Tiny House Blog

It is so much fun to see people I know get involved in the tiny house movement. Recently Bryant Goodwin, the best friend of my former boss at Cable Car Classics, Inc. and a fellow co-worker emailed me and asked me to come see the little house he is building.

Bryant with his background of building cable cars is taking his skills and building a tiny house out of reclaimed materials. His base for his home is extremely unique. Using a reclaimed mobile home chasis and modifying it to the 8 foot width and than using steel road rail guards he has built an extremely robust base for his tiny home.

Bryant is also using reclaimed cedar, redwood and other materials all through the construction of his tiny house. He is just starting on the interior and I will be doing updated posts as he moves forward. Bryant is building this home in Santa Rosa, California and his shop is real easy to find, right off of the freeway. Bryant also plans to build many more of these. If you would like to see his little home contact Bryant via email at: [email protected] Continue Reading »

“Oh Snap! Homesteader Postcards, the Facebook of 1906″ an article written by Heather Murphy at the Slate website features some really unique tiny homes built by homesteaders out on the prairies.

The images in this gallery were gathered over a period of 20 years by snapshot collector Michael Williams. They are featured in his book, Who We Were: A Snapshot History of America and at The Life and Death of Buildings, an exhibition currently on display at the Princeton University Art Museum.

Williams who spent over 15 years gathering these pictures at flea markets, antiques stores, and postcard fairs. The images were taken in South Dakota, North Dakota and Montana. Improvements were required by the homesteaders and those improvements were made using, tar paper, sod, bricks and wood. It just had to be sturdy enough to stand.

Click here to read the full article and see the slide show showing closeups and explanations of each postcard.

This beautiful custom sheep wagon by Wizard Wagonworks is based on the original “sheep camp” of the 1880′s with a modern twist. It is designed for both highway and off-road use as well as for durability, comfort and ease of maintenance. Kenny Harris of Wizard wagonworks is in the cabinetry business and built two of these sheep wagons according to a customer’s specifications. One is now being sold for $60,000, but Kenny can build any custom sheep wagon for less than the current price.

The exterior of the wagon contains laminated oak struts, a T&G planked floor and metal roofing. The wagon is insulated and the exterior wood is finished with teak oil. The interior has oak bead board paneling and the benches, tables, cabinet doors and drawer fronts are solid oak. The wagon can by towed by a truck or other large vehicle and handles well on the highway with speeds up to 70 MPH. Continue Reading »

Tiny houses usually necessitate thinking out of the box when it comes to furniture. Standard furniture for “regular” homes may not fit into a tiny house, so several designers have come up with some interesting and innovative designs for space saving furniture. Interestingly enough, while most of these designers think out of the box, their designs fold up into boxes!

Trick

Trick is the name of this multifunctional furniture that can be used as a bookshelf, a chair, and a dining set. The minimalist multifunction furniture is made from Milan based industrial designer Sakura Adachi.

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As I’m sure many of you are, we’re looking toward spring, which for us, also means looking toward next winter by getting the firewood cut and split so it can begin drying out.

Heating exclusively with our wood burning stove is pretty new to us. We moved to our Little House in 2007, but didn’t begin heating with just the woodstove until the winter of 2009 after a major ice storm showed us how much we could save without using the electric space heaters.

Thanks to that ice storm, we still have plenty of wood for next winter, people practically beg us to come and pick the wood up from their property. A good friend and neighbor has also let us use his log splitter. Continue Reading »

For anyone with vision, a few building skills and a great set of tools, several of these portable buildings by Dix Enterprises in Wichita, Kansas can become a personalized tiny house. Better Built Portable Storage Buildings by Dix are outdoor storage sheds, barns, garages, cabins and offices that are built onsite in Kansas and then delivered by truck. At that point they can be customized by the customer. Dix claims all of their portable barns, sheds, cabins and garages are built to hold up under heavy use and provide a lifetime of service. Most of the buildings are for storage, livestock and gardening, but three of their designs may make a great tiny house: the Lofted Porch, the Portable Casita and the Mini Cottage.

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We didn’t do everything right when we built The Little House, but I love the things we did do right.

One of those things was to skip the carpeting and instead, we installed laminate flooring that looks like wood.

I put a lot of thought into the flooring because I hate carpet – and here’s why – we have dogs.

Dogs and carpet don’t mix. I would like to say I was the genius who came up with the plan to forego the carpet, but my aunt moved here before we did and was actually the brains behind the plan.

She’s been here since 1999 and her high-quality, laminate flooring still looks almost as good today as it did then, and she has several big dogs running around with their nails.

As well, carpet is just not good here in the country, where the clay is red and seed ticks dwell (seed ticks are tiny little baby ticks that are worse than their grown counterparts and can burrow in carpet).

When we pulled the carpet up to replace it so we could sell our house in the city, I was doubly glad I would never have to deal with carpet again. Even when you keep it clean, the dirt and dust (and I suppose mites) that congregates under the carpet and padding is one of the grossest things I’ve ever seen!

As with most people I know, our primary consideration had to be with cost when building The Little House. Our next consideration was the convenience of cleaning/maintaining a floor with the dogs.

When taking both cost and convenience into consideration, hardwood was automatically ruled out.

While I would have liked to have gone with bamboo, as it is the most environmentally friendly flooring, cost also eliminated that choice as well.

We were left with laminate and I’m very happy with it. In The Little House, we went with a light oak, as the décor is more cabin-based. In The Belle Writer’s Studio, I went with a darker wide wood plank, as the décor there is what I like to consider more “19th century country law office.”

If you’re going to choose a laminate flooring, here’s some tips that made things easy for us:

• In The Little House, we went online and chose a high-quality laminate as the prices were cheaper then the stores, even with shipping. We had the company ship us samples first to make sure it was what we were looking for.
• For both buildings, we chose an easy snap together flooring that uses no glue.
• We haven’t found it to be true that you can’t use laminate in the bathroom due to the risk of water. I suppose it might not be a good idea if it were to get wet all of the time (if you have kids, for example), but we’ve even had an incident where my husband left the shower curtain out and the floor didn’t buckle. Of course, we soaked up as much as we could and put fans on the floor to dry it as quickly as possible.
• We weren’t here for much of the building process on The Little House, so we hired a flooring company to install it for us. BIG waste of money. The snap together flooring is easy and can be done in a small house in a matter of hours. Just make sure you follow the directions. If you have a helper, my husband says it’s easier!
• The one thing I would have done differently was to go with the next higher grade. We went with a medium priced, medium quality floor and we’ve found when things hit it just right, it will dent and even chip.

Guest Post by Kerri Fivecoat-Campbell for the Tiny House Blog

Office Floor

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