Building this house was hard work--wonderful hard work involving structural considerations, design elements, troubleshooting, big dreams, hard realities, sudden inspirations and a lot of sweat equity. I look back on our year of building nostalgically now. We had a purpose then, and it was a giant leap forward for our shared dream to live more intentionally and sustainably.
 
More than two years have passed since we moved into our house. We love it here, but with each passing day, the itch to design and build another structure grows. It may be hard for some people to believe, but, at 250-square-feet, we know this house is a much larger space than what we could comfortably live in. Don't get me wrong: We are keeping this house, and we will continue to live here.

I want to puzzle out a smaller living space, and I want to learn a few new skills along the way. When finished, it could serve as a guest room, a writing studio, a rental or as temporary lodging for us somewhere down the road. (Our current house, with its wide profile and especially its wrap-around deck isn't going anywhere!)

For some reason, I got fixated on the teeny tiny house being 8' x 12'. At less than half the size of this house, that seemed as small as we might want to go. I drew up a number of floor plans—some with lofts, some with full bathrooms, some with dining tables and/or desks. No one plan seemed the right one.

I had to dream it up. Literally. I woke one morning having just taken a dream tour of our tiny house. I knew just about everything about it. Dimensions: 8 x 8. No loft. Solar power. No plumbing. Etc. I jumped up, got out the graph paper and started drawing.

Here's a rough sketch of the exterior. On the towing end of the house, a outside shed would hold batteries for the solar setup, water tanks, tools and anything we don't need inside the house on a regular basis. The roof of the house on this end is 7 feet and there's no window (to get broken by rocks or other debris on the road). The roof slopes up to eight feet on the kitchen end of the house.

Inside, the door faces a window for cross ventilation. Another window lets in light and air in the kitchenette. Seating is a sofa that converts into the bed. Even when pulled out in bed mode, there's still enough room to access the kitchen and "the loo." Beside the sofa are two narrow side tables on wheels at coffee table height. They can be pulled out to form a coffee table or for use at ottomans. They'll also be storage. There will be more storage over the sofa/bed on a high shelf and additional storage under it.

The kitchen area has a sink and counter space over cabinets and drawers for trash, silverware, dishes, pots, etc. Water comes from a mounted tank and grey water drains to a container below the house. Cooking is on alcohol burners (like the Origo model we use in this house.) The ice chest is a real dream item; I'm not sure it exists in the real world (but it should). About the size of an ice chest but front opening (not drawn correctly here), it runs off the 12-volt solar. The "loo" is a lined bucket with a toilet seat (a primitive variation of what we use here) that just gets pulled out for use, then cover is added and it gets pushed back into a cabinet. The idea is that showers and most loo trips are to public bathrooms or someone else's house (like ours, when it's parked here).

That's it. My dream house. This is the one I want to build. No doubt there will be tweaking along the way to take care of all the things that make sense in dream world but no so much when awake. First step: find a good deal on a solid trailer, whether new or used. In my dream, we used a lot of reclaimed materials. Collecting that is something to get started on, too. Time to dream on.

We've gotten a few questions recently about cooking in our tiny house kitchen. Actually, the questions are more about whether there's room for kitchen sundries and dishes and silverware, etc. than actual cooking.

I'm happy to say that we have more than enough room for every pot and pan, every dish, every can and cereal box we want. After two years of full-time living in the house, we continue to shed things we don't use—not because we don't have space, but because living is easier when the excess get cleared out.

Below are some of our kitchen storage solutions. We'd love you to add questions/comments below to keep the conversation going.

Our pantry, with full pull-out drawers holds all our non-perishable food, our dishes, our biggest pot, water bottles, and even cleaning supplies. It's part of the wall that separates the bathroom from the kitchen and living area.

Four deep drawers hold silverware, utensils, dish towels and napkins, storage containers, pot lids, cutting boards and serving pieces. Ours, from IKEA, pull out all the way and close softly. The drawer with silverware has an inner drawer to make use of the full height of the drawer.

The counter behind the oven isn't attached. We can lift it to reach a space where we have room to store big items like the pizza stone and peel, baking pans and the countertop sections that cover the sink.

We have a giant sink in the tiny house, and it's a great place to store drying dishes (or dirty dishes!). We cut our butcher block countertop carefully when it was time to install the kitchen, then drilled a hole in the center and sliced the cutout in two. When we need more counter space, we pull out one or both of the inserts and hide away anything we don't want out.

The sink is big, but there's still enough room under the sink to house a point-of-use water heater, a dish towel and cleaning rag, plus  two bins—one for trash, the other for recycling. (The handy bins, complete with fold-down handles, are another IKEA find.)

Open shelves make accessing glasses, the coffee press, and bowls a cinch. (Anything that doesn't look good on an open shelf finds its home in one of the pantry drawers.) A 10-foot-long shelf running between the windows and the ceiling holds china we don't need every day (plus some pretty heirloom silver). We have a step ladder that slides under the kitchen table to access the top shelf.

We make up for any square-footage deficit by maximizing vertical space. Our knives, spices, most-used pots and pans, wooden spoons, water filter and more hang on the wall. Once again, IKEA was both inspiration and supplier for much of this hardware.

​Our refrigerator is big enough to hold all the perishable food we need for a party and/or a week's worth of meals. We went with an Energy Star, space-saving, under-the-counter model from GE that offered the most bang for the buck. What we don't have in our kitchen: a freezer. But that was a strategic decision. Our friend, on whose land we live, already had an under-used freezer in her basement. It takes just a minute or two to walk over and pick up something from her freezer. 

I've written a few blogs about "using every inch." That's nowhere more important than the kitchen. When I realized I had an extra six inches between the refrigerator and where I planned to put the kitchen table, I tried to think of the best way to use the space; a glass of wine helped the thinking. Voila! A wine rack, made from one of my favorite materials: a shipping pallet.

Recently I posted pictures of the barnwood wall behind our sofa and mentioned it was 90% complete. We ran out of steam before we got around to measuring, cutting and installing trim along the edges and top.

And there were the two posts that support the clerestory windows: they were also missing a decorative sheath.  Ditto for the bathroom doorway.

​I'm happy to report the trim is (finally!) in place. It's amazing how much more finished a look it gives our space.

(Now if I could only remember to install the two feet of missing floor trim—already painted and ready to go!—then I could say we've finished off our space.)


​Please click on the pictures below for more details.

I have never been known for my patience. In the past, when I wanted something done, I wanted it done yesterday. Building this tiny house has been something of a lesson in patience. Take our new slate, for example.

We built our tiny house about ten feet away from the screen "house" we built first. The screen house is an open air living space for about 8 months of the year. It's part of what makes our tiny house not feel quite so tiny, and we walk between our two living spaces several times a day. In the screen house, we have a primitive kitchen (cooler for a fridge, a sink that empties into a bucket), a table for dining and a much-used lounge area.  But back to the slate...

Two sets of stairs lead down from the tiny house to stairs up to one of the screen house doors. For more than a year, we've had to step down on to dirt or mulch to cross between our living spaces. (Imagine all my dirty feet and socks...) We had a few hundred ideas about what to do in the gap between the houses, and we actually took the time to weigh them. What would each cost? Would they reflect or clash with what's already on site? How much time would be required, time taken away from other projects? We thought long and hard about what we wanted, and we came to this conclusion: we wanted a walkway of slate slabs between the houses.

The next lesson in patience came when we looked at the cost of slate slabs. At local nurseries and hardware stores, we found prices between $200 and $300 to buy enough slabs the size and thickness we wanted. The walkway wasn't enough of a priority to justify the hit to our bank account. That's when Bill turned, once again, to Craigslist.

He kept his eye out for slate (among a few other wish-list items) and, after a few months, he found it. We paid $15 a slab for pieces larger than what we had been looking at. The walkway cost us only $30, once we realized we could make use of a couple pieces of slate we already had on hand.  The 2x3' slabs were so reasonable, we spent another $60 and had enough to put slate at the bottom of another set of stairs off the deck and under a little table and chairs that had previously teetered on dirt.

That's neither our first nor, hopefully, our last Craigslist find. The set of wicker furniture that we lounge on in the screen house cost less for all four pieces than the price of some new chairs. And then there's the beautiful, metal Emu chairs and table on the deck—in great shape and also a fraction of the price if bought new. We've also scored free landscaping stones and lumber. 

Yes, you have to wade through a boatload of ridiculously hideous and/or overpriced items, not to mention scams, on Craigslist—but, with a little patience, Craigslist can be the tiny house builder's best friend.

After posting the other day about reclaimed materials, a friend reminded me that I'd never posted a picture of the completed "living room" wall. While I can't actually claim it's 100% completed (still missing a board at the bottom and trim on the edge...), I can say I think the old wood we attached to the plywood wall has transformed the room for me. It's warmer and richer, and I love the contrast with the white walls around it. 

We recovered the wood from a collapsed outbuilding up the mountain. Much of it was rotted and needed to be cut away. We cleaned and sanded the best of the wood, then cut off any bad edges and sorted it by width. We thought we might want to stain it, but decided we liked it just the way it was.

And now...the neighbors up the mountain with the collapsed outbuilding have told us they have more wood we might be interested in. Who knows what we'll use it for?

Our square footage may feel limited to some, but the only question we get asked about the size of our sink is why it's so big. So, here are a few answers:
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1. We have room to wash dishes on one side of the sink and fit a drying rack on the other side.
2. We can easily fill our bucket and watering can in the sink.
3. We don't have a washing machine in our house but, in between trips to our friend's house for laundry, we have plenty of room to wash out clothes in the sink. (We hang things in the shower to dry.)
4. We can hide away all the dirty dishes from a dinner party in the sink and not think about them till our guests are gone.
​5. Etc.

Just how big is the sink? We went with a 30x18-inch sink basin that's 10 inches deep. The Kraus model we picked came with a removable rack on the bottom, and I'd never want a sink without one now. Pots don't scrape the bottom of the sink. Not to mention that the rack makes a great, built-in drying rack. Our Kraus facet is high enough to slide buckets, growlers and the like under it to fill, plus it has a pull-out sprayer that lets us get water anywhere we need it in the sink.

Best of all, when Bill cut the butcher block countertop, he was careful to preserve the full section of wood he cut out. We drilled a finger hold in the middle, then split the piece in two. Now we can cover one or both sides of the sink when we need more counter space or want to hide away unwashed dishes. When we want the sink open, the wood sections fit in the space behind our stove where we store pans and our pizza peel.

We had finished three sides of our tiny house when winter hit hard last year. The final side was a challenge even in fair weather. The ground drops away on that side of the house, and balancing on extension ladders to nail boards and screw in metal panels proved difficult and downright dangerous with snow on the ground. We decided we'd wait to finish the siding until we built a deck, which would give us a stable platform. For months, we did our best to ignore the Tyvek house wrap still exposed on that side of the house.
 
Other things took priority. Wiring the house. Plumbing for sinks and the shower. Walls. Ceiling fans and lights. Finally, this September (more than a year after the start of our build) we turned our attention to the exterior of the house again. Bill designed a deck we could build in pieces and take apart, if that ever became a necessity. As soon as we had the platform in place—even before the boards were screwed in place or the railing built—we installed the rest of the house siding (no more Tyvek!) and finished the eaves. Now it feels as though the house is complete.
 
From our first sketches, we had corrugated metal and pine boards in mind for siding. We like the mix of "industrial modern" and "rural rustic" for our mountain setting. The materials echo the construction of many of the farm buildings in the area—plank barns and metal sheds. They have the added advantage of being affordable choices. Sheets of metal run around $20; eight-foot shiplap boards cost less than $10 each.
 
Mixing the two materials helped break up the 24-foot-long sides of the house. And it made it possible to give each side a distinctive look. One side, the side that faces the home of our friend/generous landlady, has only wood because she's not a fan of the metal. Two sides have their own pop of color—green and blue doors.
 
Form follows function in our design. We wanted a home flooded with natural light, so we worked a total of 11 windows and three glass doors into the design of our 250-square-foot house. Putting windows at the same height and keeping their proportions similar hopefully gives the house a sense of balance even though there's a lot of asymmetry going on.
 
Now that our house has four finished sides, we're working full time on getting the deck finished—more on that later.
 
Please click on the images below for more details.

When the subject of our tiny house comes up with people we've just met, two questions pop up more than others: Does your composting toilet smell? Do you have to climb a ladder to get to your bed? The answer to both: No.

We've waxed on about our kitchen and answered the toilet question in past blogs, but we haven't said much about our amazing ground-floor (!) bedroom.  Things are just about where we want them now, with the big exception of installing our wood stove—and, with winter around the corner, we're getting on that.

The bedroom has a compact 11x8' footprint. All our clothes, shoes, backpacks, accessories, jewelry, scarves, and hats, plus books, photos, art and more share the space with our bed. That's possible thanks to a big IKEA wardrobe, an IKEA bed frame with built-in drawers, two above-window shelves and our newly crafted shoe shelf. 

We had planned on building the bed platform and closet ourselves and just went to IKEA for ideas. But when we saw they had solutions that fit our needs almost exactly that cost the same or less than our DIY approach, and they could be up and running in a day (instead of weeks!), we broke out the credit card and brought home the IKEA pieces. The Brimnes bed frame has two massive, slide-out drawers on each side that hold all our jeans, T-shirts, sweaters—and more. The Pax wardrobe fits all our hung clothes; plus, it has three drawers for our socks, etc, a slide-out shelf for a few shoes and a shelf with plenty of room for our "charging station." (Via a small hole cut through the side of the wardrobe, we plug all our phone and computer chargers into a four-plug outlet we installed with just this in mind.)

We went with all black wood in the bedroom, to give the space its own look and feel. The white walls make a great gallery space. A little less lovely to look at—but extremely useful—is a wall of hooks for jackets, backpacks, etc.

​Please click on the pictures below for more details.

Bathrooms require privacy; naturally, we built a wall to separate the bathroom from the rest of our living space. 

But there's no room to waste in a tiny house, so there's more to this wall than meets the eye. In the living room, we have a wall-mounted TV, pictures and shelves. In the kitchen, the wall becomes a pantry. In the bathroom, a recessed medicine cabinet, lighting, outlets and the sink and shower line the wall. 

We wanted to be able to get at the "guts" inside the wall should something come up, so the TV pulls out to reveal two doors and the bottom shutters come off completely, giving us access to all our plumbing. It's a hard-working wall.

Please click on the pictures below for more details.

We prepared food in our tiny kitchen for more than 20 people this week after inviting friends and family to tour our almost-complete home. The kitchen makes food prep and entertaining guests a breeze. The two of us can work in the space without bumping elbows, and more than once we've been told, "The kitchen feels so big."

Some kitchen specs:

Our butcher block counter top runs 9 feet, but feels as though it extends another two feet because our counter-height table sits at the end. If we need even more counter space, we have inserts that fit over the  sink. We cut the counter to build in our oven/stove, and we can lift out the section behind the stove to store pans, racks and the sink inserts when not in use. The counter is IKEA's birch Hammarp, sanded down so that we could stain it to match our other wood. 

The sink is a whopping 32" undermount model from Kraus. We don't have a bathtub, so we wanted a sink big enough to wash out anything that needs cleaning. It's also big enough that we can leave our dish drainer in the sink and still wash dishes beside it. We put in one or both butcher block inserts if we need more counter space and less sink. The faucet is a pull-out, single-lever model from Kraus. Hot water is courtesy of our Bosch mini-tank. More on that here.

The stove/oven is an alcohol-burning Origo 6000 from Dometic. Find more on the stove here.

Our refrigerator is a 5.6-cubic-foot Energy Star GE model. It was hard to find an affordable fridge of this size made to fit under a counter. There's only a tiny freezer, but we have access to a full-size freezer in our friend's house just a short walk away. (One example of many compromises weighed to make the most of our compact space.)

As far as storage goes, our pantry is the workhorse. Six sliding shelves hold everything from dishes to food to cleaning supplies. The top, fixed shelf has room for the toaster, food processor, big pot, colander, water bottles and more. We also built shelves that fit over the microwave and across the top of the window. The long, high shelf is great for extra china and decorative pieces that wouldn't fit in the tiny house otherwise. An IKEA magnetic bar holds our knives and a couple Grundtal racks hold spices, wooden spoons, pots and more.

Our base cabinets come from (where else?) IKEA. We had plans to build our own cabinets and drew  initial sketches. We went to IKEA to get ideas and came home, instead, with cabinets.  We realized they were the perfect size, design and price point--so why reinvent the wheel? We spent extra to go stainless on the doors and drawers, but it was a splurge we both wanted.

The wine rack was a leftover-pallet-wood inspiration because we wanted a finished side on the refrigerator that made use of the six inches left at the end of the cabinets and fridge. Beside the wine rack, our counter-height table features a DIY pallet-wood top with a steel IKEA table base. It's the same dimensions a second table we made, so we can fit them together if we ever want to host a big feast. The folding chairs are also IKEA.

Four pendant lights keep things bright with LED bulbs. To cover the holes in the ceiling, we came up with the idea of using old kitchen tins sourced at an annual flea market that raises money for the hospital. (The fish mold on the wall came from the same sale.) At this point, you've probably already guessed that the lights came from IKEA.

We like our modern conveniences here, so a pint-sized LG microwave sits atop the counter. It's big enough to fit a dinner plate, but small enough to be energy efficient. 

We don't have to but we choose to filter our drinking and cooking water. That's where our beautiful Berkey comes in. In the tiny house, we have the "Travel" model; in the screen house, we use the "Royal" model so we have enough water to wash dishes in our makeshift sink. Here in the house, we installed a shelf so that the Berkey didn't have to take up counter space. The spot beneath it makes a great home for our compost bucket.

That's all I can think of for now....Please ask questions about anything I've left out.

Please click on the pictures below for more details.