16×20 A-Frame Cabin Plans

About This Design

Sixteen feet is the threshold. Below it a roof-to-deck A-frame cannot fit a door beside the post that carries its ridge, and the floor pinches to a corridor before it reaches standing height. At sixteen it works — barely, but genuinely — which makes this the smallest true classic in the catalog and the cheapest way to build the shape everybody actually pictures.

The numbers behind that: the roof planes leave about eight and a half feet of floor at six-foot-eight of headroom, and the entry door sits a little over two feet off the centreline, 32 inches wide and 76 inches tall — the tallest the rake will take once its header is deducted. Both are tight on purpose. Push the width down another foot and neither works.

There is no loft here. Three hundred and twenty square feet on one level, an uninterrupted A from deck to peak, and nothing above you but the ridge.

Key Features

• True roof-to-deck A-frame — no knee walls, no side walls
• The smallest width that fits a door beside the ridge post
• 32×76 entry door — the tallest the rake allows at 16 ft
• 320 sq ft on a single open level
• About 8½ ft of floor at full standing headroom
• Ridge beam carried to bearing by a post at each gable end
• Full rafter, ridge, post and bearing framing in the drawings

Build Notes

Read the load path before you cut anything, because it is not the one most A-frame articles describe. A bolted heel joint cannot make its required end distance in a tie this shallow, so these plans do NOT rely on the floor frame acting as a rafter tie. The rafters land on an engineered structural ridge beam, and that beam delivers its load through a built-up post at each gable end to bearing below.

That beam is the part a professional has to size. The drawings model the whole path — post, connectors, and the transfer beam or slab pad under it — and carry a stated end reaction, but the engine does not size the beam or check the post. Take those numbers into the review.

Build the deck dead square first: the rafters reference off it directly and there is no top plate to correct an error with. Set the beam and its posts, then bring the rafter pairs up from both gable ends toward the middle.

Best For

A one-room cabin where the roof is the architecture — a weekend place, a studio, a guest cabin at the back of a lot. Three hundred and twenty square feet is enough for a bed at one end, a stove and a small kitchen at the other, and the full height of the ridge overhead in between. It is also the size that still fits on a modest lot and inside a modest budget while reading unmistakably as an A-frame from the road.