Guest Post by Laura Lavoie

Trust me, I never thought I would be the kind of person to downsize my life and move into a 120 square foot house.  I didn’t like to be outside. I didn’t like to get dirty.  I didn’t like to try adventurous things. A few years ago, something changed for me. I realized that living conventionally didn’t inspire me and I finally decided to do something about it.  When the idea came to us about building a tiny house it seemed like the perfect thing.

Our first taste of adventure came when we decided to move away from everyone we knew to Atlanta.  It was still a safety net, though, because it was a job that moved us here.  We knew we wanted to do something more. We had fallen in love with the town of Asheville, just three hours away from Atlanta. We started to spend more and more time up there and talked about buying some land and building our own house. Our minds were made up when a friend shared Tumbleweed Tiny Houses with us.  This teensy, portable house was perfect!

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Photo Courtesy of Laura Lavoie

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This small beachfront home is the epiphany of a simple yet luxurious beach shack. It’s tiny, yet seems ‘small’. It’s a modern and open oceanfront hut which can completely close up to protect itself from the environment.

It was designed by Crosson, Clarke, Carnachan Architects for a family of five (clients) and it’s named the Whangapoua Sled House because it’s built on large wooden ‘sleds’ so that it can be moved when needed, more on that later. As most of you know, you can’t build a solid foundation on sand so the wooden ‘sleds’ are a great solution, allowing this home to be dragged by a tractor or placed on a barge where it can be moved a few feet or anywhere around the world. Although more expensive and difficult to move because of its larger size in comparison to most tiny houses that we feature, it’s still mobile if you absolutely needed to move it yet large enough for a family to comfortably live in. At 430.556 sq ft square feet it’s not very ‘tiny’, although relative to most homes today… it is!

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Modern Beachfront Cabin by Carnachan Architects… Built for Family of Five. The Whangapoua Sled House!

Photo Credits Jackie Meiring Courtesy of Crosson, Clarke, Carnachan Architects

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This entire micro home including the deck is just 90 square feet. If you only include the interior, it measures just 50 square feet. This is just a bit beyond a tiny house, isn’t it? I’d definitely consider it ‘micro’.

Good news is that in many areas this would just be a simple backyard shed or accessory structure meaning there’d be a chance you won’t need a permit to build something similar. On this one, there’s a downstairs area and upstairs loft both with wonderful views through the large window. Surrounded by nature, forest and wilderness, you can relax in peace, write, or just take a nap. It can even work as an efficient, inexpensive, and handy guest suite for when you have visitors.

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Shed-style Micro Cabin with Deck

Photo Credit Robin Falck

Notice how the window is angled to bring in light and provide great views of the landscape and the sky at night. The lower half is the living area and the upper half is the sleeping loft.

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It’s called the Tall Man’s Tiny House because the builders are brothers and they are both 6’7″ tall.

They designed and built the house just as if they were going to use it for themselves.

So if you’re tall or you plan on sharing your tiny home with someone else who’s tall, this might be your chance to pick up a ready-made home for a really good deal. More details on that below.

The windows are huge which makes it feel so open inside. In the pictures- at least to me- it looks like a much larger home.

It’s also unique because it has both a modern and a rustic feel to it. It turns out that one brother is a builder and the other an artist/designer. It’s no wonder it turned out so nice.

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Tiny House Design for Tall People

Photo Credit Tall Man’s Tiny House

It’s 130 square feet inside without including the sleeping loft. They built it on a trailer with dual 3,500-pound axles and the home weighs an estimated 6000 pounds.

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This post is based on a video created by Kirsten Dirksen of Faircompanies.com about a woman living in a shipping container and a tiny home on wheels with her family.

A friend suggested she build something after being forced out of her last home where she was renting.

After that she was able to attain a shipping container for free that used to bring things back and forth from China.

The homeowner spent $4,000 to convert the container into a home so that now there’s a kitchen, living room, tiny playroom, and more- all crammed into the small space. She customized everything without any previous carpentry experience.

You’ll also get to see the awesome tiny house on wheels that the woman built right beside her container house so that she and her children can enjoy more space.

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Photo Credit Kirsten Dirksen/Faircompanies.com

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In this video-based post, you’re going to learn the basics of how to floor and frame a Tumbleweed tiny house on a trailer. In this video, they are building the Fencl tiny house using an 18′ trailer. The design shown here is 130 square feet without including the upstairs sleeping loft and the tiny front porch area.

Designed by Jay Shafer, the original designer at Tumbleweed Houses (today he’s at Four Lights). his video (below) is going to show you the basics of flooring and framing a tiny house on wheels.

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How to Build a THOW (Tiny House on Wheels)

Photo Credit Tumbleweed Houses/YouTube

The steps outlined below are assuming that you have already decided on a design (either your own or set of plans) and are therefore ready to buy a trailer.

How to Floor and Frame a Tumbleweed Tiny House on a Trailer

Step 1. Buy your trailer, materials, and order your windows

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This episode by Kirsten Dirksen reminds me how important it is to stay creative and open minded while finding solutions for your tiny house build. The owner of this tiny home on stilts found a unique solution to meet building codes for his project: it’s an observation tower. Fred Reid, owner (and airline exec), calls it The House of Tree because it has no electricity or plumbing but it does have an elevated 360 degree view of the trees.

When you’re here, you feel as if you’re one with nature and this allows you to easily escape from everything else. The humble home is approximately 200 square feet and is surrounded by the epic redwood grove. Scott Constable, of Wowhaus, helped design and build this awesome little cabin in the air, who you’ll get to hear from if you watch the video below.

Fred Reid is currently president of Flexjet and has also served as an executive at Delta Airlines, Virgin America, and Lufthansa. This little cabin is his off-grid escape. It sits three stories above the ground in West Sonoma. Let’s go check it out, shall we?

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Tiny House on Stilts Legalized as an Observation Tower?

Photo Courtesy of Kirsten Dirksen and Nicólas Boullosa of Faircompanies.com

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Do you ever wonder what it’s like living in a tiny house?  The best way is to go rent one and spend a few nights in one. That’s why we have a tiny house vacations category. Go try one out if you’re serious about it. But another fun way to explore the idea of tiny living is to sort of daydream and imagine what it would be like living in a tiny house, right?

And the best part is, you can do that right here right now without having to go anywhere or spend any money. So here are a collection of videos that will help you imagine and almost experience what it would be like living tiny! Please enjoy, bookmark this page and return later, and please let me know in the comments… How do you think your life would be like if you went tiny? Would it be better than it is now, you think? Why?

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What It’s REALLY Like to Live in a Tiny House And How to Figure out if it Would be Good or Bad for YOU…

Images © Modern Tiny Living

To tiny… or not to tiny?

That is the question, right? Let’s explore that questions below.