The Backyard Farmhouse – Free Open Source ADU Plans in Three Sizes

Jay Osborne, www.freefarmhouse.com, has designed an ADU Small Farmhouse with three sizes and dozens of variations.

The three sizes start at 16×24 with 646 square feet, a little larger 16×28 with 749 square feet, and the largest 16×32 with 857 square feet, all with potential for rear or side additions.  There is also a very small Tiny Farmhouse that is under than 500 square feet.

The Backyard Farmhouse is a “little house—about as small as you can get with 2 bedrooms and 2 floors.”*

There are a lot of variations possible. Choose different porch orientations.

You can build the small farmhouse with a bedroom suite or add one later. The plans are designed to be easy to enlarge with additions. It can be built using various materials.

Any of the Backyard Farmhouse plans can be built on a slab, a crawlspace and footers, or with a basement garage.

And, like Jay Osborne’s other designs, the plans are free and open-source.

The Backyard Farmhouse will come in 3 different sizes (for its primary massing). Additions can be added later, but these options let you fit this house where you need it.

Any of my designs can be expanded by 2 feet. Yet if you expand any outside dimension by more than 4 feet, it may require major changes to the structure and room layout, as well as the ceiling height and other related proportions.

It’s always tempting to expand a house, adding new features. Yet you should be wary of Feature Creep– because additional functions can create escalating costs and long-term responsibilities. Also, widening a house can make it look saggy and modern. Old houses are more upright than modern houses.

The Backyard Farmhouse can be build as an ADU, an Accessory Dwelling Unit or Granny Flat.

This is the smallest floor plan, Free 16×24 Open Source Backyard Farmhouse ADU Plans. The footprint is 24-feet wide and 16-feet deep before the porch.

*All quotes unless otherwise stated are from the designer Jay Osborne cited from instagram.com/freefarmhouse/