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Legally Permitted Tiny House in Asheville


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Wanted to share this legally permitted tiny house in Asheville with you today.

It’s a cabin that was built on a foundation with permits and it meets code.

I’ll show you the house below then you can listen to the interview with the owner/designer/builder below.

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asheville tiny house foundation

Get the rest of the tour below:

Congratulations Marcus! To many more of us doing the same.

Video Tour and Interview Below

Original story found here.

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Do you think you’d be better off with a tiny house on a foundation rather than one on wheels? Which route would you take if you could choose now?

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Alex

Alex is a contributor and editor for TinyHouseTalk.com and the always free Tiny House Newsletter. He has a passion for exploring and sharing tiny homes (from yurts and RVs to tiny cabins and cottages) and inspiring simple living stories. We invite you to send in your story and tiny home photos too so we can re-share and inspire others towards a simple life too. Thank you!
{ 13 comments… add one }
  • Jerry
    June 8, 2013, 9:59 am

    That’s a tiny house just about anyone could live in! I would have put in stairs with that much space, don’t think a straight vertical ladder is right for everyone, but other than that I love this tiny house! I only wish the interview had gone into more details about the permitting process. (Hint- Alex, might want to try to get an interview with him about that)

    • cheryl
      June 8, 2013, 5:07 pm

      I agree with Jerry! I’d love to hear more about the permitting process.

  • Karen
    June 8, 2013, 2:49 pm

    I would love to own some land and have my tiny house permanently built on a foundation, but I am glad that I can build on a trailer and have the ability to move it wherever I want. I don’t plan on traveling around, but I want the option to move onto one of my children’s places in the future. If one of them needed me to spend some time with them, helping out their family, I could relocate to their property pretty quickly and easily, and still have ‘my own’ place to live in.

  • Tom Zollinger
    June 8, 2013, 3:21 pm

    Since we are re-living the 50’s, I cannot justify any dwelling that does not cover a storm/fruit cellar.

    • Hank Beaman
      June 9, 2013, 9:10 pm

      Superior Walls of America will solve that…i am contacting Supeior Walls of East Tennessee for a quote this week,,,,they sell pre-cast water proof, pre-insulated walls, easily installed and quite effecient

  • Erik Markus
    June 8, 2013, 4:46 pm

    Cute houses, for sure.
    But the disadvantage here is they are attached to the ground.
    You can’t move them if you want to move, or in the event of a fire, flood, hurricane, tornado, etc.

    Legal, shmeegal. I’m not living for building codes created to serve insurance companies and realtors. They don’t count. Most “building codes” that involves dictating a size of structure are illegal and need to be removed. They are unconstitutional.

    I’m concerned about housing that is safe:
    +not polluting the ground water or a burden on sewer systems
    +is not using toxic, explosive, global warming, and politically demanding fossil fuels. (Fracking isn’t acceptable.)
    +and is creating it’s own electricity.
    Where are the codes for this ?

    • Kimberly
      June 9, 2013, 1:36 am

      Amen to that!

  • ElTee
    June 9, 2013, 4:48 am

    I absolutely agree with Jerry on the stairs (with drawers in, as we’ve seen in other builds), I think that would have just made it perfect. I would have liked a better look at the loft 100sf loft sounds huge and it looked like he had a bed up there instead of just a sleeping matt on the floor like many we see on here. I adored the ornate metal work in the loft railing & the little doors you could close (to prevent accidents) it made the bed space just seem a little more… private? More a psychological effect, I expect.

    While the video interview was interesting & it was great to see so much of the building process, I don’t feel we got a really good idea of what it was like inside (considering the woman who did the interview was there with him, she could have surely shot a proper ‘walk through’?). There were a few shots but it was hard to build a full picture and all it really did was whet my appetite for more. I know he had to be a bit circumspect with showing the plans if he’s planning on selling them/building more for others, but I was just left wanting to see more.

    As for wheels vs foundation, that’s a tough one, they both have benefits. Obviously if it’s going on a foundation you can make it taller, play with the dimensions so it’s more square (ie so you’re not restricted by width for towing) & heavier, you could conceivably even build it from brick instead of wood if you lived in an area prone to hurricanes. With a foundation you could build a ‘cellar’ underneath to either act as a storage space or for a hidey hole in hurricane/tornado zones.

    All that said, with a TH on wheels, if the weather is gonna get bad or there’s some other local disaster (fire for example), or even just to make your employment options more flexible, you can just hitch up and drive somewhere else. And of course, you’re not tied to where you live, so you could do summer New York, winter in Florida, or wherever.

    Which possibly adds up to the fact I might need TWO TH, one to tow and one to stay on a permanent foundation! lol.

    I wish there was more on legalities of TH (in general), I know that’s difficult because they vary so greatly from area to area, but if everyone who told us about their TH gave a little info on their local building codes it’d help build a useful picture for anyone planning their own TH project. I would especially love to hear about anyone in the UK who’s done the TH thing too & the legal issues around it.

    I really wish I’d discovered Tiny House living when I still lived with my parents. They had a 50′ x 25′ garden (at the rear of the house) that would have been perfect for building me a TH in, maybe we wouldn’t have driven each other quite so crazy at the time lol. In fact we may not have ended up having to move & go our separate ways as I would have been able to have ground floor (1st floor to USians) living (I’m disabled, as is my dad, & we were both having increasing difficulty with the stairs), if I’d had a TH he would have been able to move his bedroom into one of the living rooms of the main house. They moved to a bungalow & I was given a ground floor council flat (for the non-brits our local/town councils own properties that are rented out to people, usually those in need due to disability, homelessness or poverty/unemployment, though it’s not restricted to those demand is high so the most needy come first – incidentally, I believe Tiny Houses could solve much of our housing crisis here, but that’s a whole other discussion).

    Where my parents live now, they were sent notice by the local council that they had to move their *greenhouse* (6′ x 4′ and obviously completely made of see through plexi-glass) as it was ‘outside the building line’, even though it was still on their property & within their property wall. They could’ve got planning permission for the greenhouse but it would have cost twice as much as the greenhouse had (I think the application costs about £800, more if you need to hire someone to help you draft it as they can be complicated forms)! I suppose if you were building a TH that might be worth it, but the idea is to try and avoid having to deal with the BS red tape of local councils by working within their rules & loopholes. The process for planning permission can end up being lengthy and eats into the build budget, and is also contingent on the neighbours & council agreeing the plans. I mean, that’s almost £1000, which could be the cost of your bathroom & kitchen.

    They’re on a corner plot and the garden space that’s not ‘outside the building line’ is much smaller (the greenhouse is now on that lol) & only a fraction of the garden size) so there’s no place to build a TH, as I’m at least aware they have to be a certain distance from the house (can’t recall what that distance is, but they’d only have the space for the TH itself so v.little gap between buildings). They were told they would be allowed to build a conservatory (that would be the size of a TH on the side of the house) without planning permission, but they couldn’t put a greenhouse (or shed etc) on the same spot all because it isn’t attached to the house, some of our laws are…strange.

    Something else that I’d be interested in hearing comparisons between the two (trailer Vs foundation) on the issue of getting home insurance.

    • Jerry
      June 10, 2013, 12:40 am

      You can build your tiny house on skids, which can then be loaded onto any flatbed trailer (and secured), or put on pylons or a foundation, or put on pontoons to make a house boat, etc ,etc, etc. You can have your cake and move it too!

  • Abel Zimmerman Zyl
    June 22, 2013, 2:26 pm

    This is great to hear. There are a couple other current stories about successful siting of tiny houses, on wheels or not. Try searching: Boneyard Studios, Washington, DC. Also, some builders are getting actual RV certifications, like Seattle Tiny Homes. Others are siting within agricultural-worker housing rules, like Tiny House on the Trailer in California.

    Often too, those on foundations just fall under the minimum size (200 sq ft where I am in Washington State) and so, exempted from permits/inspections. Other places may have more stringent minimum sizes and building rules.

    Also, some roots just went down for a potential Tiny House Alliance. This could become a reference point for not only building ‘best’ practice, but it could help catalyze municipal code/zoning changes… and give tiny houses their patch of sun as far as legitimacy goes. Stay tuned here…

    To be fair, tiny houses ARE the patch of sun, as far as I am concerned!

    • Alex
      June 23, 2013, 9:00 am

      Thanks Abel. And it was great meeting you and getting to hang out in Vermont at the Tiny House Fair!

  • Annette
    April 16, 2014, 10:44 am

    Nice looking from outside. But missed the inside which is more important to me. The use of the space.

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