Tiny House Blog

Join Peter King, tiny house builder, at the 7th Annual Connecting for Change: A Bioneers by the Bay Conference, October 21-23, in downtown New Bedford, MA. This conference is one of the most inspiring gatherings that you will experience and if you want to join Peter visit http://www.connectingforchange.org to register or for more information.

The conference is a three-day, solutions based gathering that brings together a diverse audience to create deep and positive change in our communities.

Peter King’s workshop will be joined by dozens of other workshops and keynotes throughout the conference weekend. For more information on this year’s program please visit, http://www.marioninstitute.org/connecting-for-change/events, and here is more information on my presentation, http://www.marioninstitute.org/connecting-for-change/events/how-build-small-wood-frame-house.

In addition, here is a link, http://www.marioninstitute.org/videos/2010/2010-connecting-change, to VIEW A VIDEO of the 2010 Connecting for Change Conference

This conference can change the way you see the world and the experience can help you change the world! REGISTER here, http://www.marioninstitute.org/connecting-for-change/register, for the 2011 Connecting for Change Conference.

Gwen Powers and her husband completed a Tiny House Workshop with Peter King, which she only knew existed because of the Tiny House Blog. Gwen says the workshop was excellent and has posted about it on her blog. She is letting me repost it here so more people will see how neat Peter’s workshops are.

Guest Post by Gwen Powers:

Back in October, some friends and I decided to head up to Vermont to participate in a Tiny House Workshop, run by Peter King (check out the website – and look for upcoming workshops – here).

I wrote an earlier, much shorter post on this right after the event, but I’m hoping to be able to give a more thorough report in this one. While this may not end up containing more information, memory being the finite thing that it is, it will definitely contain more pictures!

Photos by Gwen Powers, please contact her for permission to use them.

This is Peter King, giving us an intro talk about why he does these workshops. Peter feels strongly that building a place to live is not rocket science. Housing gets expensive and complicated when we decide we “need” extravagant amounts of space, and complicated structural and decorative details. But if we are willing to redefine that need, and pare it down a bit, than being intimately involved in building the most important structure in our lives is well within reach.

Peter claims – and I believe this, after the weekend – that anyone can learn how to build a simple structure. All it involves is basic math, and basic tools, and a few easily learned rules.

The second aspect of his involvement in these workshops is that he feels strongly that housing is just too darn expensive – we should be able to own the house and the land we live on, and not have to loan it from a big corporation.

After this discussion, and after getting a quick summary from each of us – eight participants, including the owner – on why we were there, we got to work.

The first task was framing out one of the walls. The building was 12 by 20, and the two long walls had to go up first. Khumpani (the owner, who is an herbalist who is currently living in an even smaller tiny house on the land) and Peter had finished the foundation earlier in the week, in spite of the miserably cold and persistent rain, so that we could get as much of the main structure done over the weekend. Continue Reading »

Those of you in New England will want to be aware of this workshop coming up offered by Peter King. I discovered this on a website called Vermont Transitions and have put a screen print of the page below.

Here are the details:

Time: September 15, 2010 at 9am to September 16, 2010 at 5pm
Location: Johnson Vermont
Website or Map: http://www.vermonttinyhouses.com/
Phone: 802.933.6103
Event Type: sustainable, building, workshop
Organized By: Colleen Korniak

Tiny House workshop with the effervescent Peter King! Wednesday Sept 9/15 & Thurs 9/16 in Johnson Vermont. Learn fundamental building techniques for Sustainable Living. $250 includes camping on site. For info & to register, call Peter at 802.933.6103

Dale Helms a fine furniture maker from Monkton, Vermont was featured in the Sequel of Stuck in Vermont a feature story on Peter King Tiny House Builder based in Vermont. Dale recently sent me an update on their house and I wanted to share it with you. I’ll turn it over to Dale and let him tell you about it.

Here are some photos showing some of the progress on our house since the “Stuck in Vermont” video this spring. We moved into the house in June after we sold our house, it is a great space to live in, my wife even loves it.

The house is 12′x16′ with a 6′ porch. Electricity, composting toilet (behind red curtain), propane stove/oven. No running water, the sink drains into a bucket which we empty outside. We will add a wood stove when it gets colder, (you can see the stove pipe in the ceiling in one of the pictures). we will have to rearrange the furniture to accommodate it.

Thanks Dale for the  update, please continue to keep us posted.

Jon Kalish from NPR Radio contacted me a couple of months ago looking for people on the east coast involved in the tiny house movement. I gave him Peter King’s and Derek (Deek) Diedricksen’s contact information and he set up interviews with them.

This morning on NPR Radio the interviews went live. You can view a web version of the broadcast Do-It-Yourself Downsize: How To Build A Tiny House on the NPR Site. Thanks Jon for sharing the Tiny House Movement with your radio audience. Thank you Deek from RelaxShax and Peter from Vermont Tiny Houses for your creative ideas and making the Tiny House Movement come alive for those not familiar with it.

Photo of Peter King by Kirk Kardashian. Photo of Derek Diedricksen by Bruce Bettis.

Last year I introduced you to Peter King through a video put together by Stuck in Vermont. As of today a “Sequel” on the Peter King video has been added to the Stuck in Vermont website and I wanted to share it with you. You can visit Peter’s website Vermont Tiny Houses.

Peter has built 11 tiny houses since we saw him last but is not super pleased with his new moniker “The Tiny House Guy.” With the economy in shambles and foreclosures running rampant, tiny houses seem more relevant than ever. But Peter has some ideas that are even bigger than his tiny houses. Please check out the Stuck in Vermont article here and enjoy this excellent video below.