Tiny House Blog

by Josiah Williams

My wife, Christy, and I took a 1994 Blue Bird school bus and turned it into a home for us and our little boy.

We spent the summer of 2011 doing most of the conversion. I worked days as a carpenter and put in long nights and weekends on the bus and was rewarded with a comfortable, warm, and unique space for our family, free from rent and mortgage.

We spent the winter months traveling from Georgia to Washington state, spending most of the time around the south-west.

Along our journey we found out that we were pregnant with our second child so, though our time in our new home has been short, we are now in the prossess of selling the bus in order to fund a move to Alaska. We hope to get enough money from the sale to be able to start a life there and begin plans for another small, simple yet beautiful and unique home, this time though on a soil foundation! Continue Reading »

Kirsten from faircompanies.com recently updated a video that I wanted everyone to see. The video is about Johnny Sanphillippo who lives in Hawaii and how on a small salary and over time he built himself a very comfortable small home to live in.

I like the way Johnny went about doing this. First buying the land and paying cash for it and than gradually over the next 10 years building a wonderful little home for himself.

I think that we can learn a lot through his story and it follows along with many of our ideals as tiny house enthusiast. Please tell me your thoughts in the comment section below.

You can also view my previous post on Johnny here.

Kirsten from faircompanies.com latest video is about an updated airstream trailer.

Sometime between childhood and adulthood, Andreas Stravropoulos had a Peter Pan adventure. He spent 4 years living in anAirstream trailer.

He didn’t have a mortgage, he didn’t pay rent and he was able to pay off student loans. But it wasn’t just about gaining economic freedom.

Reconnecting Land and Architect

Stravropoulos is a landscape architect who worried about the disconnect in his profession between the architects and the land. So he moved back to the land. He parked his iconic mobile home in a backyard he was designing. From there he could watch shadows move across the land and observe how the yard’s inhabitants actually used the space.

When his adventure began Stravropoulos had been recently laid off and was launching his own landscape design business (XS Land Architects). Determined to find a mobile, modular and affordable home, he spent nights searching Craigslist until he located a 1959 Airstream travel trailer.

Functional not planned obsolescence

The Airstream is an American classic. It’s distinctive round aluminum body was first designed in the 1930s by Hawley Bowlus, the chief designer of Charles Lindbergh’s aircraft the Spirit of St. Louis.

The Airstream was designed to last. Even the company website mentions it: “Every inch of an Airstream has a functional purpose.There is no planned obsolescence.”

Updating a classic

Once Stravropoulos had purchased his piece of history, he installed it in a friend’s sculpture studio and began its transformation. Out went the wall-to-wall linoleum and flesh tone paint. In went cork flooring, track lighting and a light paint to open up the space.

Stravropoulos did all the work himself and the trailer reflects his love of workmanship. He exposed the riveted aluminum end caps. He created custom cabinets from a birch plywood.

In this video, Stravropoulos shows us his iconic mobile home- parked (for now) behind his current home in Berkeley, California- and talks about the joy of living with just a capsule of things.

I want to introduce you to Matthew a 22 year old who recently completed his own tiny house. He had never taken on a project like this before but learned along the way. I think his story is a real inspiration for us all. Matthew please take it from here:

When I was 19 I saw Jay Shafer’s Tumbleweed Houses and was in awe. I became infatuated with the idea of living as a young adult with no mortgage or rent payment like everyone my age that chose to live on their own. I began making blue prints/sketches every day trying to imagine what “my house” would look like!

Everyday moving the kitchen or altering the windows or what have you. I found a 8×24 car trailer on craigslist for $1,500 and bought it on a whim and said, “well, there’s no turning back now…” $10,000 and over 1,500 man hours later, I’m the proud owner of my tiny home! Continue Reading »

This weeks Tiny House in a Landscape has a twist…a story, here it is.

..and it is ours!

When the foreclosure crisis first began, my husband and I thought we were safe. We’d purchased our dream home in the Santa Monica mountains, nestled in a canyon between Malibu and Santa Monica in late 2005. We put down a healthy down payment, had a steady income, and planned on living here for the rest of our lives. By mid 2010, the recession caught up to our business and cut our income in half. We applied for two modifications, and were turned down each time by our bank; they also rejected a short sale. After months of reflecting, we decided to pursue a deed in lieu of foreclosure, which is still being processed (and probably will also be rejected, as the bank profits less from this than an outright foreclosure).

We made the decision that whatever we did next would not entail working with a bank or getting a mortgage (made next to impossible by how badly our credit as been damaged, anyway) – so we searched for a piece of land that was for sale by owner at a reasonable price, and stumbled onto the property you see in the photo. About two weeks ago, I found a tiny house for sale by a wonderful man named Jeff; he drove it to the Santa Cruz Mountains from Sebastopol, and we became proud “outright” owners of our very own house. The interior is just one big room, and still needs to be outfitted, which is going to be a lot of fun (and work).  I will keep you updated, and wanted to let you know that this web site and the information you provide has given us so much inspiration to make the move from a 2,000 square foot house to a 130 square foot one! Ultimately, we are going to build a “not so tiny house” of about 800 square feet, but that is down the line…

Thanks again for your work, you are helping to change the world by changing minds about the possibility of doing something like this!

Warmly, Juko

I could write a very short blog post here and say: Just don’t do it if you can’t live your small dwelling dream without a mortgage.

I know now one of the cornerstones of the Small House Movement is to simplify life, which includes ridding ourselves of unnecessary debt. If I had learned of Kent’s Tiny House blog and read his advice about getting out of debt sooner, I may not be writing this now.

We didn’t build a lavish small house with all of the bells and whistles. We built our Little House based on what we could afford, which really meant, based on the payments we could afford. Like many people, that’s how we previously defined “affordable.” Continue Reading »