The beginning of my tiny house adventure

Ashaya means abode of the heart in Sanskrit, and life and hope in Arabic.  This is the story of my quest for a new smaller home.

A year or two ago I read a story about a 26-year old woman with no construction experience who decided to build a tiny house.  With the help of her father, she built a tiny home for under $20,000.  A friend with land offered her a place to park her tiny home on wheels so she didn’t even have to buy any land.  How fantastic!  

This is a radically different way of starting your adult life, unlike the average couple who buy a home in their thirties and then spend the rest of their working lives – even with both of them workiung full-time – trying to pay off their mortgage.  Often even at retirement their mortgage is not completely paid off.  After the series of “freedom 55” ads, people started joking about “freedom 99”. And it is becoming more and more common that young university graduates find themselves starting out with a staggering amount of student debt of $100,000 or more.

Gradually the tiny house movement is becoming better known.  In addition to a US website listing tiny houses for sale, a number of companies in the US and Canada have started building tiny homes.  The best known is Four Lights, founded by Jay Schaefer, who has been building and living in tiny houses for 20 years.  

In British Columbia, Hummingbird Micro Homes in Fernie offers a fully furnished and equipped tiny house for under $40,000, and is building a tiny house community where you can rent a home for $800 or purchase your own house.  Now there is a plethora of tiny house videos, tv shows, and movies.  

Here is Hummingbird's Cowboy Micro Home

The stairs to the sleeping loft double as drawers.

The living room area comes with an Ikea sofa bed.  These tiny homes come full furnished, and include a hummingbird feeder.  All you need to do is find a place to park them and start living in them!

Here is a link to a short video on a tinyhouse built by a 16 year old, who intends to live in it when he goes to university.

You can even stay in a luxurious tiny house at the Hope Island Cottages Bed and Breakfast north of Seattle.

But building a tiny home is not without challenges.  In most places there is a minimum size of home permitted, meaning that it isn’t possible to get a building permit for a tiny house.  To get around that, tiny homes are built on wheels, without a building permit, and must conform to trailer guidelines, meaning they can be no wider than 8”6” and no longer that 32”, and are often only 16 feet long.  The usual layout includes a loft bedroom accessed by small stairs or a ladder, that is about 4”5” high at the centre of the room.  Being built as a trailer also means that there are weight restrictions that impact the design.

Tiny home enthusiasts are turning to trailer or boat layouts to help design tiny furniture.  Finding suitable appliances is more difficult as well, with the smaller less common fridges and stoves only available online and costing considerably more than the more common larger sizes.

After reading several of Jay Shaefer’s books, and reading countless tiny home stories I was inspired by the idea of small.  The freedom of reducing your belongings, of having small heating bills, and very little space to keep clean had a definite minimalist appeal.  I went through tiny house designs, and started designing my tiny home.  But I was still very undecided if the tiny home lifestyle was for me.  After the glow wears off, is it really a sustainable way of living?