What to expect at an open house
July 10, 2008 · Print This Article
Our West Coast Tour began today as Jay left this morning for Seattle, Washington. Tomorrow, he’ll host his first open house from 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm at the Habitat for Humanity. Over the next three weeks, Jay will host a total 12 open houses.
Each one is two hours long. We’ve picked locations that are off the beaten path to keep traffic down. We recognized that we could attract much more attention by parking in busy locations, but decided that it was more important to meet our loyal fans. We wanted to keep the passer-bys to a minimum, and have more time with you, our supporters. We hope the crowd will be small and Jay will have time to answer questions. Please keep in mind that this is a great opportunity to see the house and ask some basic questions, but Jay will not have ample time to answer a long list of questions.
You waited too long to announce the location of your Seattle, WA Open House. We wanted to at least go to the open house although we found the workshops too much. The open house is tomorrow; I got the announcement today. We cancelled our plans to attend because we weren’t sure you were even going to have one!
Reply to this comment
Steve with Tumbleweed reply on July 11th, 2008 3:45 pm:
I’m sorry you’ll miss it. I wanted to post the locations earlier but had a family emergency that required me to miss 2 weeks of work. Just got back to work yesterday.
Reply to this comment
Any chance you can make it to the East Coast? How about to http://www.nbm.org/? Let me know if you need help coordinating it!
Reply to this comment
Steve with Tumbleweed reply on July 22nd, 2008 12:45 am:
Yes, we will be there in the future. We need to return from this trip first, and then we’ll start to plan our next trip.
Reply to this comment
As a part of national PARKing Day (Sept. 19th) we are celebrating across Seattle by taking back our public spaces by putting something creative where a not so creative car once was. Your tumbleweed would be perfect. Will you be making the way north to Canada in Sept? Thanks!
Reply to this comment
Steve with Tumbleweed reply on July 23rd, 2008 2:03 am:
No, we’ll be in North Carolina in September
Reply to this comment
Where in Carpinteria are you today? State Park or city beach?? I was hoping you’d get back to me with the answer. Thanks.
Reply to this comment
overhead and simplifying your life. The benefits to this is more time, money less stress and so on. Losing my job and then losing my house to foreclosure has opened my eyes to the bigger picture. Bigger is not better. The more things you have does not make you happier. The fact is, it only continues the cycle of indebtedness and huge amounts of time consumption to maintain and pay for these things! It is insane how much people actually spend for homes, cars, and stuff they don’t really don’t need! My eyes have been opened and I thankful to have finally realized the error in my financial ways. I can’t wait to build my Tumbleweed House! Thanks for the inspiration Jay! You Rock!
Sincerely, Tim
Reply to this comment
I love the idea of down sizing and simplifying your life. The is the perfect answer to lessening your monthly overhead and simplifying your life. The benefits to this is more time, money less stress and so on. Losing my job and then losing my house to foreclosure has opened my eyes to the bigger picture. Bigger is not better. The more things you have does not make you happier. The fact is, it only continues the cycle of indebtedness and huge amounts of time consumption to maintain and pay for these things! It is insane how much people actually spend for homes, cars, and stuff they don’t really don’t need! My eyes have been opened and I thankful to have finally realized the error in my financial ways. I can’t wait to build my Tumble Weed House! Thanks for the inspiration Jay! You Rock!
Sincerely, Tim
Reply to this comment
I went to the LA location several times yesterday (3150 San Fernando Rd/Old Kmart lot) , but couldn’t find you! Updates? So want to see the tiny house! Guess I’ll drive by today, too; maybe you got off-schedule…
Reply to this comment
Steve with Tumbleweed reply on July 26th, 2008 7:19 pm:
Jay was delayed by traffic, and was about 45 minutes late. Did you find the house?
Reply to this comment
Hi there,
I love your houses and am interested in buying or building one. Your site estimates $100- $200 per square foot in construction costs for homes built on a permanent foundation. The Lusby costs $46K to buy from Tumbleweed, but $23.4K to build (117ft x $200). What accounts for the difference in price?
Thanks,
Pam
Reply to this comment
Jay Shafer reply on September 30th, 2008 5:50 pm:
The smaller you build, the more you will spend per square foot in terms of materials and labor. Square footage is actually the cheapest thing you can add on to a house once the essentials (heater, fridge, pipes, etc.) are installed.
Of course, I’m talking about up front costs per square foot. A small house is still less money overall. And once you’ve paid a few heating bills for more space than you really need, the meaning of phrases like “cheap is expensive” starts to become painfully clear.
Reply to this comment
Didn’t know where else to put this, but I just found this looking around at random links for tiny houses.
http://www.ecy.wa.gov/news/2008news/2008-269.html
Reply to this comment
Jay Shafer reply on October 7th, 2008 5:27 pm:
Dee Williams is one of my favorite people in the world. I am happy to see that the sate of Washington has recognized her genius and the importance of small houses.
Reply to this comment
I love the idea of these small houses.
There’s lots of blogging going on which is at first interesting. It seems much of the chat is between people who know about building and reading floor plans and such.
What about the rest of us? I think we’re probably your biggest untapped group of potential customers. Consider the 1-million-plus website hits. Quite a lot of visits for your company to have gone through such financially trying times in the past few years. Everyone seems to love you, so why not more sales?
My take is that pictures are worth a thousand words. Why aren’t there more pictures of finished houses and their interiors on your site (not just pictures of one house under each model)? You keep asking for people to send you their pictures. Maybe offer a discount to those you sell to if they’ll allow you to photograph and post the finished product. Don’t wait for someone to sent it to you for free. People are busy. It probably won’t happen that way. Go to them. Get what you need for the website and show it to us. Something….anything….just let us see more options. Tiny houses and the interiors in different locals, not just out in the middle of nowhere, which is nice as a fantasy but not always the most practical application. People are looking for practical ways of living and how to fit these houses into their day to day lives. Not many live out in a field in view of the Grand Tetons.
Also, it seems folks are hungry for the real thing….to see models of your houses in finished form. The coast to coast tour is great if a person is lucky enough to be in that city when you’re there. Even then, it sounds like people are missing out….the house didn’t make the ferry due to a broken tail light, the house was stuck in traffic, the house came to my town but the announcements were very late in arriving. All good reasons of course, but not what a successful, profitable business is made of.
There’s much well-deserved high praise out there for your finished products by those who have made the leap into living smaller. Yet there’s the rest of us…..a huge untapped market. I’m not a builder or a carpenter. Since you can’t visit us all or have convenient showrooms for your countless potential customers, please, please, please consider setting up some high quality virtual tours of a good variety of your houses (and change them up as new ones come available) so we can at least see our dreams as reality instead of simply reading about blueprints and room options in the endless blogs between people who sound like skilled builders.
Looking forward to lots more pictures or some virtual tours…..
~Anne
Reply to this comment
Jay Shafer reply on January 1st, 2009 5:15 pm:
Good points, Anne.
Reply to this comment
Hi Jay, we are very excited that you will be coming to Boulder in May. Have you picked a site yet?
Reply to this comment
Jay Shafer reply on March 13th, 2009 10:48 pm:
Yes. I’ll be at Homewood Suites (a hotel).
Reply to this comment