What is a tiny house? It’s a house, either on wheels or not, that is generally much smaller than your average home. Mobile tiny homes are like RVs but built like a traditional stick home with a flatbed trailer for a foundation instead of poured concrete. Tiny houses are different sizes to different people, but they generally range anywhere from 50 square feet to 300 square feet. The dimensions of our house will be 8.5 feet by 22 feet long (approximate interior square footage of 236 feet with a large sleeping loft).
Can you show me some examples? Certainly! Tumbleweed Houses has the best website of all, plus Jay Shafer was the man who led me to the movement in the first place.
Why a tiny house? In a word: freedom. Freedom from debt, payments, huge air conditioning and heating bills, maintenance costs, property taxes, etc. Freedom for us to spend more time together, freedom to invest our savings liberally, freedom to move around anywhere we can tow the tiny house, and freedom to change our view.
But what about retirement? What about it? I never understand this question. Do people really buy “forever” homes to invest in? What happens if you need to go into an assisted living facility right around the time the housing market has taken a dive and you can’t afford to hold onto your ‘investment’ that has temporarily dipped in value until the market returns? This is our retirement plan: live tiny now, invest and save the majority of our income, and never have a worry about our financial future.
You’re going to have kids and they won’t fit in there. That wasn’t a question, plus my husband and I are both sterile.
I’ve always wondered about living in such a tiny space with kids. Do you and your husband plan on having children? Thanks for asking in such a nice way! We’ve factored in an extra room in the house for a baby/toddler/kid space in preparation for such an eventuality. If you want more info on living in small spaces with children, I highly recommend one of my all-time favorite books Little House on a Small Planet, 2nd: Simple Homes, Cozy Retreats, and Energy Efficient Possibilities
.
Are you building it yourself? That was the initial plan, but after further consideration (Texas heat, lack of experience, lack of a build space), we found it best to look elsewhere. Thankfully, we found a company who builds custom tiny homes for great prices. I don’t want to speak out of turn, so I’ll be posting the details once we have everything officially in place. We are very excited about the potential to work with someone who knows what he is doing and has excellent references.
Where will you put your stuff? We aren’t going to build out the space like a boat (closets everywhere), though we could. We own very, very little and are going to continue to pare down over the next several months.
What about laundry? Allow my handsome husband to demonstrate.
Where will you park it? Our philosophy is “Build it and they will come.” Our plan is to find a piece of land where we can park, like the corner of someone’s farm or property, in exchange for some monthly work or a small fee for rent. First we will likely park in a nice RV park somewhere with water and electric hookups. You can park a tiny house anywhere you can park an RV.
What the hell is a composting toilet? You need to read the Humanure Handbook(search for the third edition; it’s available for free online). Yesterday. It will change your paradigm on life. I promise.
Why not just buy a composting toilet instead of building a Lovable Loo? I feel so strongly about this. I know too many people who have spent literally thousands of dollars on a composting unit that was 1) Hideous 2) Expensive as all hell 3) HUGE and 4) had moving parts. All I have to say is this: the reason those people bought the toilet was so they wouldn’t have to touch the, ahem, contents (the toilets claim to self-compost, which is a crock of shit, literally), but every single one of them has ended up elbow-deep in their own shit trying to fix a broken component. Keep it simple, folks. A five gallon bucket, a seat, and a simple box surround is all you need. We plan on lining ours with a trash bag and taking the contents to the sewage treatment plant for disposal until we have land where we can actually set up a composting hut.
More questions? Leave them in the comments section, please!
