Low Poly Cottage

Rough Walkthrough

New scene, start with default cube.
Resize and extrude top to create a house shape.
Add two horizontal and vertical loopcuts.
Create the roof by duplicating then separating the corresponding faces.
Pull it out just above, adjust the outer edges so they go further than the base and apply a mirror for the other side.
Duplicate the entire setup to create a second floor.
Add solidify to the roof (Offset 0) and apply it.
Move things into place and move vertices around to break rigidity and create character.
Apply mirror modifiers on parts that need to be asymmetrical.
Add beams to connect the different parts of the building together.
Loop cut the beams and set them in line with the lines of the building.
Use mirror modifiers, apply if individual editing is required, leave in place where mirroring is enough to properly show on all sides.
Use knife tool to create cuts for windows and doors.
This step creates n-gons. They can be kept if they are flat faces, or cut down to quads and triangles.
Different faces can also be made flat by scaling to 0 along the perpendicular axis then rotating the flattened face back into position.
Duplicate loops of windows and doors and move out slightly.
Scale inwards, extrude then scale outwards, rectify geometry and/or normals if needed and solidify to create window frames and doors.
Add another level of detail with small beams inside the windows and details such as door frames and door knobs.
Create a pipe with a low poly cylinder (16 sides).
Extrude upwards with top face selected and CTRL + RIGHT CLICK in a sort of wobbly path. Bevel some joints and extrude along normals.
Correct any distortion manually by selecting edge loops and rotating them back to fit. Dissolve half the edge loops to bring cylinder down to 8 for a more chiseled look.
Create lamps easily with a cube, loop cut and scale out the center loop and in the top and bottom.
Inset all faces with I twice to target individual faces, then extrude and scale down along normals to create the cut-out for the inside.
5 sided cylinders work very well for low poly ropes that are fairly thin and not very visible.