Tiny House Movement

The “Tiny House” movement is on the rise and I’m working on getting a ticket. The economy over the past few years have gotten shakier than ever. There are people that have been forced out of their jobs and had lost their “Dream” homes. Out of the fire and coming in to the main stream “Tiny Houses” have seen the light and people have realized that they have a better life by living smaller.

It was just a few years ago my wife told me about a man who lives “off the grid” and loves it. His lives in a 14’X14’ wood home with solar panels and a good size front porch. Here is a link to his website. http://www.simplesolarhomesteading.com/  I was brought up like most other people to live better than how you did when you were growing up plus at the time of the conversation we had two teenage boys who I could not conceive being cramped in to a small 200sq foot house. I need room to relax after a hard day’s work and didn’t want to be stacked on top of each other. She again told me that we could design a home that we can expand in any way we wanted to achieve the effect that we desired.

            Right now we live in a house that is over 2500sq feet. We also have her mother that we moved in to help her out with health and bills. My wife also explained to me that the less you spend on monthly expenses, the more money we would have in our pockets to spend on something else. I love to be able to use solar panels to power my home and save that energy money to put towards a family vacation or whatever we want. For example, we build our home at 600sq feet on our property. It’s not going to take much energy to power the place so the solar array wouldn’t have to be so large. Therefore we could add “Extra” comforts that we normally put in a house like heated floors. While some people wouldn’t have that expense living in SC, based on the size of the house.

            I started thinking about it and it started making sense to me to start downsizing now and building what we want with the best layout that made more practical sense. Let’s just look at the house we have now. As far as we can find out, the house was built in the late 1800s so by now there are so many problems with the layout. It’s a 3 bedroom house and these rooms are very large. The 3^rd room was added to the house much later and added to the back porch and house. The large hallway is 6ft wide. There are 2 bathrooms but are small. The kitchen is large but not at all laid out like it should be. We have 3 other large rooms living room, Sitting room, and a front entry room. The entire house has 10.5ft ceilings. There is a lot of energy use to heat and cool the house. There is a lot of wasted space that we don’t need or use.

            We started shopping at a store called Ikea. In the Concord NC location, there is a house that is showcased that is just under 600sq foot. It is only a two bedroom layout but the bathroom is much larger than the one we have now. With a couple adjustments to add a set of stairs, we can add the two needed rooms to an upstairs area. The Ikea had shown us how to set up storage units in a way we can have larger spaces for what we need. Ikea has a lot of great products that will fit your every need.

            After long talks with my wife we started looking at a transformation a transformation from a large house down to a small home. While looking at this we found a website about “tumbleweed” houses. http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/ These are even smaller homes with a smaller footprint. Another advantage is that they are designed and built to be taken to other locations. This is where I got some of my inspirations. The website shares stories about several people/couples that have left their former lives of big houses to a much smaller more comfortable living.

            It wasn’t much later that we started looking at what we can do to get to this stage. The stage of smaller living that we can take anywhere we can. We looked at trailers to build on with much of them being out of or price range. My wife did more research and found that there are some people building these homes on the trailers of old campers. They were strong enough to hold the weight plus many had the braking system already build in them. At most we would have to put some extra metal on them for added support for the weight and the building of the home. So she started looking through Craigslist for a trailer that was cheap and able to get moved to our house. It wasn’t long before she found one. It was a good price so we bought it. I post a few pictures of it on facebook and my friends said it would be nice once it was fixed up. They didn’t understand that there was no way that I was going to put money in to this camper only to have it collapse on me later. There were all kinds of leaks on the outer metal shell that the wood in the walls were rotten. There were buckles everywhere. I didn’t care, I was going to take it all apart down to the trailer and then build it back up again this time the way that I want it. Here are a few pictures of what I have done so far. I still have a long way to go. I will post lots more information here as the project grows.