When you’re working with your own two hands, you can put a lot more of your heart into your house.
About the Episode:
This week, we’re welcoming back Jay Osborne from FreeFarmhouse.com to share even more of his wealth of knowledge about historic architecture! One episode could not contain the old house love, and I hope you’ll enjoy this convo part two as much as I did.
In this episode, you’ll hear:
- How a “modern farmhouse” can simultaneously fail to be either modern OR a proper farmhouse
- What traditional architecture can teach us about a slower pace of life
- Why designing small spaces makes every design decision work overtime
And so much more!
Resources Mentioned:
Follow me on Instagram @FarmhouseVernacular!
EPISODE 23: Free Farmhouse Plans: Interview with Jay Osborne
EPISODE 5: Why They Don’t Make Things Like They Used To
Follow Jay on Instagram @FreeFarmhouse!
Transcript:
Paige:
Hello and welcome to the Vernacular Life Podcast, where we talk about anything and everything that goes on in our turn of the century vernacular farmhouse. I’m your host, Paige. And today, I am joined again by Jay Osborne. We talked to him last week about his amazing Free Farmhouse Project and the book and Kickstarter that went along with it. And today, we’re going to get a little bit more theoretical because just talking to him last week, I got the sense that there were a lot more opinions on modern architecture and historic architecture than we got into. So I’m really excited to talk to him today and I hope you enjoy. So welcome, Jay. Welcome back.
Jay Osborne:
Thanks for having me again.
Paige:
Glad to talk to you again. And for our listeners, will you give us just kind of a 60-second recap on what the Free Farmhouse Project was and kind of where you’re at with it now?
Jay Osborne:
So a long time ago, I found an old farmhouse abandoned and overgrown in a Virginia forest where I grew up. And I was inspired by it. And I wanted to learn as much as I could from it. And having an architecture background that decided to redesign it. I created a full set of architectural plans for it. And now I’ve turned those plans into a book which also include 3D renderings for anybody to better understand the design and how it’s constructed. So now, I just launched a Kickstarter campaign that was an amazing success and I’m trying to get all these books out to as many people as possible because I made all the files open source and I want to share the love as far as possible.
Paige:
Amazing. And that’s how I learned about Jay. That’s how I met him is he sent me his wonderful book, which is a physical copy of all of those plans. But you don’t have to have the book to get the plans, like he said. They’re on his website freefarmhouse.com. Everything is open source. It’s the most wonderful, charming, amazing little farmhouse ever, and all the plans are out there. So if you’re looking to build, or you don’t want the headache to have old house, this is your answer.
So we talked about that in the previous episode. If you want more information, you can go back and listen to that one. But this episode, I wanted to talk about what we can learn from historic architecture. Because when we talked last time, you said that your training and most of your work experience focused on modern architecture and historic architecture and traditional architecture is very different. You said it. Everybody can see it. So what drew you to this old house, this abandoned house that you found that kind of kicked off this whole thing? What was so different about it from the normal projects that you work on?
Jay Osborne:
So normally, I was designing enormous mansions and often very modern structures and I was attracted to this little house because I wanted to reconnect with my roots. I don’t come from a very rich background. And I wanted to give something away to people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford an architect.
I’m not actually a licensed architect. I’m not going to mislead anybody about that. But I’m an architectural designer and I do the work that licensed architects take credit for. So I’ve worked for many licensed architects and I’ve done a variety of buildings. But I’ve also noticed that their business model does not allow them to help most people when it comes to houses. Only about one or two percent of houses in the United States are custom designed by architects. All the rest are builders and architectural designers like me who are doing that kind of work.
Paige:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jay Osborne:
So I wanted to give something away to the world and I wanted to see how far it could go. And it was a very simple house. So I thought, why not start simple? Why not start small and simple and build from there?
Paige:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So this house in particular, it’s a 975 square feet, right?
Jay Osborne:
Right.
Paige:
Two-bedroom, one and a half bath, kitchen, living room. That’s a pretty small house by today’s standards.
Jay Osborne:
Right.
Paige:
But looking at it, and maybe it’s just because I kind of have a bend toward the historic houses, it seems very efficient. There isn’t any wasted space in it. Everything is used. And that kind of efficiency is not something I feel like we see a lot in modern houses.
Jay Osborne:
Right. The more you have of something, the less likely you’re going to economize and take care of it as much as you could. So if you take something for granted, you tend to not to use it more carefully.
Paige:
Yes.
Jay Osborne:
So if you go somewhere where a resource is extremely scarce, like let’s say you go to space, you think about oxygen a lot when you go up to space.
Paige:
Right.
Jay Osborne:
And if you have a tiny house, you think about space, you think about space a lot. You think about how much you can put into a small amount of space, not outer space, of course.
Paige:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jay Osborne:
So this small house has to work for many different purposes and each room has to work for different purposes as well. So a closed layout kind of helped with that. You could turn a living room into a guest bedroom, and the kitchen and dining room are pretty simple and elementary. But you can always build larger from an initial design.
Paige:
Right. And that is something, some of this I know just from growing up, I grew up in a 1924 farmhouse. Fairly closed layout, similar to this house plan, similar to my house. And something that we did was just the rooms didn’t have a super defined purpose because you could always move things around and when there were doorways between rooms, and like this house, every single room had a door on it. Most of them don’t have it anymore, but you can see where the hinges were. So you could close every door.
Jay Osborne:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Paige:
So when you don’t have these 4,000, 5,000 square foot McMansions with all of these specialized sitting room and formal living room and game room and den and all of these things, you kind of just learn to make your house work much harder for you. And I feel like your design really, really encompassed that.
Jay Osborne:
I try.
Paige:
You succeeded very, very well.
Jay Osborne:
Glad to hear.
Paige:
Okay. So when we were emailing back and forth, you kind of mentioned offhand that you didn’t want to just talk about being a change in architecture. You wanted to actually do something about it. So what does this project do and kind of what do you mean by that?
Jay Osborne:
So I made this project open source for a variety of reasons. And I’m trying to give it out to as many people as possible because I think it can help a wide variety of people and I think the most important thing to do is to allow people to understand what a set of house plans should look like and to give them something to get started with, if they wish to use it. It doesn’t have to be that everybody copies my design. In fact, I don’t want people to just copy my design blindly. I’d like them to customize it for their own needs and desires. And in many cases, they have to. Every foundation needs to be customized to its site.
Paige:
Right.
Jay Osborne:
If you build a shallow foundation up North where there’s frost heave, then your house is going to be dancing in the wintertime…
Paige:
Yes.
Jay Osborne:
… and you don’t want that.
Paige:
No.
Jay Osborne:
So the house design always has to be customized, but I wanted to provide a template for people to get started with and as a way for them to understand what it is that architects do, what builders do and how to understand a set of house plans in detail.
Paige:
When you launched this Kickstarter and then I ended up sharing it, I had a lot of people in my messages who were not going to build, had no interest in building, had a house, were pretty settled, but they participated anyway because they wanted to understand how houses were built.
Jay Osborne:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Paige:
And the way that you put this together is extremely clear. Okay. How about I ask you, what are some things that go into building a house that people who don’t know about building houses or designing houses don’t think about?
Jay Osborne:
Right. So everybody knows about floor plans, but there are also elevations which show the exterior of the house. Then there are interior elevations that show things like the walls for the kitchen and the bathrooms and there are sections that cut through the house and show you how it’s constructed in better detail. But then there are also a lot of details and there’s schedules, there are site plans. There’s all kinds of stuff that goes into a set of plans for a house. So we often shortcut our understanding of it by calling them floor plans. But there’s a lot more than just floor plans.
Paige:
Right. The floor plan is really just showing you one view that tells you where you can put your couch.
Jay Osborne:
Right.
Paige:
But it doesn’t talk to you about the framing, about the lumber requirements. And part of what you included in this project is a full list of materials [crosstalk 00:08:47]-
Jay Osborne:
Right.
Paige:
Correct?
Jay Osborne:
That was a lot of fun. So I had this extremely detailed digital model that had every stud in it, every single brick was modeled in it.
Paige:
My gosh.
Jay Osborne:
You look at beadboard and you think, oh, it’s like a texture on a wall. No, I modeled every single beadboard, every floorboard as well, and everything was in there.
Paige:
Oh my gosh.
Jay Osborne:
And then I decided at one point I’m going to take it all apart and stack everything together like an epic game of Tetris. It’s going to be amazing. After doing that, I did a material takeoff. So I was able to calculate exactly how much of every material was required to a very fine tolerance. So I created this illustration showing all the material stacks, which I’ve seen this in a Sears and Roebuck catalog before and I loved the illustration. So I thought I’d show that for a new build as well. So all the materials stacked and I did a quantity takeoff so somebody could do a cost estimate using a builder. They just give this to a builder and they can get at least a materials cost estimate.
Paige:
Right. I love that the pictures are in the book if I’m remembering correctly. But what I loved about that is that people who are interested in this, your budget’s unlimited just make it beautiful kinds of people, they tend to be DIY. They want to understand things. They want to do as much as they can, but possibly they’ve just run into a situation where, okay, I don’t know how to build a house. So I that’s a little outside of my DIY. But I loved all of the information of this because, like you said, it makes everything about building a house very learnable and very understandable and very tangible.
And so you have these plans and you go to a builder, it’s like, no, this is what I need. And I can see it’s what I need because it’s listed right here and this goes here and that goes there. So in terms of an education tool, I think a lot of people responded to that because they’re just like this kind of information isn’t out there for people who are not architects and who are not architectural designers.
Jay Osborne:
Uh-huh (affirmative). It’s something that I always wanted when I was in architecture school. And I think a lot of architecture students would like it as well because it shows you not just what a set of plans looks like, but also it shows you 3D illustrations that let you understand how it all comes together. So usually when people look at a set of architectural plans, their eyes glaze over. They don’t really understand it. It’s not intuitive. It’s not easy to figure out all black lines, very flat projections. It takes a trained eye to truly understand it. And even at some levels, a lot of people who are experienced with them can miss some different problems that arise. So when I created all these 3D illustrations, I wanted to make the case also that it’s easier to understand a set of architectural plans when you have these 3D views. And the whole point of architectural plans is to communicate such ideas.
Paige:
Right.
Jay Osborne:
So I hope my book illustrates that, not just to the general public but also to the architecture profession, because a lot of architects, they’re designing buildings in such a way that a lot of people can’t check their work. They can’t really understand if it’s going to be what they thought it would be
Paige:
Interesting. This is somewhat related. Obviously, having an engineering background, we took a class on modeling. We read drawings, we made drawings. Looking at a two-dimensional drawing and translating into three dimensions, had some familiarity with it. So when I saw the plans, I was just geeking out because it was like, oh, look at the drawings. It’s so cool.
Jay Osborne:
That’s one reason why I sent them to you and Brandon.
Paige:
Yeah. You absolutely got that bang on. I don’t know if I sent it or if my dad saw the Instagram stories that I posted, but he is also an engineer and had the same reaction. You won with all the engineers. We have that kind of understanding already just because of the engineering background. But like you said, most of the population doesn’t. They don’t understand how an awning is going to look or how the cabinets are going to look. It takes a decent amount of imagination just to go from 2D to 3D even if you know what you’re looking at. So having those side by side, and that was what you did in the book is you had the 2D drawings on one side and then the three dimensional rendering on the other side so that people can very tangibly understand what these drawings mean.
Jay Osborne:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Right.
Paige:
Fabulous. Absolutely fabulous. This is obviously emulating an old style build, emulating a turn to the century farmhouse. And I think it’s just the pinnacle of aesthetics. I think it’s just like, that is how houses are supposed to be. They’re not huge. They’re functional. We talked in the last episode about how the windows are stacked over each other, which just looks so correct and so nice and pleasing, but a lot of modern architecture doesn’t do that. And so I wonder if there are any other areas that you see modern architecture missing, not even necessarily just missing to look old, but just practices in modern architecture that just don’t work.
Jay Osborne:
Right. We have to make it clear that you’re talking about modern traditional houses, not modern hyper modern style houses.
Paige:
Yes[crosstalk 00:14:02]. So modern houses that are trying to be this kind of older traditional style house, but they just don’t get it right.
Jay Osborne:
Right. A lot of modern farmhouses fail at being both modern and farmhouses. They don’t be the feel of being a farmhouse when you’re on the inside. They might have modern materials and methods, but they don’t feel fresh in many cases. So if you want really fresh and new then there’s a way to do that. But if you want something that’s feels old and traditional, it’s hard to find any set of plans that gives you something that will give you that feeling. So it all comes down to how you feel when you’re in a house. And a lot of people can’t articulate what it is. Sometimes it’s like a smell and that’s something that’s hard to design for [crosstalk 00:14:46]-
Paige:
Yes.
Jay Osborne:
But you can put things like a wood stove into a house and you can make it smell older. So it is possible. It’s just the musty flavor of a house won’t necessarily come through in a new build. But when you look at the forms of a house, there are a set of rules that traditional houses that are authentic traditional houses, that they conform to. And of course you can break a lot of these design rules. So it can come down to roof slopes, to different levels of formality, so does something feel more formal or informal. And it also comes down to the craftsmanship and the materiality. So you have to understand how things come together to understand why it is that traditional builders made things the way they did. Why would they use a crown molding? It’s not just pretty, it has a function. These functions are important.
Paige:
What’s the function of the crown molding?
Jay Osborne:
Once you go into these details, it’s fascinating. The function of a crown molding is to make the line that’s between your wall and your ceiling look good. Because over time as the building sags and changes, because buildings, especially wood construction, they tend to change over time, the crown molding covers up where all of the bending and irregularity is. There are other functions too like, when you have a crown molding, you have fewer cobwebs. And it helps not just with the aesthetic of the house. It can make the walls feel a little stronger, but it has other functions as well. So I always say form fulfills function. And if you think about it long enough, you’ll find many, many things that are functional that you might have originally thought were just eye candy.
Paige:
Yes. You mentioned that in the last podcast, the idea that form fulfills function, and I’ve never heard it phrased that way. But I think in our renovation, that is what we have tried to do single time, is that if there is a way to make something functional and beautiful, that’s what we try to do. And almost every time there’s a way to do it. You might have to look for inspiration pictures. You might have to dig a little bit, think a little bit, but that kind of care and attention to detail, I think is what the old houses have that modern houses just don’t because they’re just produced on such a rapid timeframe that they don’t have time to sit and think through, can I make a built-in stud cavity cabinet here to make a little bit more use of this space? They just bump the wall out two feet.
Jay Osborne:
You have another podcast where you explain why things aren’t made the way they used to be made and why you buy all these antiques. I love the parallel here, it’s also important to understand why services aren’t as good as they are nowadays. It’s not just products and for many of the same exact reasons, some services have declined in quality. So a lot of times when you’re hiring somebody now, you’re hiring them by the hour and you’re getting their first thoughts on how to solve a problem. Whereas a long time ago, over a hundred years ago, builders had a lot more time to think about how things should come together and they wouldn’t be pressured to make an instant decision. They would be able to put so much more time into it that just by thinking about the design, they made it of a better quality.
Paige:
Well, everything that they were doing took more time. There were no power tools if you’re doing plaster and lath. If it’s like this house is maybe 50 or 60 miles from the closest major city. So if you’re transporting materials from there, that’s a multiple day journey to build an entire house and I never considered that all of that is time that the builder has to figure out how to do something well, not just quickly.
Jay Osborne:
Right. Time is one of the secret ingredients to old houses. If anybody has more time, they can design a house better. Anybody, not just architects, not just builders, but even homeowners. If you have more time, you can fix the leaky areas around your windows. You can add some decorative trim where it should go. And a builder can fix their mistakes as they’re working, they’re not trying to just cover them up and show it to the building inspector as fast as possible and get it approved and then forget about it. So a builder with more time can actually fix problems that otherwise they would be pressured to ignore. And architects with more time could refine their crafts, they can communicate their intentions better, which is very important when it comes to design. Design is all about communicating intentions and architects with more time could just spend that time and figure out what’s the right way to do things.
Paige:
Right. And I think everybody who has seen your project has benefited from the enormous amount of time that you’ve put into it. So you’ve done so much of the mental work already for people to get them to a point that they can have this house that clearly has had so much time and attention put into it, just because of this project that you’ve done.
Jay Osborne:
Right. Yeah, I’m hoping that other people can build on my work. There was more time than I can calculate. It’s a lot [crosstalk 00:19:45]-
Paige:
It’s a labor of love.
Jay Osborne:
It’s a labor of love. Right. And I enjoy doing it. There are some times where it was difficult, software issues to have to figure out. So I can’t say that it was all a walk in the park, but it was something that I did because I just wanted to give this away to the world.
Paige:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Turned out fantastically and I think it really is a gaping hole in the available floor plans and layouts that people can choose from. I’ve looked at them just out of curiosity sometimes just to see what’s out there if I had to build and there’s absolutely nothing like this. And I think people who want that feel who are not looking for a very aggressively modern architectural space, if they’re looking for that traditional farmhouse, that kind of cozy, homey family feel, this is it. This is how to do it. But most other floor plans just get it wrong.
Jay Osborne:
Right. A lot of it comes down to people not wanting to copy the successes of the past and builders of the past would always copy the successes of the past. That was just how they operated. They weren’t trying to reinvent the wheel every single time. So they would see something that works and then they would remix it. And that’s all what folk culture used to be. Folk culture is remix culture. It is open source culture. Once copyrights came around, once people were pressured with their time and once they were told that they need to do something completely different every time they do something, they stopped copying successes. And we’re living with a lot of halfhearted ideas that people haven’t really fleshed out.
Paige:
Right. That is so interesting because if you look at historic fashion, if you look at antiques and if you look at house styles, starting say 1700 on, there is no one definitive now is when the time changed now is when we go from this to this. Everything kind of has elements of the previous things and then maybe an extra wing pops up here or extra roof detailing or different kinds of windows. So everything kind of evolves very slowly.
There’s a house on my parents’ property that was built in 1849, but it has an enclosed like boxed staircase and the men who built it came from new England. So if you think about 30 years prior, the kinds of things that were in the houses in new England were enclosed staircases. And so when they came here, even though it was 1850, the styles had changed. That is still there. They were like, that’s a good way to build a staircase. We’re going to do it that way. But that is very, very true, is that everything, especially in the day of social media and everybody coming up with new things, like the pressure to be novel and to be interesting is very high. And it never occurred to me that that extends also into architecture.
Jay Osborne:
Right. The irony is that me giving away this traditional design for free is extremely innovative. It’s radical. It’s like a little tiny revolution. I’m very humbly saying this of course. A lot of architects won’t even consider giving away their drawings for free. A lot of builders would love this, but they have no idea that it’s out there. So one reason why I did this is to show that traditional culture has a lot of value to it, of traditional architecture. But also we can learn something about how they did things back then. Not just about how things looked, but how they actually made things. And a lot of what they did was just building on the ideas of other people.
Paige:
Right. And I’ve thought a lot about if the guy who built my house was alive today and had access to day’s resources, but had the experience of living in 1904, 1905, what would he build? And this house seems to answer that question, but the interesting thing is our house here, I have a folder on my computer, every so often I’ll find houses for sale that have the exact same floor plan, literally the exact same [crosstalk 00:23:51]-
Jay Osborne:
That sounds fun.
Paige:
… floor plan. A very basic, very popular around here, but I’ve never been able to find a printed reference of what that floor plan was. No build drawings, no dimensions, no nothing. And it’s almost like that kind of style was just something everybody knew. It’s like, oh, you’re going to build a basic house, this is just how you build it. But because we’re a hundred years on from that, all of that knowledge is gone. So this project that you did kind of reinjected that knowledge back into the world of building.
Jay Osborne:
Right. And I think the world of building needs that kind of knowledge.
Paige:
Oh, yes.
Jay Osborne:
Only to know where it came from. It’s not that people need to build traditional houses, but we should understand our past and how we got to where we are, otherwise, do we know where we’re going?
Paige:
Right.
Jay Osborne:
And I think a lot of people will want a traditional house, but it’s not necessary that they actually… They don’t need to build everywhere. So I respect other kinds of styles, but I just wish people would do things well, whatever they do, I want them to do it well. So I wanted to show them a set of plans that are just done well and use that as a basis of comparison so that if you hire an architect where you buy a set of plans from somebody, you know if it’s any good. Because there are a lot of architects, going to make somebody angry. But there are a lot of architects that don’t know what they’re doing. And there are a lot of plan sellers that are… Really they’re cheating you. And I want to provide my book as a basis of comparison so that you are empowered to know what it is that you should be getting from a set of house plans.
Paige:
Amazing. Absolutely amazing. I don’t know if we could end on a better note than that. That’s pretty much it right there[crosstalk 00:25:35]. So this was absolutely fantastic. Tell everyone where they can find you and your project.
Jay Osborne:
Right. So you can download all the open source files at freefarmhouse.com. You can even get some renderings from there. You can get a lot of goodies from freefarmhouse.com. You don’t need my permission, just download them, have fun. And then you can find me on a more personal and more regular basis on Instagram where I share new updates and explain the next projects that are coming up.
Paige:
Yes. And he hinted a little bit in the last episode that there are more projects in the works. So as soon as I have more information about that, you will hear it either here or you’ll hear it on my Instagram, anywhere that I can put it, because this is a great, great thing for the world of architecture and for the world of building houses. So thank you so much for talking. I’ve loved [crosstalk 00:26:26] having you. This was fantastic.
Jay Osborne:
Likewise.
Paige:
And maybe we’ll talk again.
Jay Osborne:
All right. I hope so.
Paige:
All right. Okay. So that was our second interview with Jay Osborne. That was absolutely fantastic. All of the resources for everything that he talked about, his farmhouse plans, everything will be down in the show notes, make sure you check it out because it blew me away when I saw it. And I know a lot of people after he mentioned his Kickstarter have the same reaction. So I think you’ll really find something special with that. Thank you so much for listening, I loved having you and I will see you next time. Bye.