tiny house seasons: year 1

Hello chilly readers (unless you are reading from somewhere mild or even warm – I’m looking at you, Bajan views)!

We’ve been living tiny since the end of March 2017, so we’re coming up on our first huge tiny anniversary! So since we are experienced greenhorns now, here is a tour of our experiences in the house over the last 10 months.

Spring: It was still pretty cold when we first moved in – it got below zero a few times. We mostly used our wood stove to heat for these months, and typically only needed to start a good fire and let it die out in our little Grizzly wood stove and that would heat us into the evening. No s’mores were had, but were often thought of. We didn’t fill our water in this time because we were waiting on finishing our shower basin (the wood barrel you see in the professional pictures) but for numerous reasons, it didn’t work out. In the meantime, we showered at the gym and filled big giant heavy stupid slippery but oh-so-useful glass jugs for drinking/cooking/dishes. The biggest problem with this season really was the water, but our propane was hooked up so we could heat water and food.

Summer: So, we were only here for the beginning of summer this year. Kenton had an opportunity to go to Barbados and work with an agro-preneur program to train young farmers to farm sustainably. We were gone to B.C. to visit my family for a month, and then off to Barbados for six weeks. The time in the summer we were home though, we learned some cool things about our house… The fan was a good idea. The cross breeze windows were a good idea. Ice cream is a good idea. Summer is the easiest time to live in our house since our solar panels are always maxing out out batteries, our solar collection tubes are always heating up our water, and there is no heating demand.

Fall: We moved the house a bit on the property we were on when we first got back from our trip, and we noticed a change in our wood stove. So it had been working OK in the spring, but now flooded our house with smoke about half the time. We started heating primarily with our back up system, a hot water loop heated by our combi-boiler (propane fuelled). That kept out house toasty and our heads thoroughly scratched wondering how we could fix up the wood stove and get our cozy dry heat back in. We bought and assembled a skirting kit to keep them breezes out from under our skirts, which we were hoping would keep a little heat in under the house. Our water tanks were filled and our shower was built so we can now… Shower at home! Goodbye, physical fitness!

Winter: Since fall was a great Tuesday in September, winter came quickly for us. We still couldn’t figure out the wood stove, and it began to drip water so Kenton dismantled the piping and shut ‘er down for now. Check back in spring to see to see how our adjustments turn out. We are still on the hot water loop and that has kept the house from freezing which we tend to prefer. We have had two really cold snaps this year (around -35), so that kind of temperature swing has frozen our water pipes. Luckily they are PEX piping, so they didn’t burst when they froze. So, with a little bit of genius (also known as waiting around) our pipes thawed themselves the first time. The second time they froze, we stuck a heater under the house, and while Kenton was snooping around he found the likely culprit for the freezing – parts of the trailer frame exposed! So another thing to do for the spring/summer is a second coat of spray foam. Another fun thing in winter is that the sun isn’t around as long – and while I do appreciate getting to eat my gummy vitamin D supplements again (they are definitely made for adults, it’s a thing, you should get on this), I do not appreciate how badly our batteries are complaining. In the summer, we would typically get to “float” (optimum charge) to our batteries every day. Now, we are hoping for it once or twice a week. Also, the battery box is not heated, but has a wall shared with our bathroom that we did not insulate so some heat would leech in there. The box itself is insulated, but we have seen the batteries drop to zero once which made us a little uncomfortable – that’s when the batteries start to lose their capacity.

So that’s one giant update. Moving on… We were just in the news a couple times – check out our fancy media page – and we are planning to be featured in the Home and Garden show again this year so you guys can all come out and check us out.

9 months later…

From our last post! Wait, what did you think 9 months was about?

Since we moved the house over to our friend’s garage… We finished it up in a completely exhausting whirlwind with the help of many fantastic people and got it ready in time for the Spring 2017 Home and Garden Show. We were up at 4am the night before the show started getting those final touches done so the house looked extra pretty.

we, however, did not

 

As some of you know, the show was insane. I used a clicker at a medium-busy time and we guesstimate (who here hates that “word”?) that over 10,000 lovely folks walked through our house that weekend.

It was super neat meeting all you tiny house nerds at the show. By the end of the three days we had gotten our script down to an art and the answers to our most asked questions memorized.

My favourite person who went through the house was this one lady though, who upon stepping in said: “My garden shed is better designed than this.” I asked her why she thought so and she said, “Because at least it can hold a picnic table and a lawn mower.” I love it! Rest assured, our next tiny house we build will have a fold down picnic table and a hideaway lawn mower under the sink.

Here are some fancy pictures of our place (thanks Chris!) for us to collectively fawn over. Some minor changes have been made since we have been living in it for the last 9 months, but we’ll update you on all that later.

 

what we did last summer

Hello folks! OK, I know it’s been a while since I updated and I really should have and I’m very very sorry, so let’s all be in a very thanksgivingy, forgiving mood, and enjoy looking at all the pretty pictures of all the pretty progress we made!

Our siding is on. We got it through Monarch, and I gotta say, I am very impressed. They were really helpful people, and made sure we were getting the best product for the job. If you’re looking for siding and you don’t know what you’re looking for, (or if you do), I would recommend checking them out.

We settled on LP Smartside, which is a wood composite. It has a bunch of nifty features, like being really really incredibly strong (vs golf balls and rocks, according to their studies), DIY friendly, and not being incredibly heavy and crushing our trailer’s axles. Big thanks to Ryan Freeman too, for all his hard work on installation! I want to warn you that we haven’t painted the siding yet…

Ryan Freeman being a champion

It comes pre-primed but now with the weather being unreasonable, our paint will chip and crack in these sub zero temperatures. Rats. We will have to wait until spring, or until we find an indoor space to finish up.

but just as a friend

I’m sure you astute people noticed that we also have our solar gear on. We do!! Our amazing Trevor from NU Energy came out and helped us put on all the brackets he designed. We wouldn’t change the slope of our roof to be the best angle for the sun because we’re stubborn and he made it work! So that our house still sits within the 13’6″ height restriction, our solar panels will lay down on the roof below the highest point when travelling, and then we can slide them forwards and prop them up for capturing the rays of the sun and leaving the rest of the world in perpetual darkness.

Sunny Mr. Zerbin

Here is solar genius and angel Trevor.

We have been working hard on our utilities, because once they’re in, our house will have all its organs in order and we can spray foam it all in forever. So far our talented electrician friend Shaun has got half our wires run for electric, despite having just had a baby (!!!) and Sheldon installed our fancy metal roof despite having just had a baby (!!!). Sheldon brought such a cool, chill atmosphere to the site and he really knows his stuff. Check out his business, On Top Metals, in our sponsors section, cause he really came through for us and he has a cute new baby and I bet he’d show you pictures if you asked nicely.

all our fancy utilities

a new roof with an old friend Kaibree!

George, the plumber!

Sheldon and his minions for the day, Kenton and Kaibree

Donat Carnegie is back helping us out with all our wood and painting projects. OK this man turned an old wine barrel into a friggin adorable bathtub/shower basin. I am not entirely convinced he isn’t a wizard. I am so in love with this thing, in the words of many wise teenage girls, I can’t even.

From this

to

this!

 

If any of you guys are interested in building a tiny house, or if you just want to be an uber nerd and learn everything about building one, Kenton is running a tiny house course in St Albert as a part of his army of permaculture workshops! It’s on June 24/25 next year. Check out his website to pick and choose or do them all to impress your friends and enemies.

See you guys soon when I have updates on the completion of our utilities, spray foaming and (gasp) the interior finishing!

the shell

Any hermit crab would be jealous of the shell we are making here. Here’s the update!

We have finished putting on all the hurricane ties and structural strapping, so our walls should be pretty solid if we ever move this bad boy (or girl, it’s 2016 after all) or get a big storm or something. Kenton and Jeff spent a day doing that, plywooding the rafters, and getting the battery box built.

Then we glued a bunch of rigid insulation over our beautiful skeleton to hide dem bones. And that roof. Thanks to Dave (who I hear is a daredevil with heights) and Ryan for coming out to help us out. Wall of famers. Once we have walls.

Now that there’s the rigid on the roof, we have it all tuck taped (hit the road, duct tape) so that it’s a water barrier. We officially have some kind of structure that actually shelters us if it were to rain! Remember that we’re going to spray foam in behind the rigid insulation when it’s all done, and that will close any gaps we might have behind the tape, and give us the majority of our R value.

Each step now feels like we’re building towards something, even if it’s a tiny something.

the setback

Time for some real talk, you guys.

OK. So we spent a lot of weekends welding on our additional pieces to the old trailer frame to make it wider and stronger. And we did! Look at all our welding! We are welders now!

We did it. The trailer was done. Wait, WAS? Is that a past tense I see?! Yes, dear reader, it is a past tense because the trailer was done for about 20 minutes. Let me tell you a story all about how our lives were flipped, turned upside down. I’d like to take a minute so sit right there and I’ll tell you how our trailer got un-trailered.

So stay with me here, the trailer is welded together, it looks like this, we can visualize the walls and furniture and dirty dishes in the sink.

But it’s really late at night, you guys. We are so tired, we have put in three full days welding the trailer and we want to go home. But if we want to build by next weekend, we need to have the trailer painted. So, we have to haul it.

We haul it. We haul it about ten minutes down the road before it comes off the hitch and rolls silently, beautifully, unstoppably into the ditch. Not just into the ditch, into a farmer’s fence. And then into a tree.

Now, the good news: The stuff we welded onto the outside stayed squared and lovely, and our suspension is OK.

The bad news: The old trailer parts, the inside box, is all warped and bent. The impact caused it to go out of square, and now it looks (mind the technical term here) all diagonally on the inside.

If you would all turn to page 2 and look at the diagram, I will try to explain more. The blue middle square on this picture is the old trailer, and the red parts are the parts that were added on by us. This is a bit of an old drawing, since then we have an addition of a few pieces cantilevered onto the back to hold up a water tank, but I digress. So, the red parts are OK, the middle blue parts are all messed up now.

We have a couple options for fixing it.

1. We pay to have it bent back into shape: it costs about $2000 on average to bend a trailer back into shape, and it would never be QUITE the same again, but it would cost us no time or effort really.
2. We cut out the parts of our trailer that are OK, namely the outside pieces, and rebuild the inside with new, stronger metal: We have the technology. This will cost us about $800 of scrap metal and another month or two of our weekends, but we come out with a better frame and foundation for our house.
3. We cry over spilt milk, set the trailer on fire and buy ourselves a mansion to live like kings in.

Weighing our options, we went with good ol’ #2. Starting this weekend, we pull up our socks, put on our masks and some Eye of the Tiger and get this DONE (again).

It’s gonna be OK. Here’s an updated picture of the house from Trevor to make us feel better.

Ahhhh. So much better.

what we’ve done so far

It’s an exciting time to be us right now – no offense to  you. We have been a whirlwind of productivity and taken down a few small villages with us. Here’s what we’ve accomplished so far, and what we’re going to accomplish soon.

Our windows: We ordered nine windows and a door for our house, to be delivered today! We went through All Weather Windows and spoke at length with their rep to make sure we got what we needed. Since our house is going to be relying on passive solar, we need our windows to help heat our house on the south side and minimize loss on the north. OK here’s what I know about windows now, there will be a quiz so pay attention. Our windows are triple pane, which means three layers of glass so that we have two pockets of gas between to minimize heat transfer between them. They have a coating on the glass called Sun Stop, which should help in keeping the heat inside the house once it’s there (it raises the R Value of the window) and the space between the windows is filled with Argon gas to the same effect. We chose awning style windows because, surprise, they raise the R value by having a complete seal around the frame. We also got our fancy double glass doors that we have dreamed of since we were little girls. At the end of the day, we have an R value of 8 for our windows and door which is almost three times the R value of a regular window. We are window superstars.

Our trailer: OK, so last we left off with this we had ripped apart the flooring that was laid by tiny house enthusiasts gone by and had a plan in place to weld an addition and fortify the frame. We did it. We went out and bought the extra steel, and Kenton’s brother in law Rob carted 24 foot lengths of steel on the back of his itty bitty Jetta which definitely didn’t alarm anyone. Then, the magnificent Jim MaGill has done all the cutting and has begun the welding as of this week!

Our axles: We have been going back and forth with Timbren, the wonderful people who are making our axles. Basically, the axleless suspension that we were looking at before is not appropriate for our project because the house is really, really, … really heavy. If we went over a bump that hit only one wheel, our house’s weight would be completely on that wheel and we would break the suspension and our hearts. They suggested we switch to their quiet ride system which will provide a lot more stability, less torsion (a force of twisting around as we drive) and the strength the system is going to need for our decidedly weighty house (probably around 14,000lbs). Some more information on them click here!

Our plans (water, solar and drawings): Trevor Locke, solar expert and cat lover, has met with us a few times to blow our minds. He designed us a water system, and drew us up some floorplans and a 3D rendering of our house in Google Sketchup. I know I shouldn’t post these because he hasn’t completed them yet but I’m going to do it anyway because I’m excitable. Sorry, Trevor. He has managed to make our house into a transformer and fit our solar panels and solar hot water collector on the front of our house (south side). Check this out:

Our build: Now comes some more very exciting news. We are beginning the build Dec. 5th. The trailer should be completely ready by then. Just to confuse us as much as possible, our contractor is also named Trevor. Apparently all you need to build a tiny house is to know a lot of people named Trevor. Anyway, our contractor (also Trevor) has set the date! The unreasonably cold date. Luckily, we will have an indoor space to build in – a storage garage for combines. We are going to try and get the entire outer shell done in that weekend – walls up, windows in, roof on, siding on. It’s insane, it’s probably not possible, but here we go!

our trailer – prep and plan

Our trailer was an awesome find – already stripped down camper trailer from the 70’s when things were built right. Right, Dad? Also, the guy we bought the trailer off of also had already framed the floor, put in insulation and vapour barrier. Yay!

Not yay? We didn’t get a fully clear answer on what kind of insulation was inside, which is a pretty big deal, so we decided to check under that pretty plywood and see what there was to see. It was soggy insulation and rusted sheet metal.

Erk. So, we ripped it all off. It took us about 3 hours and two bags of candy to complete. Check it out, from start to finish:

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Now, what the heck are we doing to our trailer? Almost everything. Since our walls are going to be about 7″ thick when you consider our exterior 3″ of rigid insulation, we decided to extend our trailer a little to have our walls fully on the outside. This gives us 8 feet of interior living space width-wise. Also, our wheel wells were pretty flimsy and offended me when they made a really loud breaking sound when I leaned on them, so they had to go. They will make their debut performance as planters in the spring.

To get this all done, we met up with Jim, along with his brother Ross. Jim is an amazing welder (who also has about 5 other journeyman tickets because he has a short attention span). They came up with an amazing plan for our trailer. We are going to extend all the inner supportive beams of the trailer out to the edges, then tack 4″ angle iron around the entire outside. Structurally, this will make our trailer much stronger and able to support the weight of our house (which will be probably over 10,000lbs). They will also replace our offensive weight-shaming wheel wells with the scraps from the material we will be using to reinforce and extend everything else.

This means that we can lay a 2×4 frame on the 4″ angle iron and have our walls completely exterior to our home. That saves us a foot of interior space. What it does mean is that our home will be over the 8’6″ maximum for pulling on the roads without a permit, so we have decided to pursue a life of crime! Problem solved! Well actually problem solved because permits are really easy and cheap to obtain both in Alberta and in British Columbia. In Alberta you don’t need a pilot car and other razzle dazzle until you’re at 10’6″, and we’ll be sitting pretty at 9’2″. That just means we need to buy a permit for $25 per trip. A single tear. In BC the regulations are also not a big deal – $15/trip or $30/month for unlimited trips.

Another note on the welding… We will be adding steel tabs to support the floor joists. This is because our walls are resting on the 4″ angle iron and the floor has nothing to support it around that frame. So by adding little tabs inwards, we support the floor with the frame and everyone goes home happy.

But first! The axles. Right now we have two of them handling abour 3,500lbs each. I know you just did the math – our house is over 10,000lbs. We need to replace our axles. It’s a common tiny house problem – trying to keep the weight low. Our solution is amazing – Timbren axle-less suspension. The system completely eliminates the need for a thru axle which gives us more freedom and less likelihood of catching on anything while we take this puppy off roading. OK, but even when we aren’t doing donuts in the mud, they increase our load capacity almost double. Each system can accommodate 7,000lbs of weight. We can install two to replace both our axles, which brings us up to 14,000lbs. So we have our cake and eat it too. They come with up to 1 tonne towing capacity, you could really go crazy with these if you wanted to.

We are also going to go with the 4″ drop model, which means that the trailer is lowered and we get another 4″ of headspace in our loft. Since Kenton is 6’4″ tall, it robs his chiropractor of thousands of dollars a year.

In order, here’s what will need to be done for our trailer to be build-ready:

1. Rip apart trailer. Check!
2. Install Timbren 7K 4″ drop suspension system with brake flange.
3. Add on extra sections of angle iron, little tabs, reinforcements and wheel wells.
4. Build a new floor frame, insulate, the works.

Easy peasy?

alberta-proofing our house

One thing that we noticed when we were researching tiny houses was that, well, most of them are built for a decidedly U.S.A climate. Now, we don’t have anything against our friendly southern neighbors (most of the time) but no offense, your designs just aren’t going to do the trick up in Alberta.

The biggest issue obviously is keeping heat inside our place in the winter, and the heat out of our place in the summer. Tying into that is making sure our off grid systems will function throughout all the Canadian seasons – like will our water line freeze or will we get enough sun for our solar array? So many questions…

Insulation: We want to be warm in the winter and not die. We also want our cat to live, too, so we’re double invested. The major thing here, clearly, is insulation. Our pro Paul really came through for us in all these design considerations, so we bow to his knowledge and wisdom and he’s probably handsome or something too. In our design, we are having close to R-30 walls. An R-value is basically your warm number, the higher the R-value, the better your house is insulated against both the bitter cold and the heat. That’s something I didn’t know before, that insulation actually also helps keep your place nice and cool in the summer. Let’s all think back to a time when we felt nice and cool in the summer. Aaaah. We will be using 2×4 framed walls, which gives us that much space to fill with insulation. We have chosen Roxul, which will give us R-14 to start. Then, on the outside of our frame, we will be adding on 2-3 inches of extruded polystyrene for an additional R-15. Our floor and roof will be insulated too. All said and done, it should be around R25-30 which is pretty amazing considering fibreglass insulation (that pink itchy stuff you may have seen in an attic somewhere) is R4 per inch. Brrr.

Passive solar design: Passive solar design is essentially making sure your house is designed in such a way to take advantage of all the free perks of the sun – like heating and cooling. You do that through things such as window placement. On a tiny house, some passive solar concepts are not as important to be really strict on as a conventional house. There’s just not as much of anything to make as big of a difference as in a bigger house – but it’s still something we wanted to take advantage of and I think will definitely help us with heating/cooling considerations. Mainly, we are going the window placement route. Simplified, it’s lots of windows on the south side so that you get lots of good warm sun into your home through your windows. You want practically no windows on the north side of your house because they will just let out heat since it’s all shaded and chilly. Minimal, strategic placement on the east and west. For us, our giant glass doors, and an additional 4 windows on the south side will make up our glass house wall to get us the most passive solar heating. We have about one window per other wall – operable ones in the lofts for the summer when it gets too hot and we need to vent that heat! We will be able to open ’em up and let it out cause heat rises, baby. Another couple tricks to use are things like dark floors or putting in things that store heat (bricks, water tanks, etc) – thermal mass as they call it. That way the sun will heat up the dark, bulky thing and it will stay hot past when other stuff would have cooled down. It cools down when everything else is cool by venting its heat around your area, and that helps you keep toastier for free because the sun is awesome and our friend.

Not freezing our water: We don’t want to freeze a water line. It just doesn’t sound fun to head out there in -25C and stare at a frozen water line and know that we can’t shower, or do dishes, or have a sprinkler party or whatever we do in our spare time with water it’s none of your business. Let me mention again quickly that Paul is a hero and a scholar. OK. We are planning currently on buying a few of those flexible water bladders that they use on boats to store fresh water. That way, they are light when they are empty and easy to move around, fix, replace, etc. We want to store them when they are full underneath our trailer. But what about the cold weather, Melissa?! You ask. I have an answer for you, my friend. We will be adding fancy skirting to the bottom of our trailer once it’s parked for a long stay. It will be insulated skirting. We will dig a hole and put the skirting into that hole. Long, skinny, rectangular hole moat thing. We will put all the dirt from our hole up against the skirting to insulate it even more. Heat from our house will go through the bottom of the trailer a little bit (even though it will be an insulated floor) and keep the temperature underneath there relatively OK for water to not freeze. That’s the plan. We will also have our greywater tank down there (the water from our showers and sink). Most of our greywater will be warm and because it is big and water it has thermal mass! Pop quiz! Thermal mass! Anyway it should help heat our little crawlspace water tanks under there. If we absolutely have to, we will throw a heater down there now and then. We will  have a little emergency door for only Kenton to ever crawl through and take a look at things if we ever need to troubleshoot.

Enough sun: We are having photovoltaics for our electricity – fancy talk for solar panels. The tall side of our roof will be our south facing side so we can have more windows and get our precious vitamin D. But oh no! That is not a good slope for our solar panels to be on, all in the shade and stuff! It’s OK. We will be attaching them to metal frames that will prop up when we are parked and safe. Not only that, but we will have two settings on them – one for summer and one for winter. This way, we can take best advantage of how low the sun goes across the sky for the season. Or how high the sun goes, depending on if you’re an optimist or not. Our solar guy, Trevor, has done the math and says there is no real benefit to having more than two settings (a 3% gain) so we only have to climb up onto the roof to move them around twice a year. Score.

With all this thinking and planning, we hope it will be enough to keep our heating and cooling loads low on our system and be cozy all year round. Except if we maybe have to snowshoe home sometimes. Ah, hell, why not just take the dogsled? It is Canada after all.

what we are working with – trailer and design

OK! We have a trailer, now what? Well, our trailer is 8 feet wide by 24 feet long. Most tiny houses keep within dimensions that will allow it to be towed on roads legally without needing an oversize permit or an escort, which means keeping it within 8’6″ wide and 13’6″ tall.

We began designing, and redesigning, and watching shows, and reading blogs… And came up with our general design. We have a big crush on the plans for hOme tiny house so we modeled a lot of our ideas off of it. Maybe one day we will work up the courage to ask them out on a date, or at least leave a cryptic note in their locker. Check it out here.

SO! Put on your spacial visualization thinking caps and come on a tour of our house – as we imagine it will be now:

Kitchen – We really don’t want to skimp too much in the kitchen as this is a place we spend some time in and is kind of a center for socialization. It’s really easy to have a kitchen look kind of dumpy if you aren’t careful, so although we are trying to be cost effective, this is a spot we have flagged as somewhere we would be willing to spend a little more to make it nice. This is to encourage Kenton to continue making daring new discoveries and for me to make the same 3 meals over and over again in. We are having a U of countertops on the far end of our trailer to maximize storage and working space. Our fridge will be running electric, and we decided to go full size. Our stove will be propane, and I can talk to you about that later when we get into our “off grid” system another time.

Bathroom – In here we are going to have a composting toilet. The skinny on the composting toilet is this: It isn’t gross. Basically,  you have a normal looking toilet that catches everything in a little container underneath. You have to fill the thing with some absorbent stuff like peat moss or wood chips. You do your work, and then cover it up with some more of that stuff, turn a handle to mix it all around and then go wash your hands. You DO wash your hands, right? Anyway when it fills up, you go dump it somewhere outside because there is  no reason to treat our waste like toxic waste. It’s seriously fine to put out there. Apparently, it should come out smelling, looking and (I assume but will never find out) feeling like regular soil. Not a big deal – but kind of a big deal. Oh, and the bathroom will have a shower. With a real shower head and everything, imagine! More detail when we get into our water system which is frustratingly never talked about in any other tiny house ever.

Living Room – We have about a 6×8 foot living room. Which holds a couch. Which is basically all we use in our living room anyways. It’ll be facing double glass doors, which we can open outwards to the wide open world and hopefully not let in every mosquito living in Alberta. It’ll essentially feel double the size having our front door big and glass though, and by putting it on the side of our house we feel we will avoid the whole “hallway” feeling effect. Our plan is to put our projector on the back wall up high someplace (TBD) and then have the screen pull down over the doors to block out light and also give us our TV when the world is just not interesting enough for us.

Bedroom – We are having a loft bedroom over the kitchen. Pretty much just big enough for our bed (queen sized) and some storage. We decided on stairs up to this loft because it gives us lots of fancy storage and will save my life if I ever get pregnant.

Second loft – We designed in a second loft over our bathroom – it’ll definitely be smaller than the bedroom one, but we wanted a separate space from the living room in case Kenton plays his stupid music for 3 hours in a row or I won’t stop watching reality TV or talking to the cat in a baby voice. Reality. Plus it works well if ever someone feels brave enough to stay with us overnight.

Roof – A shed style roof (that’s the one where it’s highest at one side of the wall and then slants down on a single slope to the other wall) gives us a less cramped feeling up there cause probably you’re gonna have your bed in the middle where a normal roof would be tallest. In general, I don’t stand on my bed. So we wanted the tall spot beside the bed. Plus it gives us a nice tall long wall for our passive solar design.

Kenton drew out our design and re-designs a few times on graph paper which really helped us see how big things were going to be in our space. Paul, Kenton’s friend and colleague, has given us so much advice on the wall structure, passive solar considerations, skirting, insulation, etc to make sure our house is really well designed for our climate (really hot summers, really cold winters). He has also taken it on to draw us out our design professionally since he is a man of many hats. When that’s done, we’ll post it up on here for your viewing pleasure.

the number one question: why?

I think to fully understand why someone might want to build a tiny house, you have to know a little bit about the people making the decision. Allow me to introduce us to you…

Kenton, my husband, has been a curious, enthusiastic learner in pretty much any field for his entire life. If you looked at his resume, you would think he is 5 years older than he is. He has traveled the world to increase  his know-how in all things sustainable. One area that kept his interest is Permaculture, the science of working with nature to meet our needs (food, shelter, community). You should google that. I’ll wait.

My name is Melissa. I like science, cats, learning new skills and thinking new thoughts.

Kenton introduced me to the concept of tiny houses on our first date. Like most people in the tiny house movement, I thought it was crazy at first. Cute idea. No thanks. Over time though, I really began to consider it. How much space do we really use in our house right now? I mean REALLY use. I began to deconstruct my spaces. I never walk on that side of the room. I never sit in that chair. I never dust the top of my fridge. Well, that’s a different story…

Even beyond cutting down on useless areas of my living space, financially it makes sense. If you build a tiny house, you can bet that it will cost less than a conventional house. We really were taken with the idea that we could build something that would essentially cost us nothing after we put in the initial money. A lot of our wages are currently going towards rent, utilities, etc to a place that we don’t own, and we don’t benefit from (aside from sustaining our lives which is great, thank you landlord). If we freed up all that money, we could use it for something else, sure. Another way to look at it is that we no longer need to earn that extra money. We could have that time instead – to play with the cat, to learn how to do accounting/basket weaving/dark arts/bake a mean apple pie. The things in life you remember, the stuff that really make this life YOUR life. Essentially, we could have more of that by cutting down on the stuff we don’t need and aren’t using.

So a week after our wedding, we bought a trailer.