Tiny House Blog

by Caleb Clark

What: We built a small house in our Southern Vermont backyard and documented the process, including:

• Actual costs in a public spreadsheet
• The Plan is on Houseplans.com
• 200-ish photos, including shots of plans.
• Blog posts http://www.calebclark.org/?p=1928
• Videos of sun studies and construction
• Link to sites, house plans, organizations,
• Architect

Who: We are not professional carpenters, nor will we be quitting our day jobs. Laura is an elementary school teacher at The Neighborhood Schoolhouse. I’m the director of the educational technology program at Marlboro College Graduate School. I also worked as a carpenter in my youth, and have always been interested in real estate. In November 2010 we bought a house on tiny 1/8th of an acre lot, 1/2 mile from downtown, Brattleboro, Vermont. (200 miles North of NYC). Continue Reading »

This weeks Tiny House in a Landscape was shared with me by Derek “Deek” Diedricksen of Relaxshacks.com and the Tiny Yellow House videos. Deek and his brother Dustin recently spent some time in this log cabin in Northern Vermont. It is a 20′ x 20′ cabin which is about 400 square feet. This cabin resides at the very end of the dirt road that Deek’s land is on.

After night two Deek and Dustin awoke to find it snowing, and proceeded to pack their stuff up quickly as they had to move their car up a hill before it was snowed in as they did not have four wheel drive.

So we luck out and have two pictures that look like two different seasons. Thanks Deek for sharing your adventure with us. You can also view a couple more pictures of the interior on Deek’s blog.

In this little side-tour episode, Derek “Deek” Diedricksen of Relaxshacks.com gives us a look at “The Fern Forest Treehouse”, in Northern Vermont- one owned by Harrison Reynolds, and author Louella (Ellie) Bryant. Harrison, a former woodworking teacher, designed this cabin with his son, which has now stood for four years in the midst of four maple trees growing below a hillside. While staying in this treehouse for two nights with his family, Derek was able to capture this narrated video, showing you the ins and outs of this hut aloft.

Bruce Sargent contacted me about a Yurt building workshop he will be holding in Shaftsbury, Vermont this summer.

Bruce say: I built two 12′ yurts last summer each, with 12 students, and each, in two days, start to finish and up. I’ll be offering the lessons learned in a workshop this summer. Course details at http://www.forloveofyurts.blogspot.com.  Minimal cost on a sliding scale $225-$185. The 12′ yurt design is simple and uses ordinary lumber and simple sail maker technology to make a waterproof roof (polytarps cut to shape and jointed with double sided carpet tape hammered down with rubber mallets). Material cost of each 12 foot yurt was $421.83 using Pex for a dome or about $771.83 using a plastic dome. There are pictures of the classwork at the blog at older posts from the workshop announcement.

Yurts have sheltered people since Heradotus wrote histories 2000 years ago. With minimal woodworking skills, a home of complex and magical beauty can be made at an amazingly modest cost, (roughly one tenth of the cost of a Yurt kit). In this workshop, you will gain an experience that will allow you to make your own yurt of any size and any design. This course will lead you through building walls, door frames, rafters, roof rings, roof ring supports, domes, tension bands and coverings. You will gain an experience that will allow you to make your own yurt that meets you needs and matches your dreams.

Workshop Objectives

To learn how to build an ultra simple, green, sustainable yurt
To learn simple power and hand woodworking skills necessary to build a yurt
To experience the magic of wall rods, under tension, shaping walls
To experience the ease and joy of lifting the roof ring skyward and fitting rafters to ring and wall
To see how a yurt cover plays with light
To gain a knowledge that allows you to create your own yurt

Build Your Own Dream Yurt.
Memorial Day Weekend, Friday 4 PM To Sunday 4 PM, May 27-29
Click here for all the details: For Love of Yurts

Nineteen students at Green Mountain College in Vermont have recently built a tiny 8 by 12 foot house (97 square feet) as part of an environmental studies course. The tiny home was built almost entirely from reclaimed materials and cost only $1,927.The students helped pay for it with a $100 per student course fee – and only went over their budget by a few dollars.

The students visited the Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Warren, Vt. for inspiration and ideas for their tiny house and they decided to design a rectangular building with one low corner to create a curved roof that rainwater can pour off of and be collected. A loft, furnishings and lighting fixtures were also designed and constructed by the students. Sheep wool was added for insulation into the window casing, the hardware and metal roofing was purchased from local building supply companies and the threshold to the front door is slate from a local quarry. The house will have a solar powered electrical system installed as well as the rainwater catchment system. The house will then be sold by the students to recoup the costs of the build.

The tiny house represents an excellent learning opportunity for students in the College’s REED (Renewable Energy and EcoDesign) certificate program. During the design and construction process, students adhere to sustainable building practices as well as learn about the real estate market. A video was created about their build and can be see on the Green Mountain College website.

Photos courtesy of Green Mountain College

By Christina Nellemann for the [Tiny House Blog]

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 »

Deek just sent me a link to his latest Tiny Yellow House vidoe, so I decided to slip it into today’s video day.

We head to the green mountains of Vermont, where Deek and his brother have been working on a cabin in the woods for several years. Away from the noise and chaos of city life, this tiny home away from home offers a place where friends, family, and neighbors can kick back and enjoy nature, play music around a campfire, and enjoy the simple things in life.