Full post at Tiny House Blog
Ready to go on permanent vacation? Check out these tiny houses for sale in the Sunshine State! 10. The Stella Blue House Boat Price: $29,900 Square Footage: 300 Location: St. Petersburg If you’ve always dreamed of sailing off into this sunset, this tiny house on fins could be your ticket to the high seas. It’s
Friday, July 8, 2016
Thursday, July 7, 2016
Should You Build or Buy a Tiny House
Full post at Tiny House Design
Pictured here is the 246 square foot Riverside by New Frontier Tiny Homes. It’s a 24-foot tiny house with batten board siding and plywood paneling that you can buy completely furnished right now for $79,000.
I know I just lost half my readers with that price tag – but hang in there with me for a second – this post is not just about the house pictured.
I don’t think anyone would knock the quality of the home. New Frontier Tiny Homes has 40 years of building experience and a team of knowledgeable builders and architects. But naturally, when you hire professionals the cost goes up.
But I think many people will find that they can build a house like this for less money – but it takes months of hard work and a certain skill set. There might also be some tiny house inflation happening right now since the main stream media is making so much noise about tiny houses.
For example, a few years ago, before the tiny house TV frenzy churned-up, a house like this would probably cost $40K-$50K and the do-it-yourselfer would have built it for $25K-$35K.
So what’s a tiny house buyer to do?
- The first thing is to decide if you really want to build it yourself – like the Derek and Hannah at Life Inside a Box. Derek has been having a blast building his house in Tucson, AZ – and making quick work of it.
- If you answer buy it, then shop around for a builder near you. I suggest starting with the Tiny House Map and the Builders List at Tiny House Listings. Also ask folks for recommendations online, like on the Tiny House People community on Facebook. The tiny house community is relatively small and people are often happy to talk. Then, if you’ve got a design in mind, ask that builder for a bid.
- If you answer built it, then learn as much as you can and find a place nearby to work on it for free (or cheap). I can highly recommend Dan Louche’s Tiny House Construction Book for to start learning about the construction process.
Now you have your path – each path is very different and will have different obstacles.
If you chose to hire a builder:
- Research the builders background and ask to see the photos of the tiny homes they’ve built.
- Ask to talk to past customers.
- Ask them how many tiny houses they’ve built.
- Ask if they can advise on financing and insurance – even if you don’t need it. Experienced builders will have recommendations for both.
Doing your due diligence before hiring a professional is always best since bad deals can go south fast and in a bad way.
Another route for tiny house buyers is to look at used tiny houses. There are many listed at Tiny House Listings all the time – and who knows, you may find your dream home for cheap.
If you chose to build it yourself, be sure to:
- Find a place to built it that costs no money, or at least very little, since you don’t know how long it will take you to complete it. This place needs to be close to where you live too… trust me… or you may never finish.
- Build out a budget and timeline – a project plan – so you have a good idea of what you’re in for. You’ll get the best understanding of this process from attending workshops or Dan Louche’s book.
- Have a plan for where you’ll be living once the house is complete – and a downsizing plan for all your stuff. In many ways, this is as big of a project as building the house itself.
I hope this short article was useful. I don’t mean to rag on builders that ask big bucks for their tiny houses. I bet there are folks that think $70K is cheap for a house that’s ready to move into. I don’t.
In the beginning, folks turned to the tiny house movement for reasonable alternatives to debt-burdened lives. Again, not saying the house pictured here isn’t worth $70K – spec houses aren’t usually cheap – just saying I don’t think people should get discouraged when they see price tags like that.
To learn more about the Riverside visit the New Frontier Tiny Homes website.
The post Should You Build or Buy a Tiny House appeared first on Tiny House Design.
Wednesday, July 6, 2016
Eco House Construction – Tiny Eco Homes of the Future
Full post at Tiny House Listings – Tiny and Small Homes For Sale
Check out how this guy is building eco tiny houses for people in need while recycling tons of waste plastic.
Eco-entrepreneur, Oscar Andres Mendez Gerardino, is an award-winning innovator who founded his company, Conceptos Plasticos, to provide war refugees on the Pacific coast of Columbia with inexpensive, sustainable housing. In the process, he might have set a domino-effect in motion that could change the future of sustainable architecture forever. How? Basically, with giant lego bricks.
Oscar invented a process of molding plastic into durable, uniform components that can be used as a modular building material. The pieces are largely interchangeable, and because they fit together with minimal use of hardware or glue, structures can even be designed for portability.
His novel manufacturing method exploits the malleability of plastic, along with its extreme durability. It can take as long as 500 years for sunlight to break down plastic, and even then it has a colossal negative impact on worldwide aquatic ecosystems. Unfortunately, contemporary recycling isn’t much help with the problem, because many products made with recycled plastic are inferior in quality to their newly-made counterparts, in addition to often being more expensive to manufacture.
What makes Oscar’s blocks different is that they can be made cheaply without high levels of processing or the resulting pollution, and in some ways they actually surpass the functionality of similar materials currently in use. As a bonus, they can be made with less carbon output than Portland cement, steel and many other traditional industrial construction materials. The best part is the bricks are made with a category of waste plastic that, until now, has been all but impossible to recycle. When used in this application, the fact that the plastic can last 500 years with no maintenance is a huge bonus. They’re also a superb alternative to compressed earth blocks in wet climates, or in areas where clay soil is hard to come by.
Over the past five years or so, Conceptos Plasticos has recycled more than 300 tons of post-industrial and post-consumer plastics to build more than 1,500 square meters of living space. In 2016 alone, they expect to build 240 new homes. By 2018, they plan to scale their production up to 600 tiny houses a year. (Given that Conceptos Plasticos is a fledgling company trying to shift several worldwide paradigms, I’d call this pretty outstanding.) The secret to their success is the modular design of Oscar’s bricks – a four person team can finish a 360 square foot tiny house in as little as five days.
For now, it’s too early to tell how Conceptos Plasticos and their recycled plastic bricks might change the world, but if I were going to invest in a start-up business based on sustainable tiny house construction in the United States, this is definitely the place I would start. The base materials are dirt cheap and easy to come by, the construction process is exceptionally simple, quick, and easy to train contractors to do, and you’ll be helping the future generations of our planet in a profound way. I’d love to see sustainable tiny house communities made of recycled plastic all over the world. With the help of Oscar’s new technology, this dream may not be so farfetched.
Tuesday, July 5, 2016
The Cost of Tiny House Freedom
Full post at Tiny House Basics
Originally Featured in Issue 41 of Tiny House Magazine
Written by:
We all keep hearing about the freedom that tiny living comes with, the simple lifestyle with less stuff to maintain and of course, saving the big bucks! But how true is it? Is it realistic to think going tiny will give that much more freedom or is it just a pipe dream? Here’s what we have found with our experience. But first, a little background.
When we set out to go tiny, our main priority was at that moment to get out of of paying crazy San Francisco Bay area rent. We had a cute house with a hefty monthly rent and the worse landlords ever, We needed a relief and fast. When we got hooked on the tiny house idea it took over and became the only thing we could think about. We researched day and night and it seemed like the perfect solution. Save money? Yes please. Less to clean? Double yes, please. And we get to have more freedom with our big savings and even travel without worrying about our huge monthly house rental payment to cover while away? Yes. Yes. A million times yes!
Of course we weren’t sure of the reality of it either but we we’re certainly gonna go for it and figure it out as we went. So we did just that and built one and have been living in the little bugger for 1 year and 5 months now and here’s what we’ve experienced:
It’s not as cheap as we thought it would be to build a tiny house.
It’s hard to narrow down where the mysterious low numbers of $10k, $20k and $30k for a fully finished tiny house came from but we have learned that is just not the case. I’m sure tiny house TV shows don’t help either when they state these too good to be true budgets with incredible finished builds that leave you wondering how on earth they pulled it off. With what we knew and researched back in 2014, we felt a $35k budget would be plenty if we did all the work ourselves. So that is what we went with. Our first step was to design our trailer. Being that we are manufacturer reps for three long standing trailer manufacturers we designed and had our tiny house trailer built for us. So now with the trailer portion out of the way we had almost $29k left in the budget which still seemed plenty at the tim. For the record, we had to sell off most of our personal items, furniture and even cars to help fund the build as we went along in addition to continuing to pay our monthly expenses at our overpriced little rental house.
In the beginning when we first decided to go tiny and do our own build we reached out to a lot of friends and asked if they would be interested in helping with our build. We happened to have a lot of friends with trade skills so we had a huge advantage in keeping expenses down. Just after we ordered our trailer we were contacted by Tiny House Nation and went through the casting process and were ultimately cast on the show for its second season. We already had our design set and our plan laid out. We had our crew and so basically the television cast and crew were going to join and just assist with the build. This expedited our timeline and we found ourselves having to accommodate a television production schedule.
For what it is worth, the build went smoothly on our timeline with only a few hiccups here and there in regards to coordinating our friends, the show, and our own lives, in order to make the build possible. The biggest shocker to us was the real cost of a custom build. We thought a $35k budget was plenty for our 28” tiny house, but we couldn’t be more wrong.
Lumber and building materials are both very expensive and that $35k came and went very quickly. Of course we had lofty design aspirations for our home and we had things we wanted our build to accomplish so our budget had to be extended exponentially. We knew when we decided to build a tiny house that we wanted to go with higher quality materials and finishes and those decisions too, came with a price tag. Par for the course though. We wanted a custom design with high end finishes and it was priced appropriately.
One of the things we didn’t account for when we went tiny though was how long it would take us to recover from the build financially once we were finished and actually living in the house. We thought we would see an instant increase in our savings account once we were able to live in our tiny house. We expected lower rent and lower overhead but neither of those were truly the case. It took us a solid year to really get back on our feet and adjust to not only living in a tiny house but get back into a groove financially and have the house fully finished where we could actually see the benefits of the lower cost of living.
A majority of the first year living in our tiny house was really focused on finishing and fixing the things that needed attention. We like to say it was a dollhouse when we moved in: it looked great but nothing worked so it took time to go through and finish the build. An important lesson we learned is that most DIY tiny houses, when built from the trailer up, take a year on average to complete. We thought it would be possible to knock it out in a few short months but the reality is that is takes much longer. This was also a big part in why we decided to help other tiny housers speed up the process by teaming up with our builders and offer them custom built tiny house shells.
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What about that freedom?
One of the main draws of living in a tiny house is the freedom it can create in other aspects of your life. Of course if you are building it yourself you won’t have much freedom until the build is finished. Once it is through and you have bounced back financially a number of avenues of freedom open to you. Some people plan to travel with their tiny house. Some people plan to keep it put for longer terms. We never meant to travel with our tiny house at all. We meant to travel because of it. We view our tiny house as our base camp, a base camp that can be moved but usually stays put for longer durations. That is what we have done.
We built our tiny house in one location and moved it to our current spot, which we love more each day. Once we settled in (we will refer to the first year as the settling in period) we were able to have the freedom to spend more time doing what we love. During our settling in period—and even now—we live very busy lives despite our life being more simplified, We have been able to focus on the more important things in our lives and give them priority rather than striving after the wind to make money to afford a higher cost of living. We have been able to increase our volunteer efforts that brings us much joy and draws Shelley and I closer together as a married couple, and we have been able to take more downtime and even travel. Even though most of our travel is related to delivery of tiny house trailers to our customers it still is a freedom that we had never had before. We actually just got home from a 6 week cross country road trip where we got to spend more time in different cities across the 33 states we traveled in and really enjoyed every minute of our time together. Living in our tiny house has really drawn us closer together as a couple and I wouldn’t have it any other way. It never feels cramped or small. It is just perfect for our needs. Plus we have less to clean, adding to our quality time together and adding to the time of activities and leisure. Who doesn’t love less cleaning and more leisure time?
Would we do it all over again?
Absolutely! We learned having patience is key and to keep our expectations and timelines realistic. Going tiny is a process. It is not about instant gratification. The tiny lifestyle opens up a significant amount of time to us and is 100% worth it. We love our little house and the life it has opened up to us but we love to share our experiences and some of the realities with others in a way to help simplify the process of getting back to basics;
The post The Cost of Tiny House Freedom appeared first on Tiny House Basics.
Llamalopolis, an Urban Tiny Living Oasis
Full post at Tiny House Blog
Sunday, July 3, 2016
1984 Mercedes-Benz G Wagon RV Conversion
Full post at Tiny House Talk - Small Spaces More Freedom
Saturday, July 2, 2016
204 Sq. Ft. Mountaineer Tiny Home with Rooftop Deck
Full post at Tiny House Talk - Small Spaces More Freedom
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