only about ten people got to see the work in progress. At the show, however, around three to four thousand people passed through my house during the course of the three-day event. The whole show was pretty overwhelming, and the feedback that folks were giving me was very humbling and something that I hadn’t expected.
Exhaustion and elation sometimes go hand in hand. I was thrilled and somewhat overwhelmed to have won this award.
People lining up to tour my tiny house at the United Tiny House Show in New Jersey in 2017.
There was a constant flow of people. I lost my voice at some point. It was a tremendous, life-changing weekend for me.
My house won best tiny house at the show. Winning was something that I would never have expected. After the show, I took the tiny house back to my property and returned to work, but, in the back of my head, I had realized that this was something I truly enjoyed, more than my dreary nine-to-five corporate existence and massive commute. I was working in advertising technology, which was certainly not a field that I was passionate about. I had many roles in various capacities, but it was always the people that I liked, not the work itself. Sure, I was well paid, but, as many of you know, money does not always lead to satisfaction—in fact, it rarely does. I started working on getting my life-coaching credentials, which is something that I saw myself perhaps doing on the side to help people.
Everything came together. I didn’t really like my job; I had seen that the construction of my tiny house had garnered so much great feedback; and my start down the path of becoming a life coach had also shown me that perhaps there was a life outside of the technology field that I had found myself in.
Here’s the key: At some point in all our lives, there’s a chance to take a leap of faith, to believe in ourselves and do something that doesn’t necessarily feel comfortable (like writing a book). That’s what I did. I quit my job and decided that I was going to focus on life coaching and tiny house construction. The house that I built became a fixture in my life and has taken on a much more prominent role than I could ever have expected.
It’s been about two years now since I left the corporate world, and I haven’t regretted any of it. Sure, it’s a little bit more difficult, and it’s sometimes tricky to structure your days around work and to be disciplined to do what needs doing on a daily basis. But my leap of faith has worked out rather well for me. I’m writing this book to share part of my story and my experience around tiny houses, and I encourage anyone and everyone to consider taking their own leaps of faith, whatever that may look like.
We’re only on this planet for a certain amount of time, and it’s the things that we don’t do that we generally regret, rather than the things that we attempt. Believe in yourself; you can do it, and you have so many resources that can help you do it: YouTube, various websites, and what has become a very tight-knit tiny house community are all great assets for your tiny house journey. Ask yourself, what do you want from life? What is your goal? If you find yourself stuck in a role or a job that you don’t like, then for your sake, please do something about it.
Anyway, that’s a bit on my background and what got me started in this field. Like I said at the onset, your story may be quite different from mine, but hopefully you can take away a piece of my experience.
The interior of my first tiny house. I kept everything to a fairly cohesive theme. I’m still very happy with how it turned out.
A TINY HISTORY OF TINY HOUSES
You may think that people have discovered tiny houses somewhat recently. You’ve perhaps seen a TV show or pictures of tiny houses online, and this is what piqued your interest. The reality, though, is that tiny homes and small living have been around for a very, very long time. The current tiny house trend is more of a rediscovery of living little rather than a purely new phenomenon.
Human beings have always lived tiny; throughout most of history, people have had rather small dwellings. You can go all the way back to caves and teepees, or consider a time in the United States, when people were traveling across the country for months in covered wagons. If you look at older cities in North America, like Montreal, you’ll see various older neighborhoods all featuring compact houses, and the same is definitely true in Europe, which is packed with neighborhoods like these. Small houses were built because it was difficult and costly to obtain materials. Current notions of disposable income didn’t exist; the average person did not live in a world where it was feasible to build larger and larger houses just for the pleasure of it.
The original tiny house on wheels: a covered wagon. Well-known for their role in transporting settlers along the Oregon Trail in the 1800s, covered wagons were glorified storage trailers and not nearly as comfortable as the tiny house you will build.
Tiny houses like these in Lüneburg, Germany, were built for centuries throughout Europe.
Some houses in Iceland, like these from the 1800s, were integrated into the land precisely because there were minimal building materials available for construction. Due to the island’s harsh climate, there are no trees that are suitable for constructing houses. The only wood that used to be available was the kind that washed up on the shores as driftwood.
In the United States in the mid-20th century, though, disposable incomes were more common and more considerable, and it became feasible for the emerging middle class to live in larger and larger houses. Many people started wanting bigger, more lavish homes to show off their success (and sometimes show up their neighbors). This culminated in the McMansion phase that we saw before the housing bubble burst and the recession of 2008. At that time, people rediscovered the tiny living phenomenon, often because they had a certain amount of insecurity with their finances. People also realized that the trend toward ever-bigger houses was not truly serving them. Ever-larger homes benefit towns because of the higher taxes that towns can charge, and the construction companies that build larger houses also derive greater profit from these more substantial structures. There is also a knock-on effect in furniture: since larger homes need more furniture, furniture companies benefit. Larger houses also require additional heating and cooling, so energy providers see a benefit as well. There is a lot of interest from various outside entities to encourage people to live in bigger houses. But in the end, there is little in the interest of the actual people living in them.
When we talk about the modern tiny house movement, one person stands out: Jay Shafer. In the late 90s, Shafer, for a variety of reasons, decided that he wanted to downsize his life and live in a smaller sort of way. He was able to do that by creating a very nicely designed tiny house. He documented his process and put it out to the world, and it started to resonate. People could clearly see the cost-effectiveness and efficiency in going tiny, and it appealed to a lot of different people for different reasons. Dee Williams is another one of the originators of the tiny house movement. She downsized
