Tiny House Blog

Guest post by Lisa

When my husband and I first moved to the country after 20 years of living in the big city, we talked a lot about the different possibilities for housing. We were both sick of apartments. We fantasized about the different natural building techniques like cob and straw bale, but worried about exorbitant land prices here in California.

About five or six years ago we stumbled upon Jay Shafer’s Tumbleweed website and were completely charmed. This was pre-Oprah, before he was so famous. We had a free private consultation with him within the first few weeks after he moved out to California. A couple years later we went to one of his open houses, and recently went to his first showing of his new Craftsman style cottage. We love his work, but his prices were too high for our budget. Building it ourselves seemed too difficult, though I’m sure it is possible for some people.

The tiny house bug had us. We now knew how we could own our own home without land or a mortgage, but we needed a place to put the house. Continue Reading »

I have a new favorite tiny house book and I have been anxious to share it with you. It is Lloyd Kahn’s Tiny Homes Simple Shelter Scaling Back in the 21st Century. Lloyd contacted me about two years ago and said that he wanted to do a book on tiny houses. He asked for contacts to a lot of people I had written about on the Tiny House Blog.

In a way this book is like a printed version of the Tiny House Blog but with Lloyds great writing ability and layout. Plus he has added many tiny houses that I have never seen. He has pulled together a book I think every tiny house enthusiast will want to own.

I recently visited Lloyd and his team at Shelter Publications and saw where these wonderful books are put together and distributed.

In this book there are some 150 builders who have taken things into their own hands, creating tiny homes (under 500 sq. ft.). Homes on land, homes on wheels, homes on the road, homes on water, even homes in the trees. There are also studios, saunas, garden sheds, and greenhouses.

There are 1,300 photos, showing a rich variety of small homemade shelters, and there are stories (and thoughts and inspirations) of the owner-builders who are on the forefront of this new trend in downsizing and self-sufficiency.

Lloyd just released a new video where he takes you through a two minute walk through of the book and Shelter Publications.

You can purchase the book through Shelter Publications http://www.shelterpub.com/ or at Amazon.

Thank you Lloyd for sharing your talent with this wonderful new book.

This week’s Tiny House in a Landscape is from Ottsjö county of Jämtland, Sweden. The house is all natural except for the glass in the window. I really like the stone fireplace and natural green roof.

The squared off logs are neat also and make the little cabin fit into the landscape beautifully. The photo was taken by Erik Sundström not to far from his home.

I’m excited to offer a book giveaway of Derek “Deek” Diedricksen new updated Humble Homes, Simple Shacks Book. It is a great book and I’ve enjoyed checking it out recently and am excited to be offering it to you here.

The details are below on how you can win your free copy. I will be giving three copies to Tiny House Blog readers and you might just be one. Derek the author of this fantastic book and I will be the judges.

I will email the winners to get your address and mail your copy to you after the selection is made. I will also post an update so everyone knows who won along with their tip. I’ll turn it over to Deek to tell you what is new with this book and how to enter for your chance to win.

Hey Kent,

Here are a few copies of the new edition of “Humble Homes, Simple Shacks“, as promised, to give away to your readers. The book is up on Amazon.com for only $11.25 right now. I suggest you determine the winners through bouts of ultimate fighting, which we can then film for youtube. No, not really, but I have an idea I’ll recommend in a minute….

The new edition is being put out through The Lyons Press (home to work from David and Jeanie Stiles, Shay Solomon, and so on), and has quite a few new aspects to it as compared to the old hand assembled versions out there. PS- if any of you own the green cover version of the old book (only about 30 were made), some wacko bought one off some online seller for almost $100 not that long ago- yeah, stupid, I know….

Anyway, the new, expanded version of the book has….

• 14 New full page cabin designs/small living sketches
• A new 16 page color insert photo section showing some of the things I’ve designed and built, in addition to almost 40 cabins, shacks, and tiny houses that others have completed. A decent chunk of these are photos I’ve personally taken too- so there are a few things no one has seen, blog-wise, before.
• A new chapter called “Tricks Of The Trade” where I interviewed the likes of Lloyd Kahn, Jay Shafer, Mimi Zeiger, Michael Tougias, Cathy Johnson, Alex Pino, Gregory Paul Johnson, Dee Williams, Colin Beavan, Duo Dickinson, Tammy Strobel, and Alex Johnson, for their own tips and ideas on designing with space efficiency, minimalization, and storage in mind.
• Many other new sketches to accompany the text sections
• An intro/foreword written by Author/Architects David and Jeanie Stiles (one of my favorites/influences) Continue Reading »

This garden shed would make a perfect tiny house. It was recently featured on the Fine Homebuilding website and I thought you would enjoy it too. The downstairs is designed as a working garden shed and the upstairs has a little retreat with two beds. I could see this design easily transferred into a tiny house. David Edrington used Google SketchUp to design the garden shed and than had a contractor build it.

Read the full article and see more photos at the Fine Homebuilding site.

Photo by Kent Peterson

Guest Post by Frank Dobrucki

My Tiny House Dilemma/Challenge. Years ago, as I was watching the Las Vegas housing market crumble, the local TV News was reporting that Las Vegas did not have to worry about the national trend in housing, because Las Vegas was going vertical! Yes, we had well over 100 huge high-rise projects on the horizon! I thought that the newscasters were out of their mind. There is no way that you can insulate one type of housing project, specially when it is an outrageously overpriced concept and believe that this will save us from economic catastrophe. Fast-forward, Las Vegas is truly ground zero when it comes to the national housing market disaster. All of the high-rise projects included, even though most were never built!

Photo Credits: Frank Dobrucki

When I looked at the floor plans of many of the projects, several entry-level models were less than 800 square feet and had starting prices of $600,000 and monthly homeowner fees of approximately $800 to $1,000. I knew that I could do a better job of coming up with the kind of housing that people really need and something that people could afford.

Continue Reading »

Guest post by David from David Moor Chartered Surveyors

(This information is for the UK not the United States)

Getting a surveyor on-board for your tiny house project can seem like a relatively daunting step. It can be the moment where your tiny house makes its first real steps into becoming a reality. That said, it can also bump up the expense of the project, so it is not a decision that will be taken lightly by those with grandeur objectives for their tiny home.

It should go without saying that it won’t be necessary to bring the technical expertise of surveyors into smaller micro-house projects. There are circumstances, however, where you will bring in the expertise of builders, architects, and indeed, surveyors.

With this in mind we’ll look at the value a surveyor will bring to your project and the circumstances that would predicate this decision.

This article will provide an overview of the role a surveyor plays in the construction of buildings and look at why they may add value to your projects.

There are three factors that will determine whether you will consider using a surveyor:

• The size and complexity of your project
• The budget for the project
• Your prior experience building

Of these three factors, the size and complexity of the project is ultimately the most important. (These however, are often defined by the project’s budget.)

In any new building project, the design is likely to chop and change as the structure begins to take shape. Let’s have a look the responsibilities of a surveyor in a construction project.

Cost Management
The role of a surveyor from your point of view boils down to two words: cost management. On smaller projects, this task can straight forward to manage yourself, but with any job of a significant cost, it’s not recommended you go it alone.

Why?

At the start of any project, you’ll have an approximate idea as to what it is going to cost. There are always (always) unforeseen changes to the project that can cause its costs to escalate.

Whilst this deviation may not be a major problem in small projects, in larger ones they can add up and jeopardize the projects chance of completion.

An architect may have an idea about cost, but they are not qualified to account for the management of building costs as they change over time. The surveyor’s cost management role continues throughout the project,
particularly in accounting for the value of a builder’s work on a month-by-month (or week-by-week) basis.

This isn’t to imply your builders will pull the wool over your eyes, it’s simply a means of giving you confidence that the project is being completed on-time, on-cost, and to sufficient quality.

For example…
As the home begins to take shape, you decide to make a change to the home’s design; for the sake of argument, adding a window, which the builder quotes at $3,000.

A surveyor will audit this quote to ensure the cost is right. You may be adding a window, but you’ll be losing cladding, so money could be saved here.

Your surveyor will be involved in material procurement as well as the negotiation of the builder’s contract, ensuring a fair price as well as the completion of the work to a high standard.

By employing the services of a surveyor for help with the construction of your tiny home, you will introduce a series of checks and balances to the project, helping to fix the cost.

Anyway, that’s my overview of the value a surveyor could bring to your tiny house build. If you’ve any questions, leave them as a comment and I’ll do my best to try answer them.