Tiny House Floorplan Considerations

For months I have been discussing the merits of various tiny house layouts with my friend Jane who is designing and building a tiny house this spring. So it's no surprise that when we sat down with paper and markers earlier this week the draft floorplan for her tiny house developed rather quickly. It was fun for me to ask prompting questions and witness the emergence of a plan.

We began by identifying what functions the tiny house would serve and which would fall to the host house. Jane decided that she wanted her tiny house to enable someone to sleep, eat, cook, and lounge. She considered whether bathing was a necessary element of the tiny house and decided she wants the tiny house to be as self-contained as possible, so she will include an RV-sized shower. But laundry facilities would be overkill in a tiny house and she wanted to avoid the bugaboo of the tiny house world (dealing with a blackwater system), so the host house will accommodate the needs for laundry and a toilet.

I asked Jane to identify what she likes about Brittany's house and other tiny houses she's seen, as well as what she would do differently. She said that she loves the sleeping loft and the window seat, so she'll include both in her tiny house. She would like a little more headroom in the loft and since we can't go any taller than 13'6" we'll go wider by adding a couple of dormer windows. She thinks (and I agree) that a window seat that runs the full width of the house would be a more comfortable place to lounge, so we'll claim the space that accommodates a tiny front porch in Britt's Bungalow and stretch the windowseat longer and wider.

In Britt's Bungalow the kitchen and bathroom are side-by-side underneath the sleeping loft. It works pretty well to have the shower and closet underneath the sleeping loft because it provides a ceiling for these two spaces. Having the kitchen under the sleeping loft works well, too, because the ceiling provides another surface from which one can hang a wine bottle rack, a wine glass holder, a fruit basket, and a roll of paper towels. However, Jane will put the shower and closet at the back and a galley kitchen towards the front of the sleeping loft. This layout will open up the space under the loft to the rest of the house.

As we considered the floor plan, we also talked about the vertical space. I asked Jane where she imagined the windows: where she would like the light to be coming from and which views she wants to capture. She wants to create privacy from the next door neighbors, so she's limiting windows on the east side to two small ones. Having more windows on the west side of the house will also provide a passive heating assist. She likes having the window seat facing the garden so she wants big picture windows there. She also likes the idea of a sliding glass door which will let more light into the house. She'd like to have a porch off of the sliding door to provide outdoor space and connection with the host house.

Drafting up plans is a project for this week, but I can already envision the space in my mind. I've been playing with window layouts on exterior elevations and basic massing in Sketch Up today. It was fun to show these rudimentary visuals to Jane and see her excitement.

Having a sense of the layout enabled us to create a list of used materials to hunt for: five operable windows, four fixed windows, a sliding door, and an RV shower. Time to start scouting Craigslist!

Seeking: Everything but the Kitchen Sink

It seems the first thing one does when committing to build a tiny house is to buy the kitchen sink. Brittany decided to build the tiny house I'm currently living in while she was traveling. So she bought her beautiful sink in Mexico and brought it home as her carry-on item. A tiny sink is the only item I've purchased so far for the house I hope to build someday. It was just $5 at the Builder's ReSupply in Walla Walla and so cute I couldn't resist. John's antique hand pump was his first tiny house purchase and it guided the feel of his design. If this trend continues a friend of mine is going to have a happy and delightfully quirky tiny home this summer.

My friend Jane has been scheming about designing and building a tiny house. She recently asked if I'd help out and I grinned. I've been wanting to build a tiny house for two years now. But I wasn't quite ready to tackle the project on my own. My friend, meanwhile, has 1) no trepidation about big projects, 2) impressive capacity to envision built structures, 3) great follow-through and 4) connections to a veritable army of talented people.

So we've been brainstorming for a few weeks now. As the conversations became more detailed, I decided this would be a splendid Practicum Project to complete my Certificate in Sustainable Building & Design through Yestermorrow Design-Build School. I started pulling together the paperwork necessary for my proposal: programming questionnaire, timeline, draft budget, materials list, etc. Meanwhile, my friend contacted a couple of builders and started searching Craigslist for flatbed utility trailers.

Still, it wasn't until she showed me the kitchen sink yesterday (her first purchase for her tiny house) that I knew for sure that the project was a go. It's official. We're going to design and build a tiny house this spring!

I'll be blogging about the build as a way of cataloging what I've learned. I'm happy to answer questions about the house and progress. Stay tuned!

*Brittany's going to be taking her wee abode back to Olympia in June so that she can rent it out as a bed and breakfast to people who are considering building a tiny house. It's a great contribution to the movement. When people are able to try out the tiny tester they often realize how doable it is. If you're considering trying out The Little Life, get in touch with Brittany at bbyunker@gmail.com.

Tiny House Slideshow

Several of you have asked to see more photos of the tiny house, so for your viewing pleasure, here is a Tiny House Slideshow. Please click on an image to see the captions and higher quality images. [mj-google-slideshow feed_url="https://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/user/113106675420027749099/albumid/5705178479888915265?alt=rss&kind=photo&hl=en_US" width="500" height="500" link_target="google.feeds.LINK_TARGET_BLANK" /]

A Tiny Truck House

For a week earlier this winter every time I caught the bus on Alberta Street I admired the tiny house built on the back of a truck, which was sitting across the street at the transmission shop. I stood there and memorized it: the graceful arch of the front door and the window matching the curve of the roof, the brass clip near the door for hand-delivered mail, the wee windows, and the storage hatches tucked near the cab. When I had a long wait I'd tiptoe around the little wooden gypsy wagon and try to peep in the windows... with little success since they're high and I'm short. The folks working at the auto shop were protective of the little house so I didn't want to push my luck by asking for contact information. I could only imagine that the space inside was wonderful.

Luckily, the tiny house world is, well... tiny. This week I finally got to see the inside of this delightful little abode and meet its owner. In fact, I had the chance to swap tiny house tours with the fellow who built this little house on wheels a couple of years ago.

Entering John's house is like unwrapping a present. John's artistic touch is evident in every ledge, knob, and surface of his cozy home. Sitting on John's window seat on a rainy day, sipping tea, and talking for three hours about the process of designing this tiny house I was impressed by the high level of thoughtful consideration he committed to his live/work/play spac. While John's quick to give credit to the craftspeople whose expertise he relied upon, including Dee Williams, the design is very much his own. I was particularly fascinated by the details that make John's place uber multi-functional. His desk can convert to another sitting space or a dining bar. His bed also serves as extra lounging space. His mom used the window seat as a bed the last time John took her and the house for a road trip. There are little latches that hold the drawers under the window seat closed while the house is in motion. The space under the bed provides easy access from the inside for pantry staples and deep storage for camping gear, accessible from the outside. Did I mention that this house is only 14 feet long?!

John is probably my nearest neighbor if you count only tiny house dwellers. I feel very lucky to have found him since it's always a joy to "talk shop" with someone who shares my passions. It was fun to have John over for tea at my little place, too, and to show him drawings of my tiny dream home. He's already given me plenty to consider as I revise my tiny house plans.

In a future post I'll share more about the tiny house design considerations we've discussed. For now I wanted to introduce John and his wee house, Polymecca. John's house will be on this year's Pedalpalooza Tiny House Bike Tour in June. Mark your calendar for June 24th so you can see it, too!

Lazy Snow!

What a perfect morning for cocoa and hot cereal! The snowflakes that have sputtered around Portland for the past three days are the northwest kind: lazy, sloppy flakes that fall in big clusters and disperse as soon as they hit anything. Even so, they confound us. School is delayed two hours this morning. Many of the busses are sporting chains and running behind. They pile up and then leap frog past each other, alternating stops to pick up red-cheeked folks who have been standing in the flurries for twenty minutes. Passengers are not sure whether to be bemused that two buses arrive at once. They're not suddenly chatty because of the snow, but they are very conscientious about not dripping on their stranger seat mates. Rumor has it the light rail and street cars are still running on time. Another reason to consider rail, but not good justification in a region that gets spooked by the mere mention of snowfall.

Most cyclists have switched to transit, more out of fear of ice and out-of-control cars than the unpleasantries of riding in the snow. Depending on the conditions, snow biking can be plenty of fun. My friend Baker reports that zoobombing in the slush is quite amusing. (If you're not familiar with that particular Portland tradition, wikipedia's zoobomb post can help you out!) On Sunday I rode my bike to meet a classmate for brunch at Pine State Biscuitsand kept blinking as snowflakes plopped into my face. I couldn't help thinking of my eyelids as windshield wipers working on their highest setting to provide proper visibility. As we stood in an unusually short line to place our orders (so many people scared off by the weather!), the snow mustered determination for the first time this season. Giddy Portlanders slipped out of the restaurant to twirl on the sidewalks and laugh about making slushmen after brunch. They then promptly resumed their places so they could ensure that their winter adventures would happen on a full stomach of fried chicken on a biscuit, smothered in country gravy.

Last night the snow actually started accumulating and by time Raffi and I climbed the ladder to our sleeping loft my tiny house was masked in a dusting of snow. Unfortunately, it rained all night, so we'll probably have layers of ice to contend with today.

Meanwhile, the wall mounted Envi heater hasn't been able to keep up with these below-freezing temps. (Read more about my slim electric space heater.) Over the weekend I used the propane boat heater twice because it's such nice ambiance on a blustery day, but the fan is still bothersome. So the past couple of days I've kept the Envi heater running at full tilt since it uses less electricity than the oil radiator heater. I set the timer on the rolling oil heater to come up to temp for the hours in the morning and evening that I want the house warmer. So far, so good.

Between Graphite and Rainbows

It's been an exciting week of tiny house happenings. I was delighted by the responses I received when I shared my blog over facebook a week ago. Thanks for all your encouragement folks!

Last week Eli and I spent a couple of hours sketching out tiny house plans during our weekly Orange Splot meeting. Such fun to get the design ideas flowing within the constraints of road legal (8'6" x 13'6"). I feel privileged to bounce ideas off of someone who designs so beautifully. (See Orange Splot's website for photos of Eli's projects). Of course, it's also fun to share what I've learned about tiny houses with someone else who is as fascinated as I am.

During my Secular Sabbath this week I continued working on my favorite floor plan. I also read a book, took a nap, and went for a run, stopping to people watch at the park. Unstructured time is truly fantastic - even just a few precious hours of it!

This morning I contacted several tiny house dwellers about an inventory of small houses in Portland. If you know someone else I should get in touch with, let me know! I'm coordinating a tiny house bike tour as part of Pedalpalooza this spring, so I'm connecting with others who live in small spaces. I now have plans to visit two other tiny houses this week and I'm excited to learn about their experiences.

And, of course, in between my classes (which started up again this week), I've been appreciating the glorious weather we've been having. Including, of course, a nap in my rainbow-bespeckled sleeping loft with a breeze blowing through the window. Nothing like a patch of sunshine on a January day in Portland to make one grateful for the little joys of life!

A Fresh New Start

Happy New Year everyone!

I still can't quite wrap my mind around harvesting kale for dinner in January. It's the first winter in 10 years that I've lived in a place with mild enough temperatures that we have greens overwintering outside my front stoop! The seasons are more subtle here, but this is definitely a time of transition.

I've always loved new beginnings. Part of the reason I've enjoyed being a student and working at a college for the past ten years is that there are so many chances for a fresh start. I like the idea of setting resolutions that are almost certainly achievable with just a smidge of extra intention. If I determine to do the things I'd like to do anyway, I'm more likely to be successful.

Last year my resolution was to take more naps, more walks, more baths, and drink more tea. I did pretty well at it! This year I will, of course, strive to find fun ways to be active so that people will still think I'm related to my little sister (who just got certified as a personal trainer), but that's what they all say.

So for the next six months, in addition to continuing my habit chart, which for some reason continues to be a good motivator to floss my teeth and contact a loved one daily (what can I say, I'm a sucker for gold stars!), I intend to block out time each week for two things that I want to do for myself anyway:

1) supporting the tiny house movement, accessory dwellings, and cohousing by committing at least four hours a week to my Orange Splot internship

2) honoring a secular sabbath that I have the freedom to reschedule but not skip

Of course, I hope the naps and tea continue, too...

What are you resolving for the new year?

By Hook or By Kindle

I have a few days between visiting family and my internship starting up again so I've been hanging out with friends and finding ways to simplify my life as I head into a new year. Mostly it's involved my new Kindle and a few well-placed metal hooks.

Because counter space is limited in my tiny kitchen and the counter tops are wooden, I've been placing my dish drying rack in the shower to drain. This has worked pretty well, but it's a little obnoxious to have to transfer it every time I take a shower, particularly since my showers only last about five minutes!

Today I made a little adjustment that I'm rather proud of, even though it's not very glamourous. I hung my dish drying rack over my dish pan, so now my dishes are right by the sink, right below the space where they all get put away. Water that drips off the dishes lands in the dish pan which is where I stash dirty dishes until I'm ready to do a load of dishes each morning. This is further evidence that a few well-placed hooks can help to create elegant design solutions. Perhaps I can figure out a more aesthetically pleasing version of this strategy for my own tiny house, but for now, I'm pretty pleased with it.

Now when I want to take a shower all I have to do is turn on the water heater and wait about 15 minutes. Granted, it probably requires more forethought than your showering process, but I'm delighted by my newly simplified system! I've found that by using the "pause" button on the showerhead I have a perfectly pleasant shower with plenty of hot water for two shampooings, conditioner, and a good scrub. I'm not sure how long my shower could be if I didn't use the pause button, but I haven't felt any great desire to figure it out with shampoo still in my hair!

In other news, my cousin upgraded to a new Kindle Fire over the holidays (a xmas present to herself) so she passed on her old Kindle to me. What an ideal gift! I've enjoyed reading the books she loaded onto it. All that wait time in transit suddenly becomes time to read a novel. (On the Corner of Bitter and Sweet was a lovely northwest novel to start on the train from Seattle to Portland during a cold winter day!) I still marvel at how I can switch between different books if I'm not in the mood for the one I've been reading. The device is slim and lightweight. And it doesn't get any more cumbersome to have another book along with me. I've also discovered that a couple of the books required for my courses for next term are available in Kindle format. This is soooo cool! I realize that I probably could eliminate paper books from my life completely if I weren't a student, but I think the format lends itself more to novels than text or picture books anyhow.

There are some books (especially picture-rich design books) that still demand a paper format and I wouldn't have them any other way. I keep a very small collection of design books that I enjoy referencing:

• Sarah Suzanka’s Home by Design and The Not So Big Life,
• Jay Shafer’s The Small House Book,
• Lloyd Kahn’s Tiny Homes, Simple Shelter,
• John Connell’s Homing Instinct,
• Clarke Snell’s The Good House Book, and, of course,
• Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language

Three favorite cookbooks provide inspiration: How to Cook Everything, Moosewood Restaurant’s New Classics, and Passionate Vegetarian. Scrapbooks of my travels to Thailand, South Africa, Belgium, and the Netherlands keep memories of far-off lands close at hand. Nevertheless, the Kindle is a fantastic invention and I'm certain that I'll do a lot more reading now that I have one!

How Many Lightbulbs Does it Take to Heat a Tiny House?

Last fall I designed my tiny dream house in a workshop called Less is More, which was taught by Andreas Stavropoulos and Dave Cain at Yestermorrow Design-Build School. As I was deliberating about heating options, my classmate John joked, "Sheesh! That place is so small you don't need to install a heater - you, your cat, and an incandescent light bulb would heat the place right up!" John had lived on and built boats in Maine for decades so I took most of what he said very seriously. But I also knew I'm a wimp compared to him, so for the last year and a half I've been paying attention to different heating options for small spaces. Heating seems to be a dilemma for many tiny house dwellers. Some folks love wood heat so they install tiny wood stoves and stoke their fires and call it good. A friend of mine who is an arborist says wood is the way he'd heat a tiny house since he has a limitless supply of it. But crawling out of a warm bed to build a fire doesn't even sound fun to me when I'm camping! Besides, I'm a little pyrophobic. Even if I did like building fires I'd need to get good at it so that I could control temperatures so it was comfortable. And since my schedule often involves being gone for 12 hours at a stretch it I wouldn't be around to stoke a fire.

Taking a page out of Jay Shafer's book, lots of folks have installed propane boat heaters in their tiny houses. They have great ambiance (a flickering blue flame) and they heat a space up quickly and without the mess of wood. But in order get the heat distributed throughout the room you have to have the fan on. And the fan is noisy. Obnoxiously noisy. I have a hunch that when you live in central California heat's not quite as critical as it is during the winters here. Portland has a nice, mild climate, but we still have plenty of heating degree days! Brittany installed one of these propane boat heaters (which requires clearances, running a propane line, and adding an additional penetration in the ceiling).

By the time Brittany turned her little house over to me she had pretty much quit using her boat heater. Instead she had switched to a portable oil radiant heater which has a timer so that it can be set to come during certain periods. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a setback temperature so it would come on and bring the temperature up to the set temp from whatever the house had cooled down to. Depending on how cold it is this can take a while! At the end of the set time it again turns off completely. I found that it worked pretty well to just set the temp to about 60 degrees and manually adjust it whenever I wanted it warmer for a while. But it also took up precious floor space, I sometimes tripped over its cord, and it was a little clunky to have to move it every time I shifted the desk over to use it as a table for dining. So I started looking into other options.

Last week my new heater arrived and, as promised by the website, installation took just a few minutes. The new heater is a wall mounted convection heater with a nice slim profile and some sort of special stack effect technology. (I understand the stack effect - I think! - but I don't see how it can be very effective in a heater that is only two feet tall, so I put it on the near the loft so that the height differential can give it a boost.) The heater is made by a company called Envi and after reading reviews for the three heaters on the market that are similar, I went with this one because there's a temperature control and the design has curved edges which I figured would help me be less likely to snag myself on it. The others also had some reviews that talked about worrisome defects and poor customer service, but it doesn't help that all three of them have very similar names. So I sprung for the one that cost $30 more.

Which brings me to the notion that $130 is a lot of money to spend on a space heater - unless it's your entire heat system and then it's nothing! I like the slim profile and it seems to be heating up nicely so I'm impressed so far! It doesn't actually have a thermostat, but it does have a temperature control. I can turn it up and down as well as on and off. I can't tell what the temperature is in my tiny house. But there's only been one day since I installed it that I felt chilly (and that was after I turned it down because I'd gotten too hot). It was also right around the winter solstice. Short, dark, cold days. So for now I'm just keeping it at full tilt and appreciating that it's always warm inside my house.

Perhaps the coolest thing is that, unlike the oil heater which was a 1500 watt heater, the new one only uses 475 watts (basically like having five incandescent lightbulbs on!) Which, I'll admit, got me thinking of John's comment: it might actually be more cost effective in the short term to just swap out all the nice CFLs Brittany put in for incandescents since they produce so much heat I might not need a heater at all! But really I don't think they'd quite do the trick...

Tiny House Sleeps Five Comfortably

My friends Sarah and Jesse from Walla Walla visited yesterday, bringing their pup Dodge along. It was fun showing them the Alberta Arts District and it was chilly enough that our cocoas were a perfect warm up treat. Jesse cooked us a fantastic squash soup in my tiny kitchen and he served it with homemade bread. Delish!

In order to accommodate everyone for the night I moved the camping gear that I usually store in my loft over to the host house where I stashed it in a corner of my neighbor's room since she was out of town. I set up a bed for myself in the storage loft above the door with a foam pad and plenty of blankets and pillows. Raffi slept with me, Jesse and Sarah had my sleeping loft, and Dodge claimed my giant pillow chair as his bed. We all slept really well and they only tricky part is that I only have one ladder. I'd crawled into bed last so the ladder was on my side. In the middle of the night Jesse, not wanting to wake me, managed to climb down from the sleeping loft using my kitchen counter! Did I mention he's resourceful? And tall!

I'm glad my tiny house was Sarah and Jesse's first stop on their road trip down to California. They live at West End Farm in Walla Walla and they left me with farm treats: pumpkin bread and apricot jam. It was a delight having my friends here even if the visit was too short. And it's nice to know that as long as everyone likes each other a lot my tiny house can comfortably sleep five!