The one I saw that the architecture school erected on the McGill campus was 14’ wide (and thus woud violate code) and maybe twice that deep, so just under 400 sq.ft. But it had an unfinished second floor that could be used to store all your guitars or, if your family grows, you could finish it.
My house, 1300 sq.ft. in which we raised three children, seems quite adequate to me. Now the two of us rattle around in it and we are looking for a small apartment. I don’t understand why the average house is twice that size.
Locally, there was an attempt to build a tiny house. This one, as with others mentioned above, ended up being prohibitively expensive. They were shooting for a cost of $100,000 and ended up over $190,000. This article goes into some detail on it. You’d probably have better results in a less urban setting.
When my relative was in nursing school in NYC around 1950, she and two others shared a single bed in a room in an appartment. Shift workers, and they slept head-to-tail when neccessary.
I lived in a 10’ x 30’ mobile home for a while. It had a bedroom, full bath, and living/kitchen area. The fact that it had a deck and was on a lake helped. It was fine for a guy as his first place on his own.
The marketing of minimalist crap — just like all minimalist shit — is purposed to condition the masses to the return to the conditions of their peasant ancestors, and like it.
Back in the early middle ages the houses of the majority were made of wood, and could be lifted from place to place. An ignoble divesting of possessions, whether for religious or any other ‘purity’’ disallows art and rich diversity and reduces us to the level of the Shakers.
Quite possibly Capital no longer needs mass markets to grow and can get by with those toilers allowed to exist living in cupboards whilst the 0.1% generate the wealth needed to maintain their own heavy hedonistic materialism.
Codes are very specific to the region and exact location. Almost Anything can be in violation of codes once you start getting into land covenants etc. Most codes are based on sound reasoning; some are outdated though.
HGTV has added Tiny House Hunters to its House Hunters series. The episode I watched yesterday showed a couple and their 4 children (2 of them teenagers), who moved from their 2,600 Sq Ft home in Santa Clarita, CA to a 500 Sq Ft home in Corning, NY. They have to be completely nuts. The place had 1 tiny bedroom and 1 tiny bathroom.
True, it’s not as small as some of the tiny houses, but for 6 people? I can’t imagine how that would work.
I think I’d be perfectly happy with one if I were single and in a warm climate.
I’m not much of a homebody, and I spend 80% of my time at home either in bed or on the couch. Left to my own preferences, I tend to go to public places (gyms, parks, restaurants, etc.) when I want to do something besides lounge around.
With that in mind, I don’t see any real advantage to a tiny house over a cheap apartment or a rented room. I don’t get any particular thrill from ownership, and I doubt these hold much value.
Until my mother married, she lived in a house with 1 front room, 1 kitchen, and 1 bedroom. I think at some point they got an indoor toilet to replace the “little house” at the back of the lot. She had 9 siblings. The parents slept in the bedroom, the girls in the kitchen, the boys in the front room. Granted, when the older boys went off to WWII things got a bit roomier, but not much by modern standards.
Until I was 4, my family of 6 lived in a house with two bedrooms. Four kids in one, parents in the other, 1 bathroom. We made it work. I think one of the reasons we moved to West Virginia was to get a bigger house - but nine months later we went back to St. Louis so I guess more space wasn’t enough to overcome some of the negatives in Morgantown.
Yes, you can make it work to have 6 people sharing 1 bathroom. You have to be organized, take turns, learn to share, and not dawdle in the bathroom.
Right now it’s me and my spouse in 1100 square feet, which suits us fine. Could we make do with less? Yes - and we have. It’s possible. For most of history people lived in smaller houses with more people in them.
Over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that they are a good option for a relatively small section of the housing sector.
For me, and from what I can tell, there is a significantly higher representation of people like me in the Th movement than the general population, I want to buy a house on a small plot of land so I can have enough room for raising a few chickens, tilapia etc.
The cheapest way, with the fewest long term costs (by far) is a with a solar powered tiny house. Unless anyone asks, I wouldn’t go into the calculations and thought process here. The reason it would work for me is due to my particular financial circumstances and location - so the advantages I would get from a tiny house would probably only apply to a small minority of the general population.
I talk to people who think tiny houses are “oh so cute” etc., I usually tell them they are probably better off just renting.
Buying a plot of land for a tiny house would be expensive in an urban area–where you get those gyms, parks, restaurants, etc. So, yeah, an apartment would work better.
If someone wants to live out where land is cheaper, a tiny house would appear less lower class than a trailer. And there would be the option of expansion or outbuildings. No sharing that tiny house with chickens!
It is a little more complicated than that - at least here in DC. There are various pieces of land that are fairly cheap because they are “unbuildable,” but they would be fine for a TH. If it were legal, all these tiny plots of land would be bought and filled with tiny homes in a year.
It doesn’t really help with affordability for all in the long run though; the change in zoning would cause the price of these currently useless pieces of land to shoot up . . .
If you are going to use solar panels for power and be off grid, you are going to have to have storage batteries. These are large, heavy and expensive. Furthermore, the charge in these batteries has to be maintained at a high level or they will degrade and become useless. So if there wasn’t enough sunlight one day, you’re going to have to charge them up with a noisy, expensive generator.
In other words, the process of using solar power is not as easy as one might think.
Certainly, there is way more to it and many more things to consider than what my brief description would indicate. Going into the nitty gritty about the details of all the systems of a tiny home would be outside the scope of this thread and probably not very interesting for most people.
And as I said previously, I do not see it as the best option for most people; but a good one for a few.
Not quite. My spouse and I have investigated solar power, both for daily needs and as an emergency backup. What you need are deep cycle batteries. Like solar panels, there is an upfront cost there but such batteries, if properly set up, are not like car batteries. They can be deeply discharged and recharged, and do not require daily charging even when in use.
Of course, if you cheap out and use vehicle batteries you’re going to get a cheap, unreliable system. Put a little more money upfront you get something that works better.
I’ve never tried “1 tiny bedroom”, but, like the other poster, “1 tiny bathroom” worked ok for 6.
In the pictures and discussion I’ve seen of large families in small houses, they lived a lot of their lives outside the house. Even in my own wealthy inner-city neighbourhood, the residents remembered that their parents used to spend evenings on the front porch, greating everyone who walked by. And the kids of course played barefoot in the street.
What makes them so expensive? I did the math on one we saw in an episode on HGTV and it worked out to $250/square foot. That’s twice the average cost per square foot of a real house in this town, and our housing costs are considerably higher than the national average of $84/square foot.