videos of 12 teeny tiny houses

[paul wheaton]

There is a huge movement for this. And the perks are easy to get your head wrapped around: no mortgage, tiny expenses, tiny housekeeping .... if it is a fit for you, you can retire ten times earlier.

Some of these it is a bit like living in a piece of art.

Some of these are so easy, you don't have to be a carpenter to build them.

http://www.makeitmissoula.com/2011/07/the-small-house-movement/

 

[rebecca100]

Wow that's amazing! The funny thing is dh and I were discussing yesterday putting 2 12 by 36 Derkster buildings out on our place that got hit by the tornado and fixing them up into a house. It is between those or an old mobile home. I have seen a single Derkster building used as a home for 3 people. Not sure which we will do yet.

 

[Leta]

Tiny houses are the way to go.

My DH and his mom built a cabin on the back of the 40 acre farm he grew up on. They used landscape timbers. (It's a sod farm, so they had a good, cheap source of landscape timbers through their business connections.) A couple years later, they added a kitchen that was half again as big as the original cabin. Altogether, it's about 300 square feet, plus a 100ish square foot sleeping loft. Two people could live in it no problem. After the electricity was installed (just a grid line run out from the barn, they wired the cabin with conduit), it ended up costing about $5000. They windows, doors, roof, fridge, dry sink, lights, fan, wood stove and propane heater were all bought new.

I think the trick for making this work for a family is to begin with three structures- a cooking/eating/food storage cabin, and a laundry/bathing/utility/clothes& stuff storage cabin- if you did this right, you wouldn't need a dryer. You'd need a solarium and/or deep porch roof for line drying clothes inside during cold weather.
And then, for parents and young children, a living area/sleeping cabin with a composting toilet and a single sink. As children got older (for example, my stepson will live at home with us until he finishes college), you could build another living/sleeping cabin for marginal expense, especially if hooked up to the same radically simplified plumbing and with it's own solar 12v electric system. I mean, what do you use in your bedroom for electricity? You'd need to be able to charge a cell phone and probably a computer, and keep on some lights and a fan. One or two people wouldn't need a TV if they had a laptop. I'd want an MP3 player, too, and some surround sound. That would use 50kWh per month or less, which would be super cheap to do solar-wise. If you were willing to have chest fridges/freezers in your kitchen cabin, and manual everything else, you could use 12v solar electricity there, too. The only place you might need regular grid electric would be in the bathing/laundry cabin.

The advantage to doing a tiny cluster of homes rather than a single big one would mean it would be easier to avoid building codes (especially as they pertain to plumbing), you'd pay less in property taxes, young children would have greater intimacy with parents and older children would have greater autonomy and privacy, you'd be less likely to take on a big chunk of debt and more likely to build as you could afford, you'd (probably) have greater southern exposure for passive heat and solar electric, and you'd keep utility costs low over all, since you'd be much less likely to heat structures you weren't using.