I had originally intended to do posts on each Live Home 3D project we created in the chronological order that we created them, but I was talking about this project to a client today and so I thought I’d go ahead and post this one now. This house was designed as a vacation house on a mythical lake in the mountains so you can go water skiing in the summer and snow skiing in the winter.

There are a few elements that were inspired by the cabin at Bass Lake that my Uncle Dave built for him and Aunt Betty. We spent many a summer at that cabin and it’s where I learned to water ski. The pool table upstairs is a definite homage to their cabin, which was a three story A-frame. Up on the third floor loft there was a pool table and more than once an errant pool ball was shot off the table, where it would roll over to the edge of the loft and drop down onto unsuspecting people sitting below. Seems like it would have been prudent to at least install a little bumper at the edge of the loft but I guess they liked living dangerously.

Both houses that Lori and I have owned have had detached garages, so I guess that just seems normal now. But I also have never liked having the house dominated by a garage in front, and a little shed garage seemed appropriate for a cabin.

Inside the garage there’s room to park a car, do the laundry, and store the wintertime toys. For the summer, there’s a dual purpose motorcycle and a pair of mountain bikes to explore the forest.

Entering the house we find the living room with comfortable fireside seating. Of course the cat’s get a nice house too.
Lori was determined to have a log cabin. Live Home 3D doesn’t have a built-in tool for creating log construction, so I had to build the walls normally, and then create and lay the logs individually. Fortunately, in the program’s virtual world, two objects can take up the same space so the program’s walls got buried in the middle of my log wall.

With an open floor plan, the dining room sits between the living room and kitchen. Looks like we’ll be enjoying donuts and crescents this morning.

The small kitchen has a wood burning cookstove, and a hoosier cabinet to give it that old timey feel.

Great conversations can be had with the cook while sitting at the counter.

The bed is the only piece of furniture I have modeled, and it is a fairly good representation of our real bed. Live Home 3D isn’t meant to be used for designing furniture, but I have been able to use it to construct built-in cabinets. SketchUp is a much better program for designing contents, but for most items we found we could just go shopping at the 3D Warehouse, a contributed library of models that SketchUp provides.

Live Home 3D allows you to import photos to be put into frames and hung on the wall. A great feature when you’re a photographer and you want to decorate your dream houses with your own artwork. 

The cuckoo clock is an homage to Grandma and Grandpa Key’s home where their cuckoo clock was a fond childhood memory.

Now that we’ve seen the main floor, let’s go check out the basement. Since the house sits on a hillside, the basement can be reached either from the circular staircase, or the exterior door under the deck. That provides easy access to the woodpile with the wheelbarrow.

In the winter there is always the possibility that you could get snowed in, so the pantry includes a good supply of coffee, donuts, and other life essentials.

One of the main purposes of the basement is to have a place where the kids (assuming our guests have kids) could watch movies, play games and do other activities while not bothering the adults. So they get their own media area with a PlayStation, puzzles to work on, ping pong, air hockey, and even an indoor archery range that is lined with hay bales so hopefully they don’t kill anyone.

Finally, there’s a small workshop area to store tools and work on the inevitable Mr. Fix-it projects.

Going back upstairs, we take one more round up the circular stairway to the loft level. Here we find two sleeping lofts, and the aforementioned pool table. Both sleeping lofts have fold up futons that provide sitting areas during the day. Built in storage makes use of the otherwise wasted space.

With the tour of the cabin complete, let’s go check out what we have outdoor. A large deck wraps around the east, south and west sides of the house.

On the east side of the house there is a BBQ station. Both the kitchen and dining room windows have pass-throughs with a shelf to make it easy to pass food and dishes back and forth.

Next to the BBQ is a fire pit with seating, and an umbrella table for outdoor dining. In the southeast corner you’ll find a hot tub for soaking those wearing muscles after a day of water skiing, or getting warmed up after a day on the slopes.

The south side of the deck looks out over the lake, and provides some nice Adirondack chairs for watching those beautiful sunsets. One really cool feature of Live Home 3D is you can place the house anywhere in the world, and pick the time of day, and the weather, and it will create the right lighting. I built a model of our real house and picked the date and time of day when I was working on it and the shadows were remarkably accurate.

In this view you can also see that our cabin has solar arrays on the roof to help prevent global warming so there’s a decent snowpack for winter sports.

On the west side of the deck, there is a ramp that goes down to the swim platform and dock. The swim platform was another nod to my uncle’s cabin, although at Bass Lake it took some swimming to get out to it.

Moored at the dock we have a rowboat, canoe, a pair of personal watercrafts, and of course a motorboat for water skiing. Being that this is one of our dreamhouses, there’s also a float plane we can use when we don’t feel like driving to the cabin, or just to take guest sightseeing over the lovely mountains and lake.

Live Home 3D can also generate walk-thru videos. Here is the walk-thru for our lakeside cabin.