The biggest…littlest…um, the latest news in Tiny: La Petite Maison. I’m sure you’ve heard of it; it isn’t all that new, but this 12 year old girl has been taking the tinyverse by storm.

She has been featured in a guest post on the Tumbleweed Tiny House blog. She appeared on Andrew Odom’s r(E)vo Convo Podcast.

She and her Mom even got a chance to visit the Tiny r(e)volution while it was still in Georgia. She also recently visited the Tiny House Showcase, Boneyard Studios, in Washington DC.

There is almost nothing that Sicily Kolbeck hasn’t done and she isn’t even thirteen. As far as anyone knows, Sicily is the youngest tiny house builder on record.

I really wish I had her level of confidence when I was her age.

Sicily and a Nail Gun. Photo from La Petite Maison

Please read below, because Sicily is doing so much more! 

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Last week I spoke about the costs of tiny houses and why I don’t find that figure to be much of a problem. Several individuals mentioned that the $20,000 cost was fine for just the house but what about the cost of adding power systems on top of it. A lot of people believe that solar power needs to be expensive but we have a different experience with this.

The first step is to determine how much power you need if you want to be off the grid. If you’re looking to run a refrigerator, an air conditioner, a washer and dryer, etc.; a small solar power system may not be the best solution for you. We decided to keep our lifestyle as simple as possible to be able to use a scaled down system. We run as much as we can on butane and propane so the only thing that really runs on the solar power are the lights and our computers, including Matt’s massive gaming laptop. And remember, both of us work from the tiny house so we need access to our computers most of the day.

Our solar panels. Photo by Laura M. LaVoie

Do you want to see how we did it? Read the rest below:

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Every product we buy whether it is manufactured in China or made here in the US has a price based on the skill and energy put into creating it. That price can be expensive or inexpensive based on the market for that item. Tiny houses are no exception. The blogosphere often asks why and assumes that tiny houses are too expensive, but are they really?

The only experience I have is my own, so I wanted to share a bit of it with you. Realize, however, I am not the numbers person in my partnership. I have these rough figures but specifics I am not so good at. In any case I do not believe that our tiny house was too expensive to build. It might cost more per square foot than a traditionally sized house, but that was a tradeoff we were willing to make.

The cost of our tiny house, not including the solar power set up, was just around $20,000. This figure includes the plans from the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company as well as the tools we used to build the house. This also includes all of our mistakes. Since it was our first time building anything we had a couple. If we started again we believe we could build the same or similar house for closer to $10,000.

Photo by Laura M. LaVoie

Is this affordable? Yes, I believe it is. Finish reading below to see why I think so.

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My idea for this post on the tiny house movement and building social infrastructure for it took a few twists and turns before it became the finished product you’re about to read.

It started with this video, featuring Dee Williams of Portland Alternative Dwellings and the folks from Boneyard Studios in DC.

Something that Dee said really stuck with me, though I imagine that most just let the statement go by.

She said, “the relationships that I have developed by living small have really surprised me. All of a sudden I’ve got a different relationship with the sun, I’ve got a different relationship to my friends, a different relationship with the food co-op, and the library and the Laundromat and all of these spaces and resources that I don’t think I put too much thought into before and now all of a sudden those people and places they make my life possible and they give me a sense of home.”

Dee Williams at Tiny House Workshop

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The Convenience of Modern Living…

…and why I don’t like it.

We just spent the last two months living away from our tiny house with Matt’s mom for the holidays. Two months was an awful long time to spend in someone else’s home and while I was grateful for her hospitality I was also quite ready to leave Michigan and go back to Asheville.

There were a couple of things that I had started taking for granted living in the tiny house. They are opposite what most would expect but they were troubling to me.

• How easy it was. I immediately missed my chores. I loved the simplicity of emptying our gray water bucket into the artificial wetland each day. I had become accustomed to breaking up my work day by going outside to handle my daily chores about 10am. As soon as we got to Michigan I felt unbalanced. I suspect that conventional life has become much too easy. Technology allows us to be hands off. As things are becoming more convenient are we becoming more disconnected with our own lives?

How important is this? Photo by Laura M. LaVoie

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Tiny House Living Expectations: Simplifying or Roughing It? Article by Laura LaVoie

This post on the realities of tiny house living over at Trying on Tiny was brought to my attention. In it, Audrey mentions the unexpected things they’ve had to face since moving into their tiny house; and not all of them have been pleasant.

Audrey and Tomas chose to downsize their lives and hired a builder to construct their tiny house. Because of their lifestyle, they weren’t able to be with the builders on a regular basis and it wasn’t until they had their little house delivered to their doorstep that they realized that there were some things they hadn’t considered.

Audrey mentions some of the challenges that have come up including mold issues surrounding a leaky drain and chores they took for granted in their old life.

She calls her expectations something of a “Tiny House Fairy Tale.” Audrey had a perception that downsizing their lives and moving into a cute little house would solve all their problems not create new ones. She writes, “It’s simple to flush a toilet; it’s not as simple to carry a urine bucket outside and ‘fertilize the garden’.”

Photo by Laura M. LaVoie

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Two Tiny NYC Apartments by Laura LaVoie

As someone who lives in a tiny house, I am very familiar with that look of horror and the question of  “how can you live in a space so small?”

Sometimes it isn’t worth answering but it depends on who’s asking. I think from now on I’m going to answer by reminding them that people have been living in tiny spaces for a long time and many even smaller than our 120 square foot home. When they continue to be incredulous I will point them to the mythical land known as New York City.

I am sure there are plenty renters in tiny NYC apartments who would look at my tiny house in the mountains as a luxurious estate. Back in 2010 Fair Companies produced a video about Felice Cohen who showcased her 90 square foot apartment in the city. When I saw this video it was early in our own building project and I was inspired by her tiny apartment. In fact, we took the idea of curtains for closet doors and applied it to our home.

Photo Credit Faircompanies/YouTube

Watch the video tour below along with an even tinier New York City apartment:

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It is funny for me to turn on HGTV and see a small house about the size of my own called an “Extreme Home.” For me, and I am sure for most tiny house dwellers, these little spaces are just “home,” not extreme at all. On Thursday, December 6^th HGTV aired a segment on tiny house bloggers Tammy Strobel and Logan Smith along with their tiny home designer Dee Williams.

The segment, only a few minutes long, was a quick look into the way tiny house owners live their daily lives. The integration of their environment to their daily activities is most notable and I think is one of the most fascinating things I notice about people who chose to simplify their lives in this way. None of us just slog through life waiting for the next thing to happen to us. We are people who take control of our world and face it deliberately. They focus on Tammy leaving her corporate job to pursue writing. I believe that this drastic lifestyle overhaul is what allows many of us to live our dreams.
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Photo Courtesy of RowdyKittens.com

I encourage you to read more about tiny houses featured on HGTV below:

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