KatrinaCottages.com sells Katrina Cottage plans, but it also does more. Katrina Cottages look great, but there is more to them than meets the eye. These tools explain the ideas and features that might not be obvious at first glance. The first Katrina Tools page describes the Most-Loved Places, which are the places in every region that have been valued the highest and loved the longest. We must re-build the Gulf Coast to the standard of the Most-Loved Places, otherwise there will always be a great sorrow over losing something great and replacing it with something less. Historical traditions include buildings that were built by our ancestors and that can be found in history books. Living Traditions are the things that are most worthy of love; we can all participate in them today. Traditions usually come to life as a result of necessity, like today's necessity of rebuilding tens of thousands of homes and businesses on the Gulf Coast. You may be one of thousands that help make this happen by learning how to Do It Yourself. Others may choose other ways of rebuilding, such as buying a factory-built home or a kit house. But factories work best when they stamp out thousands of identical products. So how do you get the Natural Variety that always occurs in great places? This page tells you how. The Plans section describes the types of Katrina Cottage, but there are also Cottage Variations that can be applied to many of the units. One of the most important variations is the Kernel House, which can begin as a very small Kernel Cottage and expand to a much larger house. One of the biggest new ideas on how we can build great new traditional neighborhoods is the Transect, which is a set of rules that tell you how to build differently in more rural or more urban places. One of the ways you can build differently is to vary the Style as you move further into the city or the countryside. But regardless of how rural or how urban your lot is, don't forget to use buildings, fences, and landscaping to enclose Positive Outdoor Space in order to create outdoor rooms like our ancestors once had. Porches connect the outdoor rooms to the indoor ones, and are very important in the Gulf Coast climate. This page tells you precisely how to locate them and protect them so that they will be lived in so they become more than just front yard decoration. The principles and details above help Katrina Cottages live bigger by connecting them properly to their surroundings, but a Katrina Cottage should be more than just a shrunken-down version of a larger house. In order to really live big, Katrina Cottages must be smarter as well as smaller. Space-Saving Tips includes a growing list of really clever ways to do so. This website began as the Katrina Renewal Tools section of the Guild Foundation's Tool Foundry, where you will find not only many of the Katrina Renewal Tools found here, but also other useful architecture and town planning tools.