Tiny Lifestyle
What is a tiny home? tiny houses are around 2.4 x 5 meters. They contain a living area, sleeping loft, kitchen and bathroom and are constructed to fit a trailer so they can be easily moved. For this reason the Tiny House revolutionises home ownership, as it allows people to own their own house, without needing to own the land that it sits on. It is possible to build these homes to be entirely selfcontained and off-grid, generating their own water, and electricity.
One of the nicest new trends of recent years is really the revival and rebranding of something very old: the smaller dwelling. For decades, we have been cranking up household size and amenities in response to increasing productivity and wealth. In the 1940s
Upscaling to a tiny home
People have long lived in small spaces, or moveable dwellings such as caravans and housebuses. In 1854, the American writer Henry David Thoreau famously documented the two years he spent “living deliberately” in a 14-square-metre cabin he built in the woods, and is often invoked as the patron saint of tiny houses in North America. That’s where the recent tiny-house movement began in the late 1990s, and gathered steam in the aftermath of the 2007 to 2010 sub-prime mortgage crisis. It landed here about five years ago
Urban Spacing
Tiny houses are great when they’re planted Or Mobile
Portable cabins are designed to be a weekend get-away, hunting cabin or to be used as a rental unit in a RV park or resort. They would also make a perfect back-yard “casita” for visiting friends or family or as a back-yard office or studio. Most have minimal kitchens (basically a kitchenette) and most combine the living/ sleeping areas.
Tiny houses were built like this to generally “fly under the radar” of municipalities, whose regulations may require full-time homes to be of a minimum square footage. As Lloyd points out in an earlier post: Tiny houses were designed under the RV rules to get around the building codes, but zoning bylaws often ban people living in RVs, and even the RV rules never allowed permanent occupancy, even though many people did. Even when you put them in RV parks, about the only place where you can legally live in them, the leases often ban permanent occupancy. Many of them won’t even allow tiny houses, because most are not certified by the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association.
Sustainable Living Another monumental factor for year-round living in a smaller space is good insulation -- which RVs and trailers generally don’t have, unless you buy a four-season RV. However, tiny houses can be constructed from the ground up for full-time occupation in extremely cold climates, or built to nearPassivhaus standards, even in hot climates. For making the interior more comfortable while keeping energy use low, tiny houses can be outfitted with heatrecovery ventilators, radiantfloor heating, solar power systems, woodstoves, heat pumps and so on. While some of these features could be retroactively incorporated into a RV or trailer as well, tiny houses’ penchant for superior insulation makes these components more
effective. tiny homes likely depreciate less over time, as they are built, marketed and perceived as more permanent structures (though this is debatable, since there isn’t too much data on the phenomenon). Even if one might only get the materials cost back during resale, one could look at it from another angle: a tiny house is a kind of mortgagefree home that helps you avoid owning money to the bank for a mortgage, or at least save on paying monthly rent and maintenance costs.
Actual Size
What constitutes “tiny” continues to be a subject of debate among devotees. There are examples under 100 square feet. Anything over 500 is typically considered “small.” (By comparison, the average size of a new house is about 1,950 square feet, nearly double what it was in 1975.) The tiny size can make building permits tricky, although the smaller models are usually built on wheels, and rarely with permanent foundation. They can, in principal, be parked anywhere – if your neighbourhood bylaw officer looks the other way. Finding a place to put their tiny homes is one of the biggest headaches owners encounter.
Couples retreat or retirement For 10 weeks of the year, my husband and I, along with our two sons, live blissfully in Nova Scotia in a two-room A-frame that measures roughly 320 square feet, accounting for the sloped roof. We sleep in the loft upstairs, which adds about 80 square feet. This puts our cottage within “tiny home” range, maki ng us part-time members of a high-minded, green-friendly, cost-saving movement to live small in a world of supersized mansions. As with many other tiny-home dwellers, we use a compost toilet. We bring in our own water by boat, take sun-heated showers outdoors and cook on the BBQ. On rainy days, we convert the dinner table into a ping-pong table. I could leave it at that, with my eco-mom credentials secured, my brood stuffed in a birdhouse with the walls closing in. But that would be cheating. Our front view is the open ocean, as big and expansive as it gets. Our sundrenched deck is as large as the cottage floor, a perfect work space. We regularly head over to Grandma’s house for laundry and a jacuzzi – there’s nothing a tiny-home inhabitant appreciates more than borrowed plumbing. Our boys spend their weekdays at sailing camp. For a tiny house, it’s big living.
But could we stay there, crammed together year round, through fall storms and winter weather? Could I handle 12 months of banging my head on the roof when I wake up in the morning, clambering down the loft ladder in the dark, having no place to read in private while cabin fever set in? We’re far from alone – although you don’t hear much about the people who shutter their tiny houses among all the upbeat stories with perfectly staged photo spreads, or those two new HGTV builder shows, Tiny House Hunters and Tiny House, Big Living.
“The ardour for tiny homes suggests it’s the next best trend in four walls.” Certainly, the motivation is hard to fault. As a society, we’ve been urban sprawling to our detriment,
wasting energy, space and interest on sky-high mortgages. And we could definitely kick the knickknack habit. But how small can we shrink without wreaking havoc of a different kind? Are tiny homes really sustainable? Maybe not so much. At least, not for everyone. Remember that couple featured in the documentary Tiny, which depicted their tiny home’s construction and extolled the minimalist lifestyle? They parked the end result in a field in Colorado and never lived in it together full-time. (In a blog, they explained that they left this out of the movie “so as not to spoil the experience of seeing that story unfold on screen.”) You may also recall Carrie and Shane Caverly, who were featured on TV shows and in newspaper articles for “bonding” in their tiny home? They lasted 18 months before they decided it was “too small” and moved into an apartment. Many more owners rent out their tiny homes or use them only as weekend getaways, and it’s not easy to find a tiny-home builder actually dwelling full-time in the product they’re selling, at least in Canada.
Luxury Camping Ultimate comfort in the wilderness