Corrugated metal sheet makes a surprising but stylish finish for the bathroom, which includes a composting toilet and a small tub that Jenna uses to give her dog a bath.
Courtesy of Tiny House Giant Journey (www.tinyhousegiantjourney.com) and Guillaume Dutilh.
The distressed reclaimed wood details in the interior make the home feel like a cozy bungalow.
How I Ended Up in a Tiny House
Experiences versus Stuff: Minimalism
Before you run out and get yourself a tiny house, there are a few things that you should ponder. It’s potentially a big, life-changing step, and being a bit introspective now will pay dividends down the road. People wind up gravitating toward tiny houses for different reasons. You should ask yourself, and be clear about, what your motivations are. This chapter will help you sort through some of those drivers.
HOW I ENDED UP IN A TINY HOUSE
I want to give you a little bit of background on who I am and why I’m writing this book. I’m not doing this because you should be particularly interested in my personal story. My story, however, is probably not unique—chances are you’ll see some parallels with your own life.
I grew up in Canada, and my earliest memories are of being outdoors fishing, camping, hiking, and doing a lot of fun stuff. As an only child, I was lucky to have two parents who focused on me, and I got to spend a lot of quality time with them. In my teenage years, I wound up in the New York City area, and then, after moving around some more, including a stint in Europe, I found myself gravitating toward the New York City area again. Subsequently, I got married and had a child of my own. It was at that point when I realized the environment that I was living in was very much a suburban, densely populated, and congested area, and that this was very different from my experience as a kid. There were simply not enough trees.
My daughter running around outside of one of my gypsy wagon builds up in the Catskills.
As a father, I wanted my daughter to have some of the same experiences that I had had when I was younger. I started to think about purchasing a piece of land somewhere reasonably close by where we could spend some time. The idea was to camp and have a place to escape to from the nuttiness of the outskirts of New York City. I found an area not too far away in the southern region of New York known as the Catskills. We could easily get there for an overnight trip or even a day trip. Once I had purchased a property there, though, I wasn’t sure what to do next. It was a great location, it was on parkland, and there were about three and a half acres to roam and explore. There were trees galore—I now owned the woods. Well, a tiny little part of it, at least.
Then I discovered Jay Shafer’s The Small House Book. I don’t remember exactly how it fell into my hands, but sometimes when we look back at things, we realize that they were just meant to be. I started looking through that book and was very intrigued. I wasn’t a huge fan of tiny houses on wheels at that point, but I did like the concept of a cabin or a small building built on a foundation. That book got me thinking about the land that I had purchased. One nuance of the land was that it was zoned for recreational use only, which meant that you couldn’t build a substantial, permanent structure on it. You could put up a shed, or a pagoda of sorts, but you could not build an actual house, even a miniature one. This recreational zoning of the land made me revisit my views on tiny houses on wheels, because tiny houses on wheels can get around a lot of zoning regulations by technically being a custom recreational vehicle (RV). They don’t fall under the same restrictions as traditional building structures do, and they generally don’t require planning/building approval.
My daughter lounging and reading in one of my tiny builds.
Aerial drone shot over my Catskills, NY, property. It’s beautiful up there.
With grand visions of a tiny house retreat in my head, I went so far as to purchase plans for a house from the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, which at the time was the premier supplier of all things tiny house related. I got the plans, I looked them over carefully, and I realized it was a somewhat daunting task to build a tiny house on wheels. I don’t come from a construction background, and these were architectural plans that had many symbols and details on them that were not necessarily easy for me to decipher.
Right around this time, Tumbleweed started offering something called an “Amish Barn Raiser.” They were effectively selling you the trailer and doing all the framing, sheathing, and whatever else you wanted them to do on top of that trailer, short of providing a totally finished house. This was fantastic, because not only did it eliminate some of the fear that I had about doing the framing correctly, but it was also going to save me hundreds of hours of labor and travel back and forth between New Jersey and New York.
Hauling my Tumbleweed tiny house shell back to the East Coast from Colorado. At this point I’m somewhere in Kansas.
I didn’t hesitate to place my order. The build took place, very inconveniently for me, in Colorado, about two thousand miles away from where I was. They did offer a delivery option, but I chose to fly out there and rent a U-Haul truck to tow the house back to the East Coast. All and all, this was a pretty bad idea, because towing a house was a lot for the truck to handle, and the distance and the speed limitations made for a very long and arduous four-day journey. I did eventually get the house back to the East Coast in one piece, where I proceeded to work on it.
Throughout this book, I’ll relate some of my experiences regarding the aspects of building a tiny house, so I’ll leave those details for later, but I did eventually complete my first build. In fact, I finished it just in time for a tiny house show in New Jersey that was being hosted and presented by the United Tiny House Association. In the span of the several
