One Piece Collapsible Reflectors

The GLOBAL SUN OVEN® can be set up for use or taken down for storage in a matter of seconds. The reflectors literally fall into place at an angle that allows you to maximize the power of the sun.

The reflectors are made of highly polished, mirror-like anodized aluminum that can be cleaned quickly and easily with glass cleaner, and they will never oxidize or rust.

Spill-Proof Levelator

There is never any need to worry about your food spilling in a GLOBAL SUN OVEN®. While cooking, your food rests on a shelf that self adjusts to always stay level as you refocus.

Easy Temperature Monitoring

A built in thermometer allows you know the temperature at a glance.

Self-Contained Leveling Leg

As the sun is at different points on the horizon the GLOBAL SUN OVEN® can readily be adjusted to follow it. A simple adjusting leg allows you to choose from 9 angled positions.

Extremely Well Insulated

A thick batt of non-toxic insulation retains heat. Food cooked in the sun and left in the oven will remain hot for hours. Cold air is held out allowing the GLOBAL SUN OVEN® to be used on sunny days year around regardless of the ambient temperature.

Light Weight, Easy to Carry

The GLOBAL SUN OVEN® weighs only 21 pounds (9.5 kg), folds up like a suitcase, and is equipped with a handle for easy transport.

To learn more visit http://www.sunoven.com

I have also seen a couple of videos on Youtube for building your own sun oven so this could also be an option.

Watch how it works in the videos below.

Manu, who is a designer who creates custom furniture, wanted the home to be eco-friendly as well.

“Little and low-priced to me is green,” he said to Arizona Central.

The tiny house contains a small kitchen/dining area, a living room, one bedroom with a walk-in closet and a bathroom with a sunken tub. From the front door of the house, every room is visible except the bathroom. A full size washer and dryer are inside a closet and a tiny office area utilizes a vintage sewing-machine cabinet as a desk. In the kitchen the appliances are smaller than average and the eating area is a steel breakfast bar. The couple had a stove custom made and they use Japanese shoji screens to separate the bedroom and living/cooking area. In fact, every door in the house is a sliding screen door.

The couple’s home has a beautiful, simple design but also contains vintage and inexpensively refurbished items. For example, the bathroom sink is made of a $2 bamboo serving tray from Goodwill and the sunken tub was crafted from leftover pieces of marble tile. They call their style “shanty-city chic.”

In addition, since the home is located in Arizona, the spacious, covered deck also gets a lot of use.

Photos courtesy of Gavin Parsons and azcentral.com

By Christina Nellemann for the [Tiny House Blog]

1. Conserve Water – Fresh water for your hands, grey water for the bowl.
2. Save Money – Put money in your pocket by detecting costly leaks and reducing water bills.
3. Manage Small Spaces – Get more elbow room with the ultimate small space solution.
4. Touch Free – Eliminates interaction with germs on faucet knobs and handles.
5. Engages all Ages – Convenient and immediate visual cue inspires hand washing of even the smallest hands.

As a retrofitted sink basin, SinkPositive replaces a toilet tank’s lid to enable a touchless hand wash with clean, supply line water before redirecting the used (grey) water to the toilet bowl for the next flush.

Learn more about the SinkPositive at their website. http://sinkpositive.com

Please tell me what you think of this option for your tiny/small home.

The house was built in the 1980s as a guesthouse and has been used for numerous guests and visiting family members. It is 12 feet by 8 feet, single story, on a cement slab foundation, insulated, and has electricity and a wall mounted heating unit. The interior is a single room with a tile floor, three windows that look out on the nearby Tahoe Range and the garden and skylights that face south. The ceiling has charming rafters and is decorated with items from my mother’s native Denmark and Sweden.

However, the house does not have a kitchen or a bathroom. I’ve made it my Spring plan to add a bathroom onto the house, add a small kitchen unit and include more storage options and multi-purpose furniture. Future additions may be a back deck and a front cement slab and some landscaping. If the house is remodeled in time, it may be rented out to our neighbor’s elderly mother. She will then be closer to her daughter and can be around when my mother is home alone.

I thought I would get the Tiny House Blog community’s input on what they would do if handed this little challenge. The house does have room to extend out to the south, access to water is nearby and there is enough space behind the house to add a septic system if needed.

Here are some ideas that have been tossed around:

• a composting toilet can be added to save water and nix the necessity of septic
• greywater from the shower and sink can be used to water the garden
• a Yestertec kitchen unit, or something similar that runs on electricity, can be installed
• functional furniture such as the IKEA Norden table and the Hagalund sofa can be used

I have been consulting the book, In-laws, Outlaws, and Granny Flats: Your Guide to Turning One House into Two Homes by Michael Litchfieild, on issues on dealing with contractors, inspectors and permits. In addition, I would love to get our reader’s suggestions on what other issues I should be thinking about before beginning the project.

Photos courtesy of Christina Nellemann

By Christina Nellemann for the [Tiny House Blog]

The Mini Kitchen is a super compact and hyper-equiped kitchen that is also highly functional and stylish. When put away your guests will wonder where you made your wonderful meal. The Kitchoo Mini Kitchen is made in France so I’m not sure that they are available in North America. Go to Kitchoo to learn more.

Made of solid European beech wood with a thickness of 1.5 inches with beveled round edges. It is both attractive and very stable. Steel tubing makes the railing sturdy and it is accented with solid beech wood. A very attractive solution for a small space. No price was listed and more research should be done if you consider using these. Here is the Stairs by Design website. Thanks Alice for sharing this great find with us.

With only 12x20 feet of living space, the whole cabin is virtually a kitchen/bedroom/bathroom. We had to choose between putting the loo by the hot stove (not safe for children) by the hide-a-bed, or in this quiet corner. While some question the cleanliness of pooping so close to a food prep area, one must remember that this is not a flushing toilet that sprays bacteria into the air with every flush. Your backside seals the toilet while you do your business. There is no splash. Compost debris quickly covers the deposits, and the lid is shut immediately. Also, having water within easy reach is a must for cleaning up "accidents." We hope to adjoin the outhouse to The Shabin in the near future.

We get quite a few jokes from friends and family about our “lovey loo,” but I would take our lovely-loo over a honey bucket any day! It’s a bucket inside a wood box, and we cover – um – the deposits with sawdust. it has a real toilet seat on it for looks and comfort, but it is what it is, and it works very well.

Recycled red outhouse behind The Shabin always stinks!

I’m a city girl with a flushing toilet, and if our composting toilet had ever started to stink or had drawn bugs, I would have buried the whole mess and put up an outhouse last year! In fact, we did install an outhouse on our last trip and I hate it! Within one day of putting the outhouse to regular use, it stunk to high heaven and was full of flies even though we continuously tossed lime into it. So pardon me if I prefer my little lovey-loo over in the cabin’s quiet corner. Privacy is highly overrated anyway, or so I tell myself … before swearing that we must purchase a curtain next time we’re in town!

After emptying and rinsing the bucket, start with a layer of wood shavings or other dry debris.

I’m not sure why wood shavings and leaf debris work so well to cover the smell, but I would emphasize that new shavings don’t work well. We take our composting debris from the wood pile, and perhaps the older debris has more microbes? We keep the shavings in a basket next to the lovely loo, and we do put toilet paper in with the leavings. Every “deposit” is covered with about an inch of dry compost. I would not recommend using kitchen scraps.

Using lysol after each bucket-dump could obviously negate the "green" effect of your composting toilet. However, after a bout of dysentery, diarrhea or vomiting, you may want to use a spray or two. In our case, the lysol was NOT being used for the lovey-loo but for disinfecting the cabin from an infestation of deer mice that had settled in during our absence. Deer-mice poop carries hanta virus, and breathing spores of it can be fatal.

To make your own, build a wooden box around a bucket. Create a removable lid with or without a toilet seat attached. Know where you’ll be burying or composing your deposits. We bury ours deep out in the fields where the tractors will till it under the following season, while some build a separate compost pile, covering it with straw and claiming that humanure is usable after one year. As long as fresh waste is kept away from human consumables and out of reach of small pets and children, it is an eco-friendly and smell-free means of living comfortably off-grid.

Bethany Learn lives in Oregon with her husband and two small children. She has a degree in Exercise & Sport Science from OSU, and she is the founder and main instructor behind Fit2B.US which features wholesome home workout videos for the whole family. Fit2B Studio and her blog “Fit2Bmama” are rapidly gaining popularity, and she enjoys a wide following on Twitter and Facebook, and she has been a guest on Get Fit Now Radio & The Organic View. Bethany also heads up the MOMS group at her church and operates a resource site for aspiring writers called Ready to Publish. Bethany’s hobbies include editing, reading, dragon boats with the Castaways, crocheting rag rugs out of recycled shirts, and fixing up “The Shabin,” which is a rustic little shabby shed that she and her husband are converting into an off-grid, sustainable cabin on family land in Montana.

The platform lifts on its own hydraulic shocks and stays up in place until you apply pressure to close. The base is 15” high which means you can fit plastic storage bins, golf clubs, suitcases and other large items in storage area. High quality, durable construction and made in the USA for over 20 years.

Available in King, Queen, double/full and twin sizes. Local showroom in Metro Phoenix and Seattle, available everywhere else through the online store at www.storagebeds.com

Platform lift storage bed was featured on HGTV’s Color Splash: Miami.

Not only does the act of cooking take place regularly throughout the day, day-in and day-out, but also it’s one thing that we assume, “the more space available the better.” Who among us hasn’t crafted a meal in which both sinks and counters were overflowing with dishes? The oven stuffed, the burners full, and the microwave zinging while all remaining counters look slightly like a food fight just went down. If you have not, I applaud you. But, one of my favorite things about bunking down in a small space is the forced transition to very green and eco-friendly cooking which becomes a necessity, whether or not we always like it.

Rather than dread or complain about the fact that your kitchen may now be more of an “idea” than an actual, physical “place,” relish and embrace the new knowledge that you’re about to become one of the greenest cooks on the planet, or in your neighborhood for sure. Here are some of the easiest things to embrace and to look forward to if you’re just in the process right now.

You can’t Waste Much if You Can’t Store Much
Mega fridges and mega pantries are just destined to become sources of waste. We overbuy and overstock. And then things get buried and hidden and eventually expire. Events come up, forcing us to eat out and in turn we eat less of that fresh beautiful produce than we thought we would. And we waste. Small spaces mean small pantries (if you have them) and small fridges. Relish in the fact that you will naturally waste less because you just can’t fit that much in there anymore. You’ll be able to see what you have, and chances are good you won’t possibly be able to buy more until you’ve used what you have. On the other hand, there are perks to buying in bulk. So if you can, consider a small shed or invest in some heavy duty barrels where you can store things like 50 pound bags of flour outside of your home without worrying about damage.

Greener Cooking
Choosing to skip big ovens and big stovetops is loaded with benefits for the environment. A tiny house is the perfect opportunity to take advantage of grilling outside more often (skip the charcoal and wood). Solar powered grills are probably your best eco-safe bet, but can also be the most time consuming. There are hydrogen powered grills as well as plant based grills that work very well. Also, you may cringe at the idea of a microwave, but if you don’t have anything against them, they do use less energy than your stove. And they come in very tiny sizes.

More Fresh, Less Processed
With less room to store processed, packaged “stuff” and less desire to stand in a small kitchen over a hot stove, chances are very good that you’ll naturally find yourself leaning towards more fresh fruits and veggies. You may even find a hidden salad connoisseur buried deep inside you that you didn’t even know about! You’ll have an excuse to take more frequent trips to the Farmer’s market, meaning fresher produce all the time and better meals because of it. Green eating is typically the healthiest, and if that isn’t something to embrace, I’m not sure what is! Look at your new tiny kitchen as an exploration into creativity. How many new no-cook, no-bake creations can you whip up? I’ll tell you: the number is infinite. You’ll never run out.

Less Cleanup!
If you haven’t thought of this yet, then you should be changing your mindset right about now! Less counter space simply means less scrubbing and wiping down 24 hours a day. Less floor space equals less sweeping and mopping, and let’s face it: we all know the kitchen is the worst. It gets dirtiest the fastest and is the hardest to clean.

Less Effort and Cost Heating and Cooling
Nothing is worse than cooking in the freezing cold or the super hot. With a tiny kitchen, you’ll warm it up quickly with some simple cooking, and you can cool it off just as rapidly opening the windows, turning on a fan or may a small AC if you have one in your home. You’ll love being able to regulate the temperature more easily, especially when rising fresh loaves of bread…

A tiny kitchen doesn’t have to mean tiny meals or skimpy meals. You can dazzle any number of people with just the bare minimum. It may be more challenging, perhaps more time consuming, but chances, are, also probably much more rewarding. Enjoy going greener and being more creative and embrace that little kitchen wholeheartedly. It’ll pay off and the environment and your health will thank you.

Freelancer Jocelyn Anne writes to encourage families to be greener and more environmentally friendly in their daily living. At the moment, she’s promoting the summer use of small portable air conditioners as a cost and energy-saving option in lieu of central AC systems.