The Tiny Life

And interesting development over at Mini-Mobile Cottage.  They recently have moved into their new Tiny House and have run into an issue with Tiny Houses: cold feet!  Now I am not talking about second guessing themselves, no they seem to be quite happy, but I mean literally their feet keep getting cold.  This is a result from have a open air space below the trailer which isn’t insulated or closed off.

If you have ever been in a trailer park or taken a good look at one you will notice people try to close off the gap between the trailers subfloor and the ground.  This hides the wheel axles, but also creates a air pocket of air, a barrier to the cold and heat of the outdoor temperature.  Most of the time I don’t like the look of how they do it, everything from fake stone to sheet metal.  But then again if you stay allot warmer I guess its worth it, just do some nice landscaping.

Jeff and Arlene…..or rather just Arlene came up with a approach to use Industrial Wool Felt, at $1 a foot its a pretty good steal and it’s 1/2″ thick.  Check out their post on it, which is rather funny, about their cold feet here

Back when I lived in my loft apartment it was really hard to heat – or rather pay for the heat – when you have 15′ ceilings and single layer exposed brick.  My solution was to warm it just enough to not freeze the pipes and I bought a pair of these

Now I got a ton of flack from my girl friend of the time, until she tried them out, but at then end of the month I was always happy to see that I had cut my bill in half.  However I am looking forward to only having to heat the space of a Tiny House.

So I have been trying to get better at ways to bring this blog to the next level for me and my readers, I am very new at all this, I have never blogged before in my life and can stand to learn allot.

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Over at GOOD they have an interesting brainstorm initiative about how to rethink our cities and the way we live.  If you click on each heading, it will bring you to a brainstorm/discussion starter.   To see the full list of ideas you can go here

What other ideas have you all seen/heard/thought about how we can bring cities to their full potential and minimize their impact?

Ideas for Cities: Decentralized Design Hubs and Work Centers

Ideas for Cities: Wide-walks

Ideas for Cities: Street Activity Stimulation

Ideas for Cities: Learning Jobs

Kent Griswald has written up a great rundown of how to take an old RV and gut it for parts in order to build a Tiny House.  He outlines three main points that are great advantages to this approach:

RV components are designed to withstand trailering long distances, are made to be turned off for many months, so they are very durable.

Most RV’s utilize 12 volt direct current systems or DC electricity, so generally use 12 volt appliances. However they usually have an inverter for when they are plugged into a grid which converts everything back to AC usage. Most inverters will transfer back and forth automatically.

Many RV’s have portable gas stoves that can be moved in and out of your home. Many of the new bathrooms are one peace and incorporate everything in them form tub to toilet, so this can make setting up your new space a relatively easy process.

This is also a great approach because you can get it for cheap or free.  The only thing you should look into is checking to see if there will be a cost to dispose of the left overs, however, there are certain parts that you can actually sell for scrap metal and make a pretty penny doing it.  Imagine get a trailer for free, taking what you need and then making money off it!

There also has been who took these RVs and took the top off them, grinded it down to clean it up and had their trailer for free!

So their blog has a broken link on it and there is no actualy way to link to it.  The full story is below and was taken from Tiny Tumbleweed House Blog. (if Jay or Kent gets it fixed then Ill just post a link)

Salvaging an old or destroyed RV trailer can be a great way to furnish your tiny house. Many salvageable items can be claimed from an old trailer to be used again in a tiny house on wheels.

The above photo shows a 32 foot trailer that was listed in Kentucky for $600. The side was ripped off but the owner still had the sink, tub and other appliances available that were included in the purchase. Watch your local craigslist for bargains like these or check around your town, you may find someone who would be happy for you to take it, just to get it out of their way.

The base trailer was not damaged so the the outer shell could be completely removed and you would than have a 32 foot trailer to build your tiny house on. You could than salvage all the internal items, such as the electrical control system, plumbing and water supply. Re-use the furniture and cabinets and incorporate the kitchen appliances and bathroom toilet and tub into your tiny house.

I have been preaching the need for us to live allot more locally, for a variety of reasons.   As we do the old infrastructure of our 1600 mile salad will no longer have its usefulness. I wrote about how retrofitting a grocery store was one example of this, well here is another.  Dornob talked about this great concept

There are nearly 500,000 freestanding billboards in the United States alone. What if any number of these could be converted en mass into functional, modular prefab homes that could be shipped and installed in rural and urban areas around the country – eco-friendly, cheap new housing from recycled old billboards.

Prefabrication and portability are nothing new in architecture and transportation, but world-changing modular and mass-producible visions  like this concept by Nocturnal Design Labs are few and far between. Unlike most conventional prefabs, these spaces are planned with interior layouts, sun paths and wind patterns in mind, giving the result a distictive and dynamic shape.

rom the curved modern shell and functional interior spaces to the high-up locations with varied views, there is more to this than simply a clever idea from a forward-thinking designer – these are best understood as prefab building prototypes, the potential start of an entire movement in adaptive reuse already being explored by various architects and designs.

So the Baumraum had very very little to actually say about this awesome tree house, here is what they said:

The treehouse serves as a room for meditation and relaxation. The straight, clear shape underlines this use.

The house is apparently used as a Zen getaway of sorts, I really like the deck on it, it’s intertwined with the tree, truly bringing the outdoors to the forefront.

I have heard allot about how pets are very non-ecofriendly, but I found this graphic and another article that shows the true impact of our furry friends.  Not only is the article interesting it’s an excellent opportunity to insert lolz cat photos

Reprinted New Scientist Kate Ravilious Oct 2009

SHOULD owning a great dane make you as much of an eco-outcast as an SUV driver? Yes it should, say Robert and Brenda Vale, two architects who specialise in sustainable living at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. In their new book, Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living, they compare the ecological footprints of a menagerie of popular pets with those of various other lifestyle choices – and the critters do not fare well.

As well as guzzling resources, cats and dogs devastate wildlife populations, spread disease and add to pollution. It is time to take eco-stock of our pets.

To measure the ecological paw, claw and fin-prints of the family pet, the Vales analysed the ingredients of common brands of pet food. They calculated, for example, that a medium-sized dog would consume 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily in its recommended 300-gram portion of dried dog food. At its pre-dried weight, that equates to 450 grams of fresh meat and 260 grams of cereal. That means that over the course of a year, Fido wolfs down about 164 kilograms of meat and 95 kilograms of cereals.

It takes 43.3 square metres of land to generate 1 kilogram of chicken per year – far more for beef and lamb – and 13.4 square metres to generate a kilogram of cereals. So that gives him a footprint of 0.84 hectares. For a big dog such as a German shepherd, the figure is 1.1 hectares.

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I like allot of the styling of this house, but I am not a fan of the weird angles and I am usually a fan of the weird modern stuff.  However, I do light the really pallet and the accent lighting is a really great touch in this 500 square foot apartment. Whats really interesting is how they have some several areas of exposed ceiling, which looks like an old mill. I could sit here and try to rationalize the sharp angles, so here is what the site said:

Design of this 49 sqm apartment in Barcelona gets its inspiration from Japanese origami art. One wall which separate all functions of the apartment made with this style in mind and that is enough. When the designer create the wall the apartment already had a shell of simple concrete walls. Some parts of ceiling are still uncovered so futuristic design also has rustic elements.

The presence of the separation wall can be felt from the entrance to the apartment. Although all benefits could be seen just from the inside of the apartment. It adds feeling of movement and hidden spaces because of its diagonal form. The furniture in the apartment correspond to futuristic design. It is simple with straight lines. The same could be said about colors in use. Black and white is always part of futuristic interiors. In the end, the apartment design with all its experiments made small space look much more bigger than it is.

More here

There is some facination with what is in people’s fridges whenever you watch MTV “cribs” which I find entertaining and depressing all at the same time.  But here is a Photojournal of people’s fridge and some interesting facts about them.  I wish I could get to the point of the fridge of the midwife.

Check it out and post a link to a photo of your fridge and tell us a bit about yourself.

Story: here

Upload your photo and share the link in the comments: here

I found this story over at CNN, its about cage homes in Hong Kong.  If you haven’t heard about these, they are essentially bunkbeds that are sealed off with cage wire so that people can lock them when they aren’t there.  They are the size of a single bed and are about 4 feet tall for each “unit”.   You have to share a bathroom with everyone, but the kicker is this, guess how much it costs for one of these in Hong Kong?  $167 a month!

There has been recent outcry about the deplorable living conditions which a large number of people live in.  Above is a photo of one of these cage homes that was used in an art exhibit to raise awareness of the growing trend.  Among the cage homes, cubical farms have been cropping up where people pay to live in, about the same rate.  In a city where houses have sold as much as $9,200 per square foot, no wonder why people go to these extremes.  The questions is, what is the solution?  With such densely populated urban centers, space is getting less and less accessible.

Read more about it at Reuters