Anyone build a small cabin with no basement?

[Angelfire]

Mine was built with a crawl space. It was the bare minimum given the 48" (if I recall correctly) frost line. When I took over as owner, the first thing I did was modify the plumbing to allow for a quick drain of the entire house. The only heat source it had was a little wall hung propane unit or electric baseboards (very expensive to run) so the next item I did was a forced air furnace. I do have a Nest on it (which doesn't work worth a **** most of the time) and we have frequent power cuts up there so draining the system has been important. I normally leave the furnace set to 40F when not there during the winter and given we'll see -50F on occasion, I sleep better knowing there's no water in the house. I did insulate the perimeter block walls and that helped quite a bit with retaining heat. I live in a house with no crawl space/basement....I hate it. Trying to run any new wiring/utilities is a real pain (No attic either) so anything I build in the future would definitely have at least a crawl space but for the price of going a few more feet down, a basement would definitely be serious considered.
Cheers.

 

[frankd]

We built a similar type structure in upstate New York about 30 years ago. It started off as a small hunting cabin (20x30) but over the years it's been extended, dormered, etc.
The house was originally built on concrete piers for 2 reasons; the first was to save money on the build. The second was because we were told (incorrectly) that the taxes would be lower as the structure would be taxed a a mobile home rather than a regular home.
In our experience, building on piers was a mistake. We had a ton of issues with moisture under the home which caused the framing under to home to start to rot.
About 10 years ago we had a basement built under the house. As you can imagine, it was not cheap (maybe around $40k).

 

[eljay]

Subscribing for interest as my wife and I have casually talked about a small oceanside summer cottage for a just a few nights a year. Those plans quickly vanished into "maybe in the future" category when we realized we'd need a well and septic field, so the site and engineering prep work would cost more than the cottage.

 

[firebirdparts]

My ancestors built a lot of them, logs and one room. The framing won't cost much. You don't really need a foundation, at least we didn't around here. Your biggest issue with that is going to be the cold weather and plumbing. You could certainly manage that with something simple, like bringing all your plumbing up and down through a small "valve house" sort of a box under the cabin. Back in the good old days we just used a single 100 watt light bulb to keep things from freezing. Cost about 10 cents and provided a very consistent output. You could also make it easy to winterize, but I don't see how you can protect the wellhead above the frost line. If you have no check valve down the well then you could.

 

[Bretny]

What if you had a heavily insulated slab floor with hydronic heat and a thermostat to keep the place at 35-40 degrees? Would that work?

The problem with in slab heat on a weekend/vacation home is it may take days to get the floor warm. With something like a wifi thermostat you may be able to to turn the temp up prior to getting there. It's still a huge amount of mass to heat for 2 days.

Alot of cabins are built up on piers and have skirting and or under floor insulation. Not having a basement isnt a big deal. After all a basement is just a concrete hole in the ground without insulation. It's not going to keep things from freezing.

If you have electric you can use a space heater or heat tape or even just make the water easy to drain. No water would mean even durring a power outage you wouldnt have issues.

We are starting to build a 32x20ft cabin this fall. No winter acess but are building it for 4 seasons and will snowshoe in in the winter, it's on a seasonal road.

 

[Bolson32]

I was at a cabin a month or so ago that was built on a slab. Concrete stamped floor, insulated and heated. The owner's weren't there so I couldn't talk to them about it but I love that idea personally.

I've owned 3 houses in MN and WI now, and I've had water problems with all of them. At best I'd do a crawlspace but if we ever build a cabin I think I'll probably try and do it on a frost protected shallow foundation slab. I hate basements.