40 Tiny Houses in 40 Days – Day 2

I ran across this little vardo at Point Reyes Station Inn. Like most of the structures I’ve collected images of, I don’t know anything about it’s history or interior.

40 Tiny Houses in 40 Days – Day 1

I’ve been shooting pictures of other folk’s tiny houses for over a decade now. While I’ve put some of my images in The Small House Book, I’ve still got some more stuff I should put out there. Here, then, are a few of my favorites- some new, some old.

Utilities in a Tiny House

This is an excerpt from my new book.

This is a six part post. Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 … more to come.

Utilities

Like the rest of the house, utilities and appliances were designed with simplicity
and sustainability in mind. They met my modest needs but would be
considered primitive by conventional American standards. These rudimentary
utilities certainly would not appeal to everyone interested in living in a
small home, and it should be made clear that living small does not require
deprivation. Hot and cold running water, a microwave oven, and cable TV are
all available options.

Water: Tumbleweed was supplied by a simple, gravity-fed plumbing system. A two-and-a-half-gallon pot sat on a metal shelf just above a horizontal section
of stovepipe in the overhead kitchen cabinet and drained into either the
kitchen sink or shower through a Y intersection in a short stretch of rubber
hose. The water was kept warm as long as the heat stove was on, and it
could be made hot by setting the pot directly on the stove or a burner. The
pot was filled at a nearby spigot. Gray water drained directly into the garden.

Heating and Cooking: The best source of heat most structures can use is that of the sun. I installed windows on all but what was intended as the north wall of Tumbleweed for good solar gain. A covered porch on the south side kept the heat of the high summer sun out while letting the lower winter rays flood the house with their warmth. A gas heater kicked in on cloudy days and cold nights. I chose a gas stove over a wood one mostly because gas stoves only require about one-sixth as much clearance from flammable surfaces. This, in turn, allowed me to have pine walls without having to put my heater right in the middle of an already tiny room. The cleanliness of gas also seemed to make sense in a small space, and I liked the idea of precise control with a thermostat rather than the frequent stoking that a small wood stove requires.

The propane tank that fed the heater also supplied an R.V. cooktop. It is upon
this same double burner that a camp oven was set for baking.

Toilet: My composting toilet amounted to little more than an airtight bucket, a can of sawdust and a couple of compost piles outside. Sordid story short,
the bucket was used as an indoor toilet and sawdust was put into the mix
to absorb odor and balance out the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio. This bucket
was emptied onto one compost pile or the other every so often, then rinsed.
(Please see J.C. Jenkins, The Humanure Handbook, for details on this and
other methods of composting human manure.) While the idea of carrying
one’s own poop (or anybody else’s for that matter) to a compost pile off
away from central living quarters may sound both inconvenient and plainly
unacceptable to most Westerners, its appeal for more than a few will be its
absolute efficiency. Without electricity, running water, or waste and only small
inconvenience as its price, a cleaner environment and soil-building compost
are made available.

Electricity: By now, these description of rudimentary plumbing and a plastic chamber pot may have made it sound as if my house was more derelict than
homey. But, as I have said, these utilities were of my choice, and for me,
choice is, in itself, a luxury. In fact, there was plenty of room for modern conveniences.
The integral CD player, TV, and VCR disqualified the house as
an ascetic’s shanty. These appliances, along with six lights, two fans, and a
radio, were all powered by the sun through a single solar panel. I chose not
to mount the panel on my roof but kept it separate. This allowed me to situate
the house in a shady place during the summer while collecting energy at the
same time.

The Small House Book
by Jay Shafer

Price: $36.95

My First Tiny House

This is an excerpt from my new book.

This is a six part post. Part 1 Part 2 … more to come.

Tumbleweed

It was not until after I thought I had already finished designing my little dream home that I became familiar with the term “minimum-size standards.” Up to this point, I had somehow managed to remain blissfully unaware of these codes; but, as the time for construction neared, my denial gave way to a grim reality. My proposed home was about one-third the size required to meet local limits. A drastic change of plans seemed unavoidable, but tripling the scale of a structure that had been designed to meet my specific needs so concisely seemed something like altering a tailored suit to fit like a potato sack.

I resolved to side-step the well-intentioned codes by putting my house on wheels. The construction of travel trailers is, after all, governed by maximum–not minimum–size restrictions, and since Tumbleweed already fit within these, I had only to add some space for wheel wells to make the plan work.

At about eight by twelve feet plus a porch, loft, and four wheels, the resulting house looked a bit like American Gothic meets the Winnebago Vectra. A steep, metal roof was supported by cedar-clad walls and turned cedar porch posts. The front gable was pierced by a lancet window. In the tradition of the formal plan, everything was symmetrical, with the door at exterior, front center. Inside, Knotty Pine walls and Douglas Fir flooring were contrasted by stainless steel hardware. There was a 7’ x 7’ great room, a closet-sized kitchen, an even smaller bathroom, and a 3’ 9”-tall bedroom upstairs. A cast-iron heater presided like an altar at the center of the space downstairs. In fact, the whole house looked a bit like a tiny cathedral on two, 3,500-pound axles.

The key to designing my happy home really was designing a happy life, and the key to that lay not so much in deciding what I needed as in recognizing all the things I can do without. What was left over read like a list I might make before packing my bags for a long trip. While I cannot remember the last time I packed my TV, stereo, or even the proverbial kitchen sink for any journey, I wanted this to be a list of items necessary not only to my survival, but to my contented survival. I am sure any hard-core minimalist would be as appalled by the length of my inventory as any materialist would be by its brevity. But then, I imagine nobody’s list of necessities is ever going to quite match anybody else’s. Each will read like some kind of self-portrait. I like to think that a house built true to the needs of its inhabitant will do the same.

The Small House Book
by Jay Shafer

Price: $36.95

Living Large in Small Spaces

This is an excerpt from my new book.

This is a six part post. Part 1 | Part 2 … more to come.

The Airstream

I have been living in houses of fewer than 100 square feet for nearly twelve years. The first of my little abodes was a fourteen-foot Airstream. I bought it in the summer of 1997 for three thousand dollars. It came as-is, with an aluminum shell as streamlined and polished as what lay inside was hideous. The 1964 orange shag, asbestos tiles, and green Formica would have to go. I began gutting, then meticulously refurbishing the interior in August, and by October, I was sleeping with an aluminum roof over my head. The place looked like a barrel on the inside, with pine tongue-and-groove running from front-to-back and floor-to-vaulted ceiling.

I settled in on a tree-lined ridge at the edge of a friend’s alfalfa field. It was a three-minute walk to Rapid Creek Road and a ten-minute drive from there to Iowa City. I carried water in from a well by the road and allowed it to drain from my sink and shower directly into the grass outside. I carried my sawdust toilet (i.e., bucket) out about once a month and took it to the sewage treatment facility in town. My electrical appliances consisted of a fan, six lights, a 9-inch TV/VCR and a small boom box. A single solar panel fed them all. It seemed that this simple existence would provide all I needed.

Then December came. I had reinforced most of the trailer’s insulation, but some areas remained thin. I spent over a half-hour each morning, from Christmas until Valentine’s Day, chipping ice and sponging up condensation from my walls, floors and desktop. This went on for a couple of winters before I began construction on the tiny house I have since come to call “Tumbleweed”.

The Small House Book
by Jay Shafer

Price: $36.95