The Tiny Life

Once upon a time, I lived in Australia for a while, the thing that  remember so clearly is how big the country is and how much space is available.  The country is the size of the US, with a population well under 25 million, where 80% of that population lives within 50 miles of the coast, this means that the interior of the continent is very very empty.  There is a strong sense of quasi cowboy feel to being in the outback, where I lived while I was there.  This house not only captures that sense of the rough and tumble of the bush, but is sustainable too.  In an odd way this prefab structure has a turret feel, almost medieval.

This prefabricated structure is sited in an isolated mountainous of Australia. Sheathed in copper, the 10×10 foot building closes down to protect it from brush fire, as well as precipitation. The project also manipulates the elements by employing passive heating and cooling techniques and a water collection cistern (which provides running water).

This small building is an excellent example of contemporary modernism. Formally, it responds to the environment while maintaining a rigorously simple geometric composition. Responding to building technology methods, economy, and siting issues, the unit is completely prefabricated and installed on the site.

From: Casey Brown Architecture

Water catchment system

Found this awesome concept for a hotel that would translate nicely to a Tiny House.  The really neat thing about this is that the skin of the structure is highly reflective so when placed in a forest it reflects the forest and almost blends in.  The skin more specifically is mirrored so it reflects outside, but you can see through it from the inside.  This affords a 360 degree view of the natural surroundings.  The architect says it would be “hung” from the tree, which seems both unrealistic and very high impact on the tree even if it could hold it.  None the less its a great idea!  Check the architect’s firm out here

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.

Here is good video about how the economy today is making some traditional home owners rethink the McMansion and of course pursuing the Tiny House Movement.  Sitting at a around 425 square feet, this house is decked out with really high end finishing touches.  Basically the owner is taking a traditional home budget and dumping it into a small foot plan for the costs savings and simplified living.

A little while back I talked to someone who was a reader of this website; the topic was about how tiny houses might be able to address a need for homelessness.  This is of great interest to me as I work for a non-profit in order to reduce poverty and homelessness.  My job is a bit different from most who work in this field as I am essentially a staffing agency for volunteers.  I seek out non-profits who need volunteers and then get volunteers, train both sides and facilitate them to fight poverty.  All of this is done for free, except for when large companies want a “work day” or “community service day” for their employees, we charge them a consulting fee.

Homelessness is a big issue right here at home, with the economy in a funk, I personally know many people who by all measures financially were responsible, saved 3-6 months of expenses in a rainy day savings account, but were still forced out of their home.  If you have ever worked with homeless folks, we find that really aren’t that different than us.  I was struck by irony one day when I served food to a group of gentlemen who were dressed better than I was.  I was struck when 4 nurses who were still employed sat down to eat because they had a job, but couldn’t afford to eat because of pay cuts and they were giving their portions to their kids.

This Atlanta group called the “mad housers”  is a really interesting idea of making cheap houses and dropping them off at homeless camps and tent cities.  They construct these for around $400 and have a sleeping loft, a wood stove and a place to secure their belongings and sleep safely.

If you live in a city, you may no know, but every city has several tent cities.  Homeless people don’t always just sleep on the streets, they construct in prompt tu shelters in groups for security, community and many other reasons.  These things are huge too!  I have seen some covering an entire acre.

They say this about their mission:

MAD HOUSERS Inc. is an Atlanta-based non-profit corporation engaged in charitable work, research and education. Our charter outlines our goals and purposes:

• To provide shelter for homeless individuals and families regardless of race, creed, national origin, gender, religion, or age.
• To develop low income housing for people in need of housing.
• To help people develop the skills and knowledge for constructing and rehabilitating housing and shelter.
• To increase the quantity and to improve the quality of housing in the world.
• To act, if necessary as an advocate for the homeless, to ensure that their moral and civil rights are protected.

The Mad Housers believe that if a person has a secure space from which to operate, they are much more capable of finding the resources to help themselves.

Check them out here

One thing about The Tiny Life is that having a small home encourages you to spend for time outside.  This has a huge appeal to me because I love being outside and enjoying various activities such as gardening, backpacking, grilling etc.  I plan to extend my Tiny Home’s square footage with the use of Outdoor Living areas.  I am sure most people can figure out what I mean by this, but essentially it is an outdoor space which uses natural elements to create a room like feel.

The advantages of an outdoor space is huge because it’s very cheap and can be done without permits or inspections (with exception of larger decks and electrical).  You can have a rather large area for very cheap and allows you to spend more of the year outdoors or handle having a large dinner party or cook out.  These things come in all flavors from a picnic table to 40 square feet of granite counter tops with a full on stainless steel kitchen.

I have often thought of owning two or three separate plots of land where I build these outdoor spaces and just tow my house from one to the next.  This allows me to migrate with the seasons (job permitting) so I can go North for the summer, down South for the winter etc.  This way I could maximize my use of these rooms and have the outdoor spaces’ plants geared to bloom when I will be there.

So here are so design ideas and photos for some inspiration in your spaces.

Encourage the winter sun, block it out in summer

With a tree canopy or a pergola with vines, in the summer the leaves will grow to block the sun and in the winter the leaves will die to allow more sun to warm the space.

Outdoor garden screens

To add privacy, define the space or block winds use hedges and boarder plants which are taller than your eye level.  This lets you establish where the space starts and ends, can give the area a bit more “room” like quality and block wind if you are in a windy areas where in others you might want the breeze for warmer climates.

Use vegetation to shelter outdoor living space

The Use of trees to create a ceiling is a great way to soften light and provide cover for when it rains.  A large tree can block allot of rain.  In addition it prevents the need for building an actual roof, which costs more and needs to be permitted.

Consider shade and shelter fabrics

Kent over at the Tiny House Blog did a great post about keeping cool with Shade Sails.  These are simply a triangle of fabric that blocks the sun, are really inexpensive and work really well.  When I traveled to Australia these where everywhere and if you have ever been in the outback, you know it’s really hot and sunny there.

I stumbled across this from our friends over at Materialicious, It’s a “Log Home”  haha get it? Ba-Da-Psssh – Clicky Okay corny jokes aside, the aesthetic of this is a really interesting collision of rustic extreme meats modern extreme.  With all walls except the one being entirely made of logs, I love the look!

It also brings about an interesting point.  Many of us want to take our tiny homes to a wilderness setting, an area that is untouched, that hasn’t been ruined by McMansions.  With the logs being on most of the sides, the house can easily blend into the natural surrounds.  This idea is interesting because you are minimizing the impact, not as we normally think of it as in renewable resources or recycled products, but in terms of Nature’s aesthetics.  You are essentially able to keep what we find so great about a forest intact even with placing a house in it.

The Designers website is in French, but here is what it roughly says when I ran it through a translator:

Flake House, house wandering with the road gauge, is conceived to equip the places where it fails and to thus transpose them in strange vision. A “madness” which Marie skilfully “low tech” and “high tech”. The treatment of this poetic shelter is connected more with one object found than with an artifact. The madness is presented in the form of a cast solid building, monomatière (natural wood) broken in her center. This definite irregular break the sequence of entry and delimits space serving as been useful space. The interior treatment of the madness contrasts with the irregularity of the made exterior facade of logs. This space is punctuated random openings arranged between the logs of the walls.

When it comes to Tiny Houses, they come in all shapes and sizes.  Even the definition of a Tiny House isn’t all that definitive as of yet.  Tiny Houses and the movement’s folks live in urban areas, they live in the most remote areas of the earth.  Diversity of what Tiny is, is in itself interesting as people take these ideals we share in the Tiny House Movement and manifest itself in so many forms.

This richness of various forms allows rethinking of traditional housing is so many great ways.  I have toyed with building a Tiny Home a la Jay Schaffer, which I would venture is one of the most popular approaches today.  The other option I have considered is a Prefab shed.  Today I was able to go see a model that I have been toying with the idea of purchasing and putting in the middle of a plot of land.

There are issues with this approach of course.  Like all other Tiny Home making this legal and to code is rather difficult by its nature of being Tiny.  One big advantage of the prefab shed option is that these structures will almost always pass code, are easily able to obtain building permits, if you even need one!  Of course officially this would have to be just a shed.  It gets a bit more complicated when you are not placing the shed behind a primary dwelling.  This is where I find myself.

When I was talking with the sales person at the shed store, she told me that they have had several customers live in these sheds.  They call these buildings “sheds” loosely, with models up to 1000+ square feet.

Why a shed though?  Well like I mentioned the ease of getting them legitimized of course helps.  Second they are cheap!  The model I show here is 192 Square Feet. Included are the windows, doors, installations, taxes, anchoring, site leveling and delivery all for the price of $4,200!  Figure adding in permits, running power, insulation and drywall (doing the work myself of course) I am looking at a sweet house for around five grand.  You could then deck it out with Ikea swag for another $500 and have a really really nice place!  The only drawback is there is no loft for a bed, so you have to deal with that, Murphy bed?

The other advantage to these houses is that you can move them!  Not as easily as Jay’s house on a trailer, but it’s possible.  The other advantage I see with this is that they offer payment plans of $70 a month, makes it pretty affordable, considering I have friends that pay over $1500 a month in rent.

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How to reshape suburban sprawl?  If you think about it the demands of today are high.  People want their McMansion on decent sized lots (which they think is 1/3 an acre, but that’s for another day).  I live in Charlotte, NC where our outer beltway is over a hundred miles long and it doesn’t even begin to encircle Charlotte’s suburb.  If you have errands to run, in a single day, I constantly drive 100 miles just for errands!  How can we fix this?

Enter the Inhabitat / Dwell REBURBIA competition, by sending up to 5 images and a statement about your design proposal. You can submit as many entries as you like, but each individual entry should be focused on one singular design problem/solution (i.e. a McMansion farm rehab, a bicycle transportation hub, a piezoelectric, energy-generating freeway paving system). Entries will be judged on clarity of idea, usefulness of design, and visual/aesthetic appeal of renderings.

go to http://www.re-burbia.com/ to check it out!

When it comes to the construction of a tiny house there are many options to consider.  While some options might not have been an option in a larger home because of magnitude, in a smaller house you might consider more expensive options which offer huge advantages because you are only using it on a much smaller scale. 

Reprinted: Planet Green By Josh Peterson Los Angeles, CA, USA  Wed Jun 10

Insulation is so important to energy-efficiency and reducing global warming that the government will help you insulate your house. Over half of your home’s energy consumption goes towards heating or cooling your domicile. That’s why proper insulation is paramount to green living. Switching off lights and unplugging appliances are all well and good, but if you want to make the biggest difference in your home, insulate it. Check out these green forms of insulation.

1. Spray Foam Insulation

Spray foam insulation can be added to existing homes. Insulating an old house is greener than building a new one. Spray foam will last indefinitely, so your home will be warm for generations to come. Spray foam doesn’t harm indoor air quality, it doesn’t promote bacterial growth and it keeps moisture and rot out.

2. Cellulose Insulation

Cellulose Insulation, sometimes called newspaper Insulation is insulation made from three-fourths recycled content: Newspapers, corncobs, straw, etc. The last fourth is flame-resistant chemicals.

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