This just brought to mind some of the tiny-ass dorm rooms we had at college. I was actually in a weird circumstance where I had an unusually large room all to myself (maybe like 15’x15’ or more) so my experience wasn’t too cramped, and I was only there a year.
But I had a good friend who lived on campus for 4 years, always in a dorm, and the room sizes were just nuts. When he had a roommate the room had enough room for lofts on either side, with desks underneath and a couch by the door. When he had a single, the room size was half that. Loft bed over a couch, across from a desk. End of.
Granted, you didn’t have a bathroom or a kitchen in your dorm room like you’d want in a home, but most people did have a fridge and maybe an illegal microwave.
Anyway, I wonder what the dorm room experience was like (or if it existed) for people who decide to go the tiny house router. Are they ok with it because they’ve lived it for 4 years? Or are they ok with it because they’ve not had to deal with it yet?
Yes, I remember having a room the width of the length of my bed. But I was happy to be in a single and didn’t care too much. Now I used to having extra space for my TV area and crafting set-up and a tiny house would be tough.
They haven’t caught on in the UK, really, not even as a TV show concept. There’s probably an American show on some cable channel but there’s no British version.
The reason is a lot of these “tiny homes” are bigger than the average UK home, especially per person, so living in that amount of space is about as impressive as putting your socks on. And they tend to look like holiday chalets rather than real homes that will keep out the cold and damp (or, in hot places, the heat and humidity) so they’ll have to spend more on heating/air con. It’s rare for them to have a second storey other than a mezzanine level, so they’re not just small but unnecessarily small. Then they are unlikely to outlast their owner due to their construction materials. All in all they’re a pretty wasteful way of using land, really, which is ironic given their aim.
I was involved in a non-profit tiny house organization for a little while, this concept was lost on a lot of people. Along with a lot of other concepts that were lost on a lot of people. I gave up after a while. I still support the movement, but there are a mountain of issues to deal with. I don’t like dealing with issues, so a mountain of issues was way more than i could handle. I’ll never really amount to much in life because of this, but I’m OK with that. I met some really nice well-meaning people though - I don’t want to neglect to mention that.
That’s the upside, too, though. They’re cheap used, and they’re actually designed to be light and flexible enough to haul around. We got a 32’ 5th wheel recently for $3500. It needed some work, but not all that much. It’s 350 sf inside, and we’re going to live in it while building our next, normal-sized house.
It would be even easier to build a couple of sheds out of 2x4s, assuming you want it to be watertight, insulated, and have electricity and plumbing.
I interviewed an architect who’s a Tiny House advocate, who lives in an Airstream trailer, arguably a form of a Tiny House. He said that careful design helped them feel more spacious and organized. An ordinary RV feels like a trap.
He also told me that it took him a few years to downsize enough to fit his essentials into the Airstream.
I don’t think Tiny Houses are a terrible thing, they’re an experiment. Might be OK for people buying a modest plot of land, and they want to fit several groups of independent adults onto it. The main obstacle here is local zoning laws.
Tiny Houses don’t make as much sense in cities, although there’s a companion concept called a Tiny Apartment where you have a small footprint and maybe shared amenities like a kitchen and bathroom.
Yeah a lot of adults say “No way!” but they can work, especially if living near your job is otherwise totally unaffordable.
I don’t anticipate ever partaking in this “tiny house” craze, but I think I understand how I feel about them through a game.
In Fallout 4, you build settlements – small communities operated by non-player characters (AI people) to perform functions like farming and security. You build them buildings for all the things they need, including living quarters.
I feel as guilty as hell when I put together something like a shotgun shack and slap some amenities in there. “These are people,” I says to myself, “they really deserve a little more elbow room. Even if I furnish this shipping container super nice, it’s just a shipping container.”
Of course, I don’t actually build them bigger quarters, because space and “build allowance” (how much total improvement you can do to a settlement site) is limited, and I need room for my factory and my own personal McMansion and my Museum of Power Armor. So sad for the poor settlers, but if they really don’t like it I guess they can go back to scavving the radioactive ruins and trying not to be raped to death by raiders or Super Mutants or something.
Shipping containers as homes, meh, but I was in a restaurant in the Caribbean (Rum & Peas) that was made out of two or three shipping containers with another on top. It was done beautifully with aesthetics in mind, plus much of the seating was al fresco; I mean it’s the Caribbean, right.
Sadly, it was lost to Irma last year. #SXM STRONG.
Unca Cecil had a column on shipping containers and unless things have improved drastically in the last year-and-a-half, they could be dangerous as living quarters.
I’m with you, sort of. We are just building a cabin in the woods, 400 square feet with a 180 sq ft. loft. (It has a washer, 1.5 bathrooms, sleeping for 6 on beds, wood stove if baking is required hot plate and microwave otherwise). We’ve lived in 2500 sq. ft. for the past decade and with kids moved out, we don’t want to deal with that much space any longer. Bare essentials and a nice porch is all we want- and we can go for a walk/hike and enjoy our big backyard. We can’t fathom why people want so much space- we loved our NYC and Paris tiny apartments.
We are building it for $25k and will lease out our current house for income.
mrAru and I could easily live in a tiny home. He spent 20 years as a submariner, and we were sort of forcibly divested of the majority of our belongings when the house burnt. Currently we are living in the 20 foot by 30 foot top story of the barn. We don’t mind, we really aren’t materialistic, we prefer ebooks to physical books, and our mudic is ripped to hard drive, and we tdnd to netflix and youtube our entertainment. We both have a laptop, tablet and smartphone, and have a 9 cubic foor apartment sized refrigerator, 20 inch wide apartment sized stove, and stacked apartment sized washer dryer. It really isn’t much different than the old house, it was 20 feet by 40 feet…
I think if a couple is interested in living in a tiny house, they should rent a classic studio for a year, I lived in one where everything fit in a 20 foot by 20 foot footprint. If you can survive in the studio, then you can consider building a tiny house.
Oliver Johnson, in his book A Home in the Woods, guesses that this was the average size of a pioneer cabin: 20x20 with a loft over half. At nearly 600 square feet of space, it’s way more sensible than most Tiny Homes.
This thread, and this comment is particular, is so painfully American. There are reasons to restrict space, to avoid overdeveloping land for example. Land is also very, very expensive in many places in the world. Also, if everyone lives in huge houses with loads of space on huge pieces of property then everyone has to drive long distances to get anywhere, which seems a little unnecessary from my perspective.
These tiny house shows are a joke to anyone that has ever lived in Europe as they tend to be bigger than most people could ever afford in London, Oslo, etc.
If someone doesn’t want to have a 3000 sq ft house in the boonies just to fill it up with cheap, worthless crap then more power to 'em.
Point of example: One of my aunts built her own stackwood house. On the whole, she did a very good job of it: She’s got a nice usable kitchen, a comfortable living room, room for her, her three kids (or guests, nowadays) and dogs, porch space, and so on. Except that it turns out that stackwood is a terrible way to build walls. Yes, they’re nice and thick, but they’re always developing chinks that let the draft through.
Well there are tiny houses and then there are really tiny houses. A lot of people live in studio apartments, but 400 square feet is a lot different than 150 square feet. Some people don’t need a lot of space. They may spend a lot of time outdoors and/or not have a lot of possessions. What I don’t get is the people who want a tiny house to be more mobile. That is what an RV or trailer is for and they are better designed to be movable. If you want to save money by buying a tiny house but then have to shell out for an extra-large truck to move it, you may not save money. I personally love watching the tiny house hunting shows because at least half of the people do not appear to want to live in a tiny space. If you want your home to be mobile, then having a flushing toilet and a decent-sized porch are probably not the most sensible options. If you want full-sized kitchen appliances and a bedroom with a separate door, then you may need more than 200 square feet. If you are trying to save money, then having to pay extra to rent land is going to add to your costs. Finally, if you have children, remember that they may also want privacy occasionally. There is nothing wrong with having kids share rooms; but putting 6 people in a tiny space with only open lofts seems unnecessarily restrictive.
