I find that there exist two overall categories of tiny house hunters.
One group of you is the lone individual. You’re maybe young, an artist, with lots of student loan debt, and you tell us all the lie that you’re going to buy the tiny home and buy some property with it, except the truth is, your tiny home will forever haunt the yard of one of your siblings because that’s where you plant it. Or maybe you’re older — a musician gone to pasture or an aging hipster or a yarn lady — and you’re divorced or your spouse has perished in the usual way and now you just want to pare down your life. I understand that.
Another group of you are the couples.
Oh, the couples…
Don’t we put wheels on these things and only stay in them for trips & camping vacations? RVs?
The various Design Review Boards, Planning Commissioners, and City Councils here in N.CA … routinely chastise my clients for wanting to build a house that is … “larger than anyone needs”.
The “small house movement” cannot be simply contained to those people who actually DESIRE to live that way …. ohhhhhhh nooooooo … it HAS to extend to EVERYONE !! Because the leftists KNOW the best way to live on mother gaia. With religious FERVOR and RIGHTEOUSNESS … they ATTACK anyone who departs from their Orthodoxy.
They cloak their Socialist envy in various ordinances including FAR ordinances – Floor Area Ratio ordinances, etc. Only recently, did a local city finally DUMP all of their IDIOTIC restrictions … because too many filthy RICH high-tech leftists couldn’t build the BIG homes THEY wanted. So they elected a “new” Democrat Mayor who overturned all the city’s STUPID ordinances of ENVY.
It. is. all. about. CONTROL. The leftists infecting our culture are DESPERATE to dictate how everyone lives … of course … according to THEIR worldview. The American left is bent on removing ALL our Constitutional FREEDOMS. And IF Hillary gets to appoint a couple new Supreme Court Justices … then it is OVER. Our nation will be FINISHED.
My Wife loves that show,so I have had to suffer through several episodes.
I have come to the conclusion that I would be glad to move to a “tiny house” if it’s on another planet,far away from SJW’s ,greens, enviro-zealots and other activists.
The peasant does not need more than 150 square feet of living space, instead of a grand piano in the music room, he can have an accordion on the back porch. A 45 gallon rain barrel will suffice for all washing needs.
It’s called progress.(I think)
They are tool sheds. I lived in a tool shed “apartment” when I was in graduate school in the late 70’s. It was cheap but it was a tool shed. It was one room with a bed, a desk, a kitchen thing sort of, and a bathroom. Like I said it was very cheap and I was putting myself through graduate school as I had put myself through college. Now forty years later I live in a very nice LARGE custom house on six acres (wooded) in a city that I paid for a couple of decades ago. Living in a tool shed when you are young, unmarried, a student and looking to improve yourself is great. These shows also invariably have people who want to live in a tool shed so they can have the money to travel more. I did that too with a wife and kids in a large house. Tool sheds are depressing, feel like a rustic jail cell, you live in them because you are poor and why I built an additional three car garage for cars and TOOLS.
I invariably find myself asking a couple of questions. One is: Why not an RV? You can buy a pretty nice new RV, let alone what’s available on the used market, that is equally (or more) livable and far more easily transportable for a lot less money. Plus, a used/lived in RV has a resale value that would put a so-called “tiny house” to shame. The other is: Why do they build them as trailers when they’re not really mobile? I see a lot of mobile home tire/axle combo’s. These are not recommended for actually going down the road. They’re meant for one-time use only. Plus, the structure and shapes don’t lend themselves to going from place to place. The weight of them means that the only way they’re getting from place to place is behind a diesel dually or bigger, yet the few shows I’ve watched have mentioned the ability to pack up and go from one site to another as a plus. Seems hinky to me.
Some of the best times of my life at one and two week stretches every year are spent in tiny houses. One is a ice hut and the other is deer camp,but the lure of a decent shower and king size bed always wins in the end..
Read the article: yaya yada etc…
Meanwhile, here in Blighty (which has really stupid restrictive planning/building laws – but you can ignore them and, if you get away with it for a few years they can’t then stop you), I live in my little 30 sqm (300 sq ft) piggery shed conversion.
I also built a neat little 15 sqm “shed” for my young(ish) Lithuanian tenant. It’s based on the idea of what you get when living in a shared house or with your folks: bedroom, bog, kitchen. Cost about $US 13K to build, I charge $35 a month + electric (bargain or what? No Socialism or rent control required).
You don’t need much space to live in – just lots of outbuildings for workshop/cars/bikes/aircraft…
And of course not being in a town helps 🙂
Punchline: where and in what people want to live should be up to them, not government or people who write blog posts about “An Open Letter To Tiny House Hunters” 🙂
Forty or more years ago my buddies and I used to move those things on Halloween night.
I hope every weed smoking millennial that voted for Trudeau spends their entire lives living in a tiny house when the reality of deficit spending hits.
It’s like deciding to live on a sailboat. It will either make or break your relationship, and in very short order. Mostly, the relationships get broken.
Best idea for compact living is buying a nice camper unit or camper van … then you can live in a Walmart parking lot for free.
Amusingly, in Vancouver and Toronto they stack these things about forty stories and charge 700k. Call ’em condos…who knew.
Hey Gareth, a 10×30 ft. space, all by yourself IS easy, add a couple of toddlers/kids in that space, AND about 6 months were outdoor daily living is severely restricted by harsh winters – then get back to us about your new definition of “cabin fever” ;-).