Tiny Furnishings

The Tiny Houses of HabeRae

Like many other cities, my hometown of Reno, Nev. has seen more and more people leave the suburbs to make their home in a more condensed urban environment to save on housing and gas costs. Several buildings in the downtown Reno corridor have been redeveloped to include housing for city living. Kelly Rae and Pam Haberman of HabeRae Investments Inc. are creating tiny, beautiful urban infill houses while keeping the history of many of these buildings alive.

Kelly and Pam have been redeveloping properties since 1998 and are most well known for their 8 on Center project, but their most recent projects are getting some attention for their tiny size, aesthetics and green design. They have won local awards for historic preservation, environmental design and community improvement.

Seating In a Tiny House

by Kent Griswold

Guest post by Ryan Mitchell of TheTinyLife.com

In a Tiny House, space matters. Your choices about what you put in that space matters even more. One of the bulkier items, that we often find we simply can’t live without is seating. While we spend 8 hours of our day sleeping, we fill the rest of our day with work, leisure and socializing, a lot of which, we do sitting down. As humans, we are by nature social creatures, which mean that not only do we need seating for ourselves, but others too. Having a dinner party, meetings or game night in a Tiny House can be interesting when it comes to providing chairs for everyone. Here are a few ideas of how to balance the need for seating, while conserving space.

This chair was designed by Marina Bautier, with an integrated stool/table. While not in use it is able to be stowed within the foot print of the other. With a natural wood finish, it blends well with a Tiny House interior and one is able to double your capacity with no extra square footage.
Source: http://www.lamaisondemarina.com/

Little House Stove

by Kent Griswold

Guest Post by Kerri Fivecoat-Campbell

The temperatures are dipping and the weather forecasters are predicting frosts – if you haven’t see them already – and it’s time to start cranking up the heat again.

For those of us who live in smaller sized homes and have access to wood to feed the wood burning stoves, though, it’s time to breathe a sigh of relief, as we won’t be paying the high electricity bills for the air conditioning of summer.

When we built our Little House, we intended on using it primarily in the summer, so we didn’t go to the expense of installing a central air system, as we figured we could use a window air unit and a wood-burning stove in the winter – along with space heaters. I did want a beautiful rock fireplace, but given we ended up living in The Little House full time, I’m glad we went for efficiency, rather than beauty.

For four years of using The Little House as a weekend retreat and mainly over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, we never used the wood-burning stove. Even during the first year we lived here full time, we only used a space heater, as the place is so well insulated, it used relatively little energy. As well, having just moved and the transferring of jobs didn’t allow my husband the time to cut wood.

Tiny Circle Kitchen

by Kent Griswold

Tara, one of our readers brought this cool kitchen idea to me that I thought could be integrated into a small or tiny house design. Here is what the company has to say about there product. The revolving concept Original Circle Kitchen® offers intelligent kitchen comfort compressed into the smallest … Read more

Pallet Chairs

by Kent Griswold

Pallets are really Michael Janzen’s specialty from Tiny House Design, but I happen to like them too and enjoy seeing what can be built with them also. Craig one of our readers, sent me a couple of cool links to chairs that are being built with pallets and if you … Read more

Tiny Washing Machine

by Kent Griswold

One of the questions that comes up often with regards to a tiny house, especially one of the tiny houses, like Jay Shafer’s Epu is how do you do your laundry? Jay says that he uses the laundry mat. That is ok for some, but is there an alternative? My … Read more