.
The Country Carpenter’s Garden Shed and Pool House line is reminiscent of another common homestead outbuilding, the wash house or summer house. “There was a time” writes Mr. Hay in his article in the Daily American Newspaper, “when nearly every farm sported a structurethat was generally referred to as the wash house, the summer house, or the summer kitchen.” He continues, “It was a separate wood-framed building — not the family’s permanent residence — a structure that normally sat in the same yard but some yards away from the main two-story farm house”. Many of the smaller outbuildings on early American properties served double duty as wash houses and smokehouses, for butchering and wood storage. As the need for such buildings decreased with the popularization of electricity and other modern amenities, many of the farm outbuildings were abandoned. When home swimming pools became popularized in the mid-1940s to early 1950s it is likely that these former washhouses and other outbuildings were converted from their previous uses to the pool houses of today.

    With the classic New England Saltbox and Even Pitch styles, Country Carpenter’s array of custom Pool Houses harkens back to the utility and simplicity of the homestead outbuildings of old while allowing for the beauty and creativity of the future to shine through.
Visit CountryCarpenters.com today to see our Country Cabin and Pool House for yourself and give us a call to see how you can bring old New England style to your modern backyard.