This (tiny) House

Every few months, I find myself looking on youtube, searching the web, and basically dreaming of building a tiny, preferably mobile, house.  It's that time, again:  I've spent much of today looking at all the interesting things people can do with recyclables and building tiny houses.

   Today's search began as an offshoot of something I saw at the store, yesterday: A Conestoga-style camper in the back of a pickup truck.  This was super-cool.  I tried hanging around for a few minutes, just in case the owner showed up, but I had to do some quick shopping.  By the time I came out, the vehicle was gone.  I did, at least, snag a few pictures before I went inside.  I just wish I could have seen the inside, and how it's constructed.  I suppose I can find that on youtube, too.

 

   The next step in checking out today's search was when I saw a picture link on Facebook.  I do kind of hate Facebook, for the way it creates the expectation that we're all willing to give up our personal privacy, but as long as we're vigilant, we can still manage to maintain the semblance of privacy while pretending to share every detail.  Right?  To continue, I saw a picture linked on Facebook: an over-long tricycle with a shortened, narrow camper built on it - basically it looked like a small over-cab camper such as sits in your neighbor's pickup.  I'd love to see the inside of this little work of art!  I continued hunting around Youtube and online for a bit, trying to find more examples of this very-cool little RV, but there were too few examples of anything similar, and the links quickly degenerated to links for camper or tiny house videos.  I did watch a couple of camper videos, since they are a sort of tiny house, if a lot less sturdy, then my attention landed fully back on tiny houses.

 

   There's a young man, still in High School, who has been building his own tiny house on a flatbed trailer part-time for nearly a year.  He plans to take it with him when he goes off to college, and possibly even continue living in it after college.  The plans he came up with, and the overall design, seem very well thought out. 

   A pair of architects showed some examples of small and tiny houses built out of pallets and wooden shipping skids.  Once complete, these little houses appear to have a real rustic charm, and best of all, are nearly free.  The pallet houses were conceived of as part of a project they had joined to design an easily built, low-cost housing solution for areas hard-hit with refugees and otherwise displaced people.  If I knew someplace local where I could get a hundred or so pallets, I might try building something deep in the woods here on the farm.

 

  What some people have built as part of this tiny-house movement is really amazing.  From gypsy wagons, shepherds huts, and modernized conestoga trailers, up to fully framed little houses (mostly on trailers, for building-code reasons), the kinds of things people will build to live in, for short or for long-term, can be really inspirational.

 

   It could be very nice to have a tiny house on wheels to set up by the lake or river on a weekend as beautiful as this one. 

 

For more on Tiny Houses, and living in small spaces, Faircompanies has a number of youtube videos.  Enjoy this one about a 320 sq ft shotgun shack and the family of 3 who love it.