Tiny House Blog

by Fulton Forde

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I’ve been keeping up to date on the world of small homes on your blog for a couple of years. My girlfriend and i moved into our tiny home that we designed and built a year and a half ago in western North Carolina. We used a Dickinson Marine Newport p12000 heater for the beginning of this winter, but I was able to get a great deal on a tiny wood stove and now I am selling my year old Dickinson, flue, rain cap and flue extension.

I am listing it on Ebay, but I know it was hard for me to find the heater at a good deal, so I wanted the readers of your blog to know about it if they were interested. I’ve attached some lousy pictures taken with my computer as i don’t have a digital camera. Thanks for keeping up the great blog.

Here is the Ebay Listing http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=261170014241 Starting price is $450. Thanks for checking out!

Hello! Joe Everson here with Tennessee Tiny Homes! First off I want to thanks you for featuring us earlier last year on your awesome blog! I just wanted to let you know of some awesome stuff coming up real soon for us. We were just featured in The Commercial Appeal, Memphis TN’s only paper. I have had an overwhelming response!

I am taking my second tiny home on a tour from February 11 through 18. Eight days and seven citys! Nashville, Knoxville, Asheville, Charlotte, Atlanta, Chattanooga, and Memphis! We also will be in the local papers and live on the local news at each location!

We are also working with several banks hoping to offer partial financing on our future home! Thanks for your time and let me know if you have any questions.

Here are the dates. As soon as I get the Lowe’s locations where I will be in each city, I will post the addresses too! So please plan to come and see the home if you can.

by Marcus Barksdale

I recently completed a tiny house for my personal residence in Asheville, North Carolina, and wanted to share a description, a few pictures, and a video of it with other tiny house enthusiasts. I include a lot of detail to help others learn from my thought processes.

I’ve wanted to build my own house since childhood, and became fascinated with tiny houses upon discovering Lester Walker’s book Tiny, Tiny Houses in the late 1980’s. At the time I owned a small, post-war house in Austin, Texas, and it always felt so huge and inefficient. The rest of life distracted me for a long time, all the while I constantly dreamed about, researched, and drew tiny houses for fun. After leaving a toxic job and traveling for awhile, I decided it was time to follow this life goal and build my little house.

I chose to build a fixed house, rather than a trailer-based dwelling, for several reasons:

• I’m an urbanite and I’d rather live in town so I can walk or ride a bicycle to get places than drive a car very far. But it’s pretty hilly here in Asheville and harder to find an in-town backyard into which you can physically move a tiny house on a trailer.
• I didn’t want to worry about getting caught violating housing codes by living in what the local governments would consider a recreation vehicle.
• I didn’t want to own, or need to rent or borrow, a large truck each time I needed to move a trailer-based house.
• A fixed house provides equity, potential rental income and better resale value.
• I wanted the creature comforts of a large shower and full-size range.
• I wanted outdoor rooms with more permanent features, such as a porch dimension,” except kitchens.

“Each dwelling unit shall be provided with a kitchen area and every kitchen area shall be provided with a sink.” Continue Reading »

Sorry for the short notice, I get these up as soon as I can!

Author of the book Pocket Neighborhoods, Ross Chapin, will host a workshop in Asheville, North Carolina on November 5, 2012 at the Lord Auditorium in the Pack Memorial Library located at 67 Haywood Street in downtown Asheville.

On his website Chapin describes pocket neighborhoods as, “clustered groups of neighboring houses or apartments gathered around a shared open space — a garden courtyard, a pedestrian street, a series of joined backyards, or a reclaimed alley — all of which have a clear sense of territory and shared stewardship. They can be in urban, suburban or rural areas.

These are settings where nearby neighbors can easily know one another, where empty nesters and single householders with far-flung families can find friendship or a helping hand nearby, and where children can have shirttail aunties and uncles just beyond their front gate.”

During this workshop, Chapin will offer a presentation on this topic for professionals and the general public, sharing stories of communities from around the world, their historic precedents, and the key design principles that give them vitality.

To get all the information visit the Local Plan website. http://www.localplan.org/2012/10/pocket-neighborhoods-author-ross-chapin.html

Last month Lori, one of the Tiny House Blogs readers sent me this link to this wonderful tiny cabin in a landscape. The photo is listed as creative commons at Flickr and was taken by anoldent (not a real name). Entitled “Old Home Place” with the following description. You can link to to the photo stream here and see more pictures.

The summer after I finished school I set off into the mountains of North Carolina to build a log cabin, armed with a few books, and hand tools, but no experiance or skills. I set up my tent and expected it to take six weeks to build. Six months later I still hadn’t finished the chimney or started the roof. But this is what it looked like on a misty November morning a few years later.

I lived here for about eight years, and owned it for about fifteen years after I built it in 1976 with local fieldstone and oak logs I cut, peeled and notched on the site, working alone with hand tools. It had no plumbing, I carried water from a nearby spring, and I heated it in winter with about half a cord of wood a week which I cut and burned in the open fireplace. Eventually I moved into Asheville and had to sell it, but it was a large part of my life, and I miss it more with each passing year.

Mark discovered this tall skinny tiny house on flickr and the photos were taken bym Terri Gillespie.

Does anyone know the story of this interesting construction facing I 240 in Asheville? The house is at the corner of Short and Cherry Streets, Asheville, NC. It had a spiral staircase connecting the main floor and the top floor but now that’s been blocked off.

This house is supposed to be occupied by a realtor on weekends. His bedroom is the top floor and there’s a camping kitchen and bathroom on the main floor, not much else. Seems to have been built over a single car garage. Any scoop on this place?