hi there welcome to my channel where we feature unique home tours of all sizes sometimes the
homes are tiny sometimes the homes are quirky and sometimes they're all together jaw dropping
if you're a subscriber you might remember when a few weeks ago we featured a family
who built a luxury home inside of a cave well this week we're traveling back to
Ohio to feature that same family but this time we're going to show you their gorgeous
A-frame cabin now this A-frame might be the most beautiful A-frame that I've ever seen
and I think you're going to agree once you step inside and see that there's actually
three different levels to this cabin and my favorite happens to be the level at the very
top so make sure that you stay tuned all the way through this tour so that you don't miss
it and if you like videos like this one where we show you unique tours make sure that you
subscribe and hit that notification Bell so that you know every single time we publish a new video
hi I'm Bryant and I'm Amy welcome to the Dunlap Holo A-frame
we wanted to buy a property outside of the city a place to go and Escape
I'm a builder that's what I love we have just always been drawn to A-frames it didn't take long
for us to decide like what type of build we were going to do first we just love the Simplicity of
an A-frame and how well it fits in with a natural environment we decided how wide we want it to be
which the interior space is 24 feet wide we knew like the pitch we wanted and that gave us a floor
to Peak interior of 30 feet and so that's like perfect for three stories what we really tried
to prioritize was just that felt really warm and cozy I think in a way we just designed what what
feels so special to us we love stargazing we love lying in bed and just being cozy and lazy
process took about eight months a month we spent about 170 000 on materials That's not including
labor we did almost all the work ourselves I think if we had had it hired out we'd probably
be spending around 400 000 probably the A-frame initially was a getaway for us from the city and
then now we have our own website even that folks can book from it's a lot of fun to see just all
the different people that book the A-frame for bachelorette parties and birthday parties and
family reunions and the patio opens up wide and you can stuff a lot of people in this build and
so it's just been fun to see ways that it's brought families together and friends together
and I think we especially love how folks from the City come out here to enjoy nature [Music] as you
can see it looks pretty tall from the front and that's because it is from where you stand at the
bottom to the the peak is about 45 feet tall in order to construct that we had a telehandler on
site the whole time that helped us carry Building Supplies way up there unfortunately our grade is
so steep that in a lot of places the telehandler couldn't even operate at all so we had to do a lot
of scaffolding things were done manually for a large extent of the build so as you can see
we love triangles we think they're a really cool shape and actually from an engineering standpoint
it's also like a great shape to work with because it's the strongest shape so we were able to do
this whole window facade with very little framing in between everything is very strong without a
lot of Lumber in there when we first started designing the A-frame we looked at a lot of
different examples of A-frames and we really loved the ones with the really steep sides which is what
you see here we were really going for a like a modern Scandinavian look we wanted to add a
lot of natural elements you can see all the cedar siding to help it fit in with the environment let
me show you the deck patio area and then I'll take you inside [Music] this is our outdoor patio space
what I'd really like to point out is that we have on-site trails that guests have private
access to even hear from the deck there's some pretty impressive Clips over here actually
right here behind the A-frame if you follow this Trail around there is a really cool big
cave back there and there's also an 80-foot waterfall that's only like a three minute
walk from here so it's pretty cool that guests can go out explore their immediate surroundings
you can see we have some sliding doors here that can allow guests to enjoy the
outside while they're inside [Music] let me take you inside and show you around [Music]
all right well the first thing you'll notice when you walk in is this big table this is a big white
oak table we can see it up to 10 people around this this A-frame can sleep 10 people so we're
like we should probably be able to seat 10 people as well one of my favorite pieces here at the
A-frame is this painting it was actually painted by my father he's a professional impressionist
oil painter and this is A View From The Overlook which you can hike to he actually helped a lot
with this build he was here with me probably I would say half the time I was building here
he was helping and everything I've learned he taught me so important figure in my life
back this hallway we have our first level bedroom and a bathroom as well
[Music] and we have a laundry area we actually have three more
bedrooms and a bathroom up in the top two levels
we have 12 feet wide of view out of the kitchen which was important to us to
have lots of natural light one thing to note about these skylights since the pitch of our
roof is so steep it's actually steeper than the Skylight manufacturer allows for their skylights
and probably any Skylight manufacturer would allow and so to prevent leaking when we have
a really hard rain we actually had to build a custom flashing that goes over it and actually
we didn't know that initially so for the first month or so after this was built we
were getting leaking here it dripped right down into the kitchen sink and we were like
we gotta deal with this so we we built a custom flashing and we've never had any problems since
I'd also like to highlight our locally roasted coffee from Florin these are friends of ours from
Columbus Ohio it's great coffee as you walk into the living room the first thing you'll notice is
you know this giant wall of Windows a beautiful view of the forest from floor to ceiling so one
thing you may wonder is you know how much do you spend on glass in this build we have 44 windows
and doors that's a lot of glass I think our total expenses for all the skylights windows and doors
was less than 50k I remember at work I would draw just like a blank triangle on a piece of napkin
and then I would like fill in the triangle with different shapes and try to see what would look
good to me and I think that one day I drew those triangles on there and I remember texting it to
Amy and she was like yeah that's really good and um that's kind of how the design came to be
so the suspended fireplace while it is fun to use has tended to be a bit Smoky and I would probably
discourage anyone who's getting a suspended fireplace from doing that unless you have done
research on that specific model and know that it does not smoke in order to take care of that issue
we actually had to install a draft fan if the power goes out or something the draft fan doesn't
work so not an ideal situation One Design element we decided to incorporate here is to cut out a
circle in the wood floor and add tile here just a non-combustible layer underneath the fireplace
we liked how we incorporated a circle to match our fireplace in this triangular home as you walk over
here you can see the main stair going up at the second level stairs take up space and especially
in an A-frame where the walls just come in it can be tricky to figure out a way to build a Stairway
without taking up a lot of space And so there's a lot of geometry that goes into this because the
stair actually starts far back in this corner and then it follows the angle of the roof as you walk
up this stairway actually was custom built we did these posts in the cable railing ourselves [Music]
so here in the hallway we have a mural with John Muir quote that we found inspiring
on this level we have two bedrooms one of which has its own private balcony [Music]
we also have a bathroom [Music] but the bedroom that everyone loves the most is up on the third
level my wife really wanted us to have an actual stairway but unfortunately we didn't have space
so we built this ladder stair it's also custom steel with white oak Treads we did the alternating
Treads and we have handrails to make it a lot easier to get up all right well welcome to the
third level of the A-frame the first thing you'll see as you walk up is these little beds that fold
out of the walls since our walls are 12 inches thick we're able to recess areas for these Murphy
Beds and we can actually put like a normal uh twin size mattress on here they're actually
pretty comfortable to sleep on believe it or not so this is everyone's favorite bedroom and I think
you can probably see why from the bed itself you have really 360 degree views in all directions
and you're lying down so you're you're looking Upward at the sky at the trees at the Rock cliffs
a lot of questions we get from folks are how are you able to heat and cool your third level
efficiently so what we did was we just ran ductwork central heating just like we would
anywhere else but we ran two different registers up to this third level and we have a main air
return on one side of the area and we have the registers on the other side of the areas anytime
the furnace is running or the air conditioning is running we're getting flow of air through the area
ensuring that we're we're getting conditioned air in this space in the winter we end up being
about three to four degrees warmer in this area so it's a little warmer but it's not too bad
my favorite part is waking up to you know seeing the sunrise over the Cliffs at night
you can look up and see stars even though we're in the woods it's clear enough that
if you look up you can see stars so it actually feels like you're in a tree house with Windows
all around feels like you're you know really in the canopy you might forget that this is a
big A-frame and it seems more like a intimate space up here much like a tiny home actually
for the sunken bed we decided to go with that because we wanted to maximize the amount of
window space we could get up here which means the windows have to come down to the ground in
doing so if we had a bed at normal height there wouldn't be space to walk around the bed and so
we decided let's just make the bed level with the floor and people can just walk over it [Music]
I think we learned something about ourselves as we were building at least this A-frame and that
is that like we just we really just wanted to do the best we could we just wanted to be really
special for people after the A-frame was finished and we saw that it was doing really well I think
that gave us the Boost of confidence we needed to start the cave we now rent out the cave as well
and so we love being able to host as many guests as possible at the cave and at the A-frame [Music]
thanks for watching this week's video I hope you guys enjoyed it if you'd also like to see
a tour of the luxury cave home built by this family make sure you check out the
links in the description and I will see you soon with another unique home tour [Music]