Tiny House Blog

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.

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.

Here is a preview clip of a structure Deek (Derek Diedricksen) is now working on, that will travel with him to festivals, and speaking appearances, etc. Its designed to be a mobile, stackable, homeless shelter that doubles as a street vending kiosk. As always, its made with a good deal of recycled curb materials, and salvaged building-site materials.

The structure is still nameless, and as Deek is still looking for funding to break even on his Vermont Cabin shoot (in HD, it looks GREAT!) and/or for their Jay Shafer/Tiny Tumbleweed House Company Episode, Deek might even go so far as to name the cabin after whoever largely helps/sponsors our videos- which WILL reach a ton of people (Episode #1 in just over 3 months has grabbed 37,000 views). Naturally, if the sponsor’s last name is “Crappy” or “Firetrap”, although comical, Deek might have to rethinking the naming-offer….and Deek probably won’t want to slap a Skoal logo on the side of it either!

So if you would like to spread your name or business than sponsor a Tiny Yellow House Episode contact Deek at kidcedar (at) gmail.com. Sponsorships are $300 per episode. Deek just told me there are other options higher and lower amounts to sponsor. Please read his comments in the comment section below.