In late July I co-taught the Tiny House Design-Build Class at Yestermorrow in Vermont with Lizabeth Moniz and Patti Garbeck. Over the course of 2 weeks our 14 students developed designs of their own and worked together to build the shell of a small shed house on skids. During one of our morning in the second week Alexei Rubenstein of Channel 3 News stopped by to see what we were up to. And our class made the news last week. Check out the Tiny House Class video clip from Channel 3 to see what Alexei saw when he visited! WCAX.COM Local Vermont News, Weather and Sports-
Tiny House Jamboree 2015
What an incredible weekend! In April, when Lee Pera of Boneyard Studios first invited me to speak with her about tiny house communities at the Tiny House Jamboree, there were 3,500 people signed up to attend. By the time she and I connected in the Denver airport and drove to Colorado Springs, there were 11,000 people pre-registered. So we figured a third of those folks would show up and that would be the largest number of tiny house enthusiasts ever in one place at one time. Little did we know. (No pun intended!) Turns out those of us who find tiny houses irresistible are in good company! By the time the three-day event wrapped up more than 40,000 people had passed through the gates of the Western Museum of Mining & Industry (which hosted the Jamboree)!
And what a great crowd! There was incredible energy since everyone I talked to was curious, excited, and exploratory. The tiny house curious folks were just beginning to dabble in the tiny house scene. The tiny house enthusiasts came with sketch books, cameras, and tape measures so they could get serious about their design ideas. One woman even showed up, checkbook in hand, ready to take a leap of faith into the little life! I met people from nearly every state and a few other countries. (Oh hey, #famousfrieda!)
On Saturday morning during our presentation, Lee and I shared 5 Models for Tiny House Communities and 5 Steps to Create a Tiny House Community. I also got to watch and listen as other presenters shared their expertise. Molly Orendorff shared clever tips for decluttering, Damon from Trailer Made explained tiny house foundation fundamentals, Kai Rostcheck of Tiny House Dating played matchmaker for a tiny house dating game, Zack Giffin of Tiny House Nation described the increasing interest in the little life, and so much more! I even got to watch as Andrew Odom performed a vow renewal ceremony for a couple’s ten year anniversary. (And the best part? Their three year old held my hand! Eep!)
Part of the time I tabled with Patrick from Artisan Tiny House, who created my SIPs kit and kits for two sets of clients whose houses we put up this spring. Part of the time I tabled with some other great folks who designed and built their own homes and are now helping others do the same: Lee Pera of Boneyard Studios, Alek Lisefski of The Tiny Project, Vina Lustado of Sol Haus Design, and BA Norrgard of A Bed Over My Head. When I wasn’t tabling, speaking, listening to speakers, or exploring the tiny houses, I had great conversations with great people: Gabriel Craft of Small and Tiny Home Ideas, Gabriella Stupakoff Morrison and Andrew Morrison of hOMe and Tiny House Build, Byron and Dot Fears from Simblissity, James Taylor from The Company Store on Wheels and Orlando Lakefront at College Park (an RV park turned tiny house community) and hundreds of others!
Yesterday I spent the day with Robin, a design client of mine here in Denver. In addition to identifying next steps for her house, she also took me to see Wee Casa and invited me to speak at the Denver Tiny House Enthusiasts Meet Up. That was oodles of fun, too!
It’s thrilling to see so many people exploring intentional living through tiny houses. I don’t think the timing could be better for Ramping Up Niche Consulting LLC. I’m honored to have been part of the first Tiny House Jamboree. We’re hoping that as soon as Darin Zaruba of EcoCabins (and his team - hey, Angela Alcorn, Coles Whalen, and Marcus Alvarado!) have a chance to get some sleep they’ll decide to host the second annual Tiny House Jamboree. I’ve already marked my calendar for the first weekend of August in 2016. See you there!
Tiny House Design-Build Wrap Up
Yesterday we wrapped up our Summer 2015 Tiny House Design-Build class at Yestermorrow. After A Week of Tiny House Design-Build our students had their noggins full of considerations and their drafting tables full of bubble diagrams, inspiration boards, and sketches. The tiny house shell we constructed had its two long walls framed and sheathed and we were ready to put up the end walls.
This past week everything seemed to accelerate. In the field, we framed and sheathed the end walls, put up the rafters, sheathed the roof, installed the storage loft joists and decking, and installed the interior walls and the bed platform. (This tiny house is available for sale! If you’re interested in learning more, please contact Mark at Yestermorrrow.)
In the design studio, students synthesized their design ideas into drawings and models. Three special guests, Mac Rood, Kathy Myer and Chris Cook, all architects, joined me for desk critiques in the evenings to serve as sounding boards for the volley of ideas and questions. It’s always remarkable to me to see how everyone’s designs evolve over two weeks as they wrangle their hopes and needs into spaces that could facilitate the lifestyles they desire. We even snuck in another field trip to the fabulous and well-thought-out home of Ethan Waldman of The Tiny House.
As I noted last time I taught Less Is More, Presentation Day is always a bit like Xmas morning for me. There’s so much anticipation and so much delight in seeing our students designs revealed! I’m especially a sucker for the elegant details everyone comes up with!
This time around we had a variety of tiny houses on wheels with clever ideas such as:
- A closet tucked under a raised bed with drawers that interact with the stairs
- A workbench for projects the length of an end wall
- A mosaicked shower under a sleeping loft with a peek-a-boo view
- Rotating quarter-moon disks to increase counter space in a kitchen
- Rock climbing holds to access a loft
- A swooping countertop with a corner sink
- A fabulous customized desk
- A movable wall that transforms a space into three different rooms
We also had a set of ground-bound structures, including:
- A speakeasy-inspired summerhouse
- A long rectangular house that plays with windows to bring outside in
- A fire-tower inspired octagonal book and puzzle library
- A backyard yoga hut
- A family farm house with a courtyard
- A cozy addition to a fifth generation lake house
I look forward to seeing some of these designs become reality over the next couple years!
Next up for me: spending the weekend with some VT friends (and maybe lending a hand with a tiny SIPs house), a couple days in GA to discuss tiny house feasibility in Atlanta, and then a flight to CO so I can speak about tiny house community with Lee Pera of Boneyard Studios at the Tiny House Jamboree. There are nearly 10,000 people pre-registered! See you there!
A Week of Tiny House Design-Build
Yesterday evening we sent our Tiny House Design-Build students off for a much-needed 26 hour break. Since they arrived a week ago on Sunday evening, we’ve had a packed schedule with lots of hands-on learning. Today they're going for runs, swimming in the local swimming holes, watching a movie, napping, and otherwise enjoying a lazy Sunday in Vermont.
On Wednesday I celebrated another revolution around the sun by exploring tiny houses with my students and fellow instructors and eating lots of desserts (maple creemees, anyone?) We had the chance to go on six field trips to see a 12 x 20 owner-built tiny house, a small live-work space designed and constructed by Yestermorrow’s Semester Program, a wee 2-bedroom featured on Tiny House Nation, a treehouse overlooking a pond, a sculptural house with a barrel vaulted sleeping space, and little efficient guesthouse by the brook. That’s right up there on my top favorite ways to spend my birthday! (Though my Big Birthday Bash at the Tiny House Hotel was pretty good, too!)
In the studio, we’ve done presentations on a variety of topics ranging from considerations for site, climate, and finding parking to options for systems, foundations, and interior design. Our students brought a variety of design ideas including several tiny houses on wheels (THOWs), a portable sauna, a tree house, a one-bedroom flat retrofit, a tiny house truck, and a backyard library with sleeping nook. During our time in the studio they’ve been finalizing their programming, exploring layout through bubble diagramming, practicing their drafting skills, and building models. They have so many clever ideas I can’t wait to see what they come up with during our studio time in the next week!
In the field we’ve been constructing an 11x16 tiny house on skids so we’ve had lots of practice with measuring, cutting, nailing, leveling, remeasuring, plumbing, shimming, bracing, etc. The house has a shed roof, a sleeping platform, and two storage lofts in addition to the kitchen and hang out space. We’ll continue constructing the shell next week and we’ll take it as far as we can in the time we have. The tiny house will be available for sale, so if you or anyone you know is interested, please contact Yestermorrow!
Cabinets & Built-Ins Class at Yestermorrow
Whew! What a busy couple weeks it's been! A week ago I wrapped up my role as Project Engineer & Sustainability Coordinator for the Breathe Building and presented our owner, Chris Calarco, with a stack of Operations & Maintenance Manuals. The heap of materials was so huge I offered it up via hand truck. It's been a true pleasure working with Chris' team and I look forward to visiting the building when I return to the west coast in a few weeks! Until then, I wish them all the best wrapping up final details so Yoga Union, Prema Health, and Fern Kitchen can get settled in and open for business.
Then I kicked off My Summer Adventures with My Annual Pilgrimage to the Oregon Country Fair. It was splendid to have quality time with my fairy godfamily in Corvallis, OR and to share this experience with two of my landies, Karin and Isha. Saturday night we drove back up to Portland and my landies dropped me off at the airport for a red eye flight to Vermont.
So I'm Home Again at Yestermorrow and this time I get to stay for three whole weeks! The past four days I've been taking a Cabinets & Built-Ins class. Our instructor, Justin Kramer, is a fabulous teacher and he's done a great job providing a huge skill set in manageable doses, answering approximately a bazillion questions, sharing lots of tricks and tips, and letting us make and learn from little mistakes (while helping us avoid the big ones). We've been building a cabinet which will be used in Yestermorrow's South Studio.
On the first day we got a thorough woodshop orientation, familiarized ourselves with the plans for the cabinet, and built the "carcasses" for our cabinet out of 3/4" cherry plywood, using pocket screws. The second day the team I was on milled down bass wood for the face frames and attached them to the carcass with biscuits while the other team routed out the backs of the cabinets and installed the plywood backs. I'd never milled wood before so this was a great experience! Yesterday we prepared the wood for our pine drawer boxes and built the cherry doors for the cabinet, using dominoes to secure the frames and inserting cherry plywood panels. Today we practiced joinery techniques on our drawer boxes, using three different methods (fingerjoints, dovetails, and pocket screws) and installed our doors on their hinges. We also created a plinth for the cabinet to sit on, built shelves which sit on pins, and started building the web frame for our drawers. Tomorrow we'll continue with the drawers and finalize our cabinet. It's been a great project and I'm more excited than ever to get back to the woodshop at Simply Home Community!
Next week I'll be teaching the Summer 2015 Tiny House Design-Build course. Stay tuned for updates. Meanwhile, if you'd like to read up on what it's like, you can read the day-by-day account of the 2013 Tiny House Design-Build class.
Oil, Spice & Everything Nice
Editor's Note from 2/24/16: This post was lingering in draft mode and I decided it was high-time to get it published!
I loved designing and building my tiny house, The Lucky Penny, but I've also thoroughly loved the process of Making it Home. I've been finding A Place for Everything and this past weekend I got my spices and oils all set up. I wanted to have both of these things handy but out of the sunlight since sunlight can diminish the quality of both oils and spices. I think it's pretty cool so I wanted to share it with you. Here are the solutions I came up with!
I bought a bunch of spices recently at an awesome shop called Sequim Spice & Tea, while visiting family on the Olympic Peninsula. But I hadn't come up with a good plan about how to store them yet. Last week I was hanging out at my favorite tea house, Townshend's Tea on Alberta Street, and I realized that the little containers they use for loose leaf tea would be perfect! The woman behind the counter told me where I could buy them online and a couple days ago my containers arrived. I labeled all of them and sorted my spices into them and I now have them tucked into a set of flatware dividers I picked up at Ikea. They work splendidly! It's so nice to be able to pull this drawer out and see everything at a glance. Oh, and you can also see that I have room for two squeeze bottles here. These have my sweet liquids in them: agave and honey.
Remember those copper canisters I found on my Tiny House Treasure Hunt? I decided they'd be perfect to hold my oil containers. So I purchased a set of food grade plastic squeeze bottles and filled them up with a variety of different oils (avocado, sesame, extra virgin olive oil, etc.) and vinegars (balsamic, apple cider, white, etc.) Thanks to Simply Home Community's Bulk Buys, I was able to fill my bottles from the community supply, knowing I'll be able to refill them as needed.
Because we have Community Dinner between four and six nights per week, I do most of my big cooking in the Big House. But I often do cook little things (breakfast, tea, lunch prep, and weekend suppers) in The Lucky Penny. So it's nice to have a good collection of spices and oils so I can prepare a variety of food and enjoy Cooking in the Lucky Penny!
So Much Tiny House Goodness
This month is jam-packed with tiny house goodness:
This weekend I'll be participating in the Tiny House Conference, where I'll be speaking about tiny house Building Basics and leading the Open Source session. I participated in the Tiny House Conference in Charlotte last year and it was a great chance to meet several of the bloggers I'd been following and corresponding with as well as hundreds of other tiny house enthusiasts. I'm thrilled to get to catch up with old friends and make new ones at the Tiny House Conference again! People are already starting to roll into town for the conference. Yesterday I saw Jeremy Beasley who created the film Small is Beautiful, which will be show at the conference. (I'm in it, but I haven't yet seen it, so that will be a fun experience!)
But first, on Friday I'll be participating in the Tiny House UnConference, which is a networking event to support tiny house businesses and innovation. I can't wait to swap ideas and inspiration with other tiny house advocates!
And of course, on Friday afternoon there's the Tiny House Mixer Extravaganza hosted by Caravan - The Tiny House Hotel and Portland Alternative Dwellings.
The last weekend of the month I'll be cohosting a Tiny House SIPs Wall Raising Workshop with Angela Ramseyer of MightyMicroBuilt. We're working with a fabulous couple with whom I did design consultation, so it's really exciting that we'll be helping move their tiny dream into the next phase with the wall raising using a SIPs Kit from Artisan Tiny House. If you'd like to join us, please register for the workshop.
And the following weekend Simply Home Community is hosting a Tiny House Community Tour. We'll be introducing tiny house community curious folks to how we created our tiny cohousing community.
And, of course, in amongst all THAT tiny house goodness I'll also be doing some consultations and design work for space-efficient housing.
Hope to see you at some of these events!
Upper Cabinet Trim
Like so many other owner-builders, I moved into my tiny house before it was completely finished. By the time it was livable, I was ready for a break! When my Move In Day & Housewarming took place in November, I hadn't yet finished trimming out, but I was eager to find A Place for Everything. Sure, it was out of order to hang decorations before I'd finished trimming out that last window, but it turns out the trim wasn't as critical for my everyday life as having my mason jar racks in place!
This weekend I finally:
- installed the last beadboard panel under the upper cabinets,
- ran the cords for my plug-in kitchen lights so I can turn on any of the four sets of lights with the flip of a switch,
- trimmed out the window over my tansu,
- hung my new curtains on curtain rings,
- installed curtain hold-backs, and
- added outside corner and scribe molding to the upper cabinets.
I also plugged in a string of lights above the upper cabinets which lights up the ceiling. The light string is on a timer so they turn on in the morning (as my first alarm clock) and again in the evening. When they turn off in the morning I know it's time to head for work and when they turn off in the evening it's time to wind down for bed. It's much more pleasant cue than an alarm clock!
Trim projects still to come include the skylight box and the entryway. My landies and I are setting aside a day in a couple weekends to help each other with lingering projects, so it will be fun to see what more I can accomplish with a couple other sets of hands!
Less Is More Presentation Day
Presentation Day at Yestermorrow is always a bit like Xmas morning for me. Dave and I posted our list on Wednesday evening, asking our students to incorporate context/site, floor plans, elevations, and sections and/or models into their Friday presentations. And we were up late with them on Thursday night. So it’s a little like sending a letter to Santa and then trying to stay up to catch him. (Several of our Less Is More students were still up at the eleventh hour when I called it a night!) But inevitably, some of the design magic happens after we’re fast asleep, visions of elegant details dancing in our heads. We never know exactly what we’ll find on the presentation board when the designs are pinned up of the following day, so it’s a wonderful surprise!
This morning our presentations began at nine and everyone presented his or her work and then receive feedback from their classmates and our reviewers. Paul Hanke and Kathy Meyer are both architects and seasoned Yestermorrow instructors, so they brought a fresh set of eyes and great insights.
It was a delight to see the designs our students developed over the course of the week, including:
- Bert’s mobile house and studio
- Carol’s historic barn to cottage conversion
- Dani’s southern farmstead with indoor-outdoor rooms
- Emily’s complex of yurt dwellings
- Eric’s tiny house on a trailer with a unique roofline
- Genevieve’s little house on the go
- Jason’s timber-framed cabin
- Luke & Katie’s renovation to create a cozy community
- Matt’s caboose-inspired home, art studio, and apothecary
- Max’s sailboat-inspired off-grid tiny home
- Rick’s vardo as showman’s wagon
What an honor it is to teach at Yestermorrow and enjoy the company and creativity of such inspiring students!
I’m looking forward to my next week-long small home design course, which I’ll be co-teaching with John Labovitz in Portland, OR in November. Contact me if you’d like to be added to the notification list for more information!
Less Is More Tours & Programming
We're about to begin our third day of Yestermorrow's Less is More class, which is focused on small home design. The first two days had a similar itinerary: small home tours in the morning, afternoon design lessons, and evening presentation and studio time. (Today the high is supposed to be 17 degrees, so it's probably just as well our tours have wrapped up!)
In just two days we've had the chance to explore seven homes, ranging from 200 to 2000 square feet. And while the larger homes are certainly not tiny (and I wouldn't consider them small either), they did offer good ideas for clever storage, creative work-arounds, and matching layout to program. They also provided good fodder for last night's discussion about design concepts that make small spaces seem larger. We now have good examples to point to as we discuss the strategies we're using in our own small home designs. This group of students has been asking great questions and they do a wonderful job working together to understand the various considerations and trade-offs when designing a small space. I'm looking forward to seeing their designs evolve!
They've already begun exploring layouts both in our life-size mock up and on trace paper. Today we'll continue the process with elevations and sections.
