Kicking Off 2016 with Small Home Design

 

Happy New Year!

They say that what you do on the first day of the year is indicative of what the year will bring. If that's true, 2016 is going to bring me fun adventures! I started out the new year by hoping on a plane on New Year's day, bound for Vermont. I'm teaching the Less is More class at Yestermorrow, which is a 1-week design intensive focused on small homes. (You can also learn about past Less is More classes.)

We kicked off tonight with introductions and a design exercise to get the creative juices flowing. It was fun to hear about all the tiny house dreams and schemes that our students have. It seems this week on the drafting boards we're going to be seeing tiny houses on wheels, small cabins in the woods, and a smallish vacation home for 12. It should be fascinating!

Tomorrow we'll start out with field trips and then we'll jump right back into the design process.

It's nice to be starting class having already adjusted to the timezone. But really I planned an extra day onto the front end of my trip for two other reasons. First, I was traveling through Chicago. In January. So, you know, contingency. The second is that I've made some good friends here and one of them was celebrating a birthday. We had a fabulous day of... well, mostly eating, really... but other good fun, too! Yay for homemade waffles, fresh oysters, winter wanders, and the ridiculousness that is bowling! I've long liked the idea of secular sabbath but the past couple years I've been rather lousy at unplugging! Saturday was good practice and I plan to continue that throughout the year.

Less Is More: A 1-Week Small Home Design Intensive

Five years ago I created my first tiny house design in a Yestermorrow Design-Build School course called Less is More. Less is More is a 1-week-long design intensive that includes field trips, presentations, and design time. For the past three years, I've been teaching Less is More at Yestermorrow and thoroughly loving it! I hope you can join us this January!

Less Is More: Designing the Small or Tiny House

• Yestermorrow Design Build School (Waitsfield, VT)
• January 3 - 8, 2016
• Registration: https://yestermorrow.org/learn/courses/less-more-designing-small-or-tiny-house

Reese, who took the course two winters ago, is deep into the design phase for his tiny house on wheels, the Shred Shed. Reese looooves snowboarding, so he's designing his little house so that it can not only accommodate his lifestyle but so that the house itself can become a surface on which to perform snowboarding tricks. (You can check it out at Shred Shed.) It was great fun watching Reese go through his initial design process. In Less is More, Reese taped out the footprint of his little house on the floor and then borrowed furniture from the library so that he could rearrange the furniture until he figured out the ideal layout for his tiny house at a life-size scale!

Genevieve took Less is More last winter and she's now building her tiny house on wheels. She has lived in some truly amazing places (including spending winters in Antarctica!) and her tiny house is shaping up to be a pretty amazing place, too.

Here's what Genevieve said about the course:

"I can strongly recommend this course. Lina & David are very helpful. This course truly confirmed my design decisions before building my TH." - Genevieve

If you're serious about designing your tiny house so that you can start building this year, join us in January in Vermont for Less is More!

Here are some posts I've written about the course so you can get a better feel for it:

• Welcome to Less is More
• Less Time, More Drafting
• Less Is More Presentations
• Hello Again Less is More
• Less is More Tours & Programming
• Less is More Presentation Day

A Year Living in the Lucky Penny

It's my one year anniversary of living in The Lucky Penny! November 15th last year was my Move in Day & Housewarming. But Raffi and I officially moved out of the basement of The Big House and began living in my 100 square foot gypsy wagon, The Lucky Penny, on December 1^st of last year. So I’ve now lived in my little house for a full year. And what a full year it’s been!

I celebrated A Year of Little Living in September of 2012 and I commemorated Another Year of Little Living in 2013, but a year of Living in the Lucky Penny seems extra special because this is the house I designed and built for myself (with lots of Tiny House Helpers, of course!) After Offering Gratitudes this week, I’m especially thankful to have another year of Tiny Home for the Holidays!

I woke up to moonlight on my face this morning. It was shining right on me through my domed skylight, which someone recently referred to as my “moon roof.” I love that description! It totally is a moon roof! Of course, it also lets me see the stars, the clouds, the rain, the sun, the birds, and the mighty oak tree I’m parked under.

Here are a few things I’ve discovered after a year of living in this this little house:

• The Lucky Penny works really well for me. I don’t have any major regrets with the design or the construction though there are few things I’d do smarter now that I’ve done them once the hard way. (For instance, you’ll see in Musings on my Vardo Roof Box that I would do the roof differently next time!)
• I love that whatever activity I’m doing is what the house becomes. When I’m sleeping it’s a comfy bedroom. When I’m working the whole space becomes an office. When I’m cooking, it’s all kitchen.
• I have plenty of storage space in my little house. More, actually, than I know what to do with. The top half of my tansu is empty right now as are some of the upper cabinets and I don’t have much in the storage loft.
• When I’m here with just Raffi it’s very easy to do whatever I need or want to do in my house. Once I add another person to the mix we have to navigate around each other more. It gets to be a tango. The dance is fun when it’s my sweetie or a friend, but I can already see that it could get old over time if I shared this space. (Isha and I have talked about trying it just to see what it’s like, but we're happily scheming our Tiny House for Two.)
• I was afraid I would get annoyed by converting my multi-functional spaces, but I’ve found I actually like it as long as I’m not already stressed and in a hurry. For instance, putting My Pull Out Bed away in the morning is a nice part of my morning routine. Getting my drawer top table ready is just the first step of Setting the Table to have breakfast or tea. Isha likes this idea enough that we’d talking about designing it into our Tiny House for two.
• I find I sleep comfortably on My Pull Out Bed in either its closed up or pulled-out versions. The pulled-out version is especially nice because I’m under the moon roof, but it is also quite cozy when Raffi and I sleep on the bed when it’s in window seat mode. And no, I’ve never fallen off!
• Cooking and baking in My Plug & Play Kitchen is wonderful. Although I usually make big meals for our Community Dinners at the Big House, I make my own breakfasts and lunches in my little house. Sometimes that’s as simple as making tea and having a piece of fruit. Other times I get on a baking kick and make cardamom twists in my little house, rolling out the dough on top of My Tiny Chest Freezer and baking them in My Fabulous Toaster Oven.

There are some things still not done. I never have finished out the shower since I’ve been showering at The Big House. (This is one of the many advantages of living at Simply Home Community, a tiny cohousing community.) And still I have a punch list that’s 40 items long that includes little tasks like washing the windows and doing paint touch ups. I’ll get to those eventually. Say, this spring when it warms up again! But for now, I’m enjoying being hunkered down for the winter in my little house!

Now, to go hang my advent calendar and count down the days till I get to go visit my sisters and introduce them to my sweetie, Isha, The Guy Next Door!

Staying at Sol Haus

When I was in Ojai last weekend for the Tiny House Community Workshop, I got to stay at Sol Haus, Vina Lustado’s beautiful tiny house on wheels. And it was so wonderful I must tell you all about it!

Lee and I confessed to each other as we were driving to Vina's that night that we anticipated we'd have some tiny house envy. We’d seen pictures of Vina’s beautiful home, but of course, Vina’s house, like so many other tiny houses, can’t really be captured in photos. The feel of her house is splendid! So cozy, such clean lines, such well-thought-out details. Vina is an architect and her design aesthetic is fabulous! I loved the curve of her spacious desk, the awesome library ladder, and the way the low window in the kitchen makes you feel like you’re cooking al fresco. It was awesome curling up on the comfy bench and falling asleep to the flickering flame of her propane fireplace. (Lee slept up in the loft which has a nest feel with a circular window and an operable skylight!)

There were a few other things Vina did that I was surprised I liked so much. Here are my top three:

1. 

   A ceiling under the loft. I’m used to seeing exposed joists under a loft which I like because it shows off the structure of the house and gives a sense of spaciousness. I'd always thought that a ceiling would make the space seem too small. So I was impressed by how the clean lines and light color of her kitchen ceiling actually made the space feel larger (of course, at 6'8" Vina's kitchen ceiling is about 5" higher than normal. And somehow the loft feels spacious, too! I'm pretty sure it's Vina magic! That and having the walls tall and the roof pitch a little shallower!)

2. A tiled shower. Vina’s lovely tiled shower reminded me that maybe it’s worth considering tile for the Tiny House for Two I’m designing with The Guy Next Door. I used to think tile was a bad idea for tiny houses on the move because of the weight and the cracking potential, but for little houses that don’t move much, I think they can make a lot of sense (especially if they’re small tiles which seem to handle movement a little better). I installed tile in Tandem (under the instruction of a great teacher named Rocky) and it’s held up well.
3. A second sink. I also appreciated the handwashing sink in the bathroom. Typically I don’t feel it’s necessary to have two sinks in a tiny house if there are just one or two people, but since Lee and I were staying in Sol Haus and Vina was in and out hanging out with us and getting herself ready in the morning and for bed, it was quite nice to have two sinks. I’m now convinced that if two or more people are sharing a space it’s at least worth considering a second sink.

I feel very, very lucky to have had the opportunity to stay at Sol Haus. If you ever have the chance to tour this little house, please take it!

Small Home Weekend Wrap Up

What an action-packed weekend it was for little houses!

On Friday I enjoyed visiting with other small home advocates and enthusiasts from all across the country at the Build Small, Live Large Summit. Alan Durning of the Sightline Institute and Dee Williams of Portland Alternative Dwellings laid the scene perfectly in their Keynote Address: The Power of Small. I especially appreciated that Alan’s point that small housing is so often illegal and his encouragement to think really BIG about how we can move forward housing options that are better for people, communities, and natural environments. It was hard to pick between the concurrent sessions, but I’m glad I went to the one about demographic shifts and housing trends because it was really interesting learning about how certain trends (towards smaller households, larger homes, longer lives, delayed marriage and childbearing, increased desire for walkability, etc.) are impacting housing choices.

The five panelists for the Space-Efficient Housing Policy Round Table (Eli Spevak, Jean-Pierre Veillet, Danell Norby, Liz Getty, and Rachel Ginis) did an excellent job describing the regulatory challenges they face in their daily work as they attempt to create small homes. They also presented clever solutions to address or work around these challenges and we left the audience with Tangible Ways You Can Support Space-Efficient Housing.

The Courtyard Clusters session with my heroes Ross Chapin, Mark Lakeman, and Eli Spevak was full of incredible ideas and images. I tried frantically (and failed miserably) to capture the poetry of how smart land use creates sustainable community. I also learned new words like “pre-legal” which I have already begun employing. (Thanks, Mark!)

The Best of Small Design Slam was fabulous, too. As he was ducking out at the end of Mark Lakeman’s presentation, Mayor Charlie Hales leaned over to me and said: “I know a vacancy coming up soon and that guy would be a good candidate to fill it!” I completely agree, Mayor Hales.

On Saturday Eli and I both lead Guided ADU Tours with 14 participants, showing them a great line-up of accessory dwellings. Many of the people in my group are considering creating an ADU on their own property so they had lots of questions about the ins and outs of the upcoming Accessory Structures Zoning Code Amendments and the impacts of Multnomah County’s new method for assessing property values on properties with detached ADUs. It poured down rain all day, so we ended up soaked, but morale remained high as we went to as many ADUs as we could fit in.

That evening we celebrated Simply Home Community’s 1 Year Anniversary with a party at our place. It’s always fun to get our friends together to mix and mingle. We hosted little parties in our tiny houses (at one point I had 17 people in The Lucky Penny!) as well as activities in the Big House. And, of course, we had singing and s’mores around the bonfire to wrap up the night.

Yesterday during our Simply Home Work Party we donned our rain coats and put our garden to bed. (Amazing how much we can get done quickly when working together!) Then Jake, Isha and I hunkered down at Bison Coffeehouse in the rainstorm to work through our Tiny House Considerations Lesson & Challenge for Week 2. (Since I've fallen in love with The Guy Next Door, I'm going through the same process of scheming a tiny house as the other participants in the E-Course!) We had a great conference call for Week 2 of the Tiny House Considerations E-Course and I look forward to sharing the Lesson and Challenge for Week 3 because it’s full of fun design exercises so participants can consider what’s most important to them. The bell rang for Community Dinner just as the conference call wrapped up, so we trooped inside for one of Lindsey’s fabulous meals. Our Heart Meeting after supper focused on capturing our Values in preparation for upcoming conversations about Vision and Mission.

If my weekends are going to be so full, I'm glad that they're full of great things and wonderful people! With a good breakfast in my belly (fried green tomatoes from yesterday’s garden harvest) I’m ready for a brand new week! Happy Monday, everyone!

Small Home Weekend in Portland

This weekend is jam-packed with small house events! Some folks are even referring to it as Tinypalooza! The Build Small, Live Large Summit on Friday, Nov 6th will take place at Portland State University. I'm moderating the Space Efficient Housing Policy Roundtable, which includes a great line-up of panelists. On Saturday and Sunday Dee Williams' company Portland Alternative Dwellings (PAD) is leading a Tiny House Basics Weekend Workshop.

On Saturday, I'll be leading a Guided ADU Tour, showing off 11 fabulous ADUs in Portland. I've lead Guided ADU Tours a couple times now and they're always a blast. This one should be, too, because the ADUs on this tour are beautiful and use lots of clever space-saving tips which I get to point out. Coordinating the ADU Case Studies Project the past two years has been a fabulous experience! I've learned a great deal about the challenges related to ADUs as well as the creative solutions homeowners, designers, and builders have developed. It will be fun to share these tips, tricks, and cautions with the group of people joining me for the tour. My guided tour is sold out, but you can still Register for the ADU Tour and take yourself on a self-guided tour. If you can't make it, keep reading the ADU Case Studies to learn about how other people have created second dwellings to create community, housing flexibility, and additional income.

Finally, on Sunday Caravan - The Tiny House Hotel is hosting a Tiny House Tour and they've asked me to be there. It's always fun showing off Tandem, the tiny house I helped finish out for Orange Splot when I had my Summer Dream Job: Tiny House Design-Building.

I look forward to the chance to geek out with so many other small home lovers this weekend. Will you be there? If so, what are you most excited about?

Build Small, Live Large Summit on Friday, Nov 6th

A couple years ago I participated in the Build Small, Live Large Summit, hosted at Portland State University. This Friday the event is happening again and it's sold out! If you didn't manage to snag a ticket you can still tour tiny houses in the Park Blocks. Meanwhile, for those of you who got one of the golden tickets, I'm excited to be serving as the moderator for the Space Efficient Housing Policy Roundtable. Here's a description:

Although demand is growing for small homes and creative residential developments, there are sometimes regulatory barriers to innovative, space-efficient housing options. Our panel of experts brings a wide range of experience with the very latest solutions in small housing policy, from affordable housing advocacy to regulations pertaining to tiny houses on wheels. This “fishbowl” style panel will acknowledge regulatory roadblocks to small housing, share how successful projects navigated those challenges, and brainstorm policy changes to help small housing options flourish.

Our session, which begins at 1 PM, will include five fabulous folks, with a wide variety of backgrounds, including affordable housing, development, real estate, and policy making.

Presenters: Liz Getty, Urban Nest Realty Rachel Ginis, Lilypad Homes Jean-Pierre Veillet, Siteworks Danell Norby, City of Vancouver, Washington Eli Spevak, Orange Splot

These are the folks I love geeking out with about the challenges we're facing in the regulatory landscape. I look forward to hearing their suggestions for policy changes that would support the creation of more small housing options. Please join us if you're coming to the summit!

Tiny House Considerations E-Course Kicks Off Nov 1st

Early Bird Pricing (20% Off) Available Through Friday, Oct 30th Register for Tiny House Considerations!

This course is specifically designed to help you explore the plethora of options, considerations, and decisions surrounding your design and build.

We'll talk about our inspirations and aspirations as we discuss layout, size, shape, and siting. We'll dig into fun design considerations related to windows, doors, kitchens, bathrooms, and built-ins. We'll also help you noodle through the plethora of building options and make smart choices about your systems for water and power. And, of course, we'll help you figure out if a tiny house is right for you by discussing regulations, cost, and timelines.

The best part is you'll get to do this with the encouragement of other people who are embarking on a similar journey. These folks may well be helping you build when the time comes!

This eight-week e-course will include a weekly lesson, a weekly challenge, and a weekly check-in with your fellow tiny house enthusiasts. The November course begins on November 1 and runs through December 20th. Check-ins are Sunday evenings at 5pm PST (8PM EST). 

The course price is $200. Through Friday, October 30th you can take advantage of the Early Bird Price of $160 (a 20% savings)!

Home Is (Still) Where Your House Is

One of the perks of living in a tiny house on wheels is the ability to have a change of scenery. But I’ve gotta say, I’ve felt a little topsy –turvy in my house the past couple days!

On Sunday morning The Lucky Penny went on A Tiny Move for a Tiny House. The layout has remained exactly the same, of course, but my house was rotated 180 degrees from how it was in my previous spot. So it’s strange that I now turn west to walk through My Arched Door and east to curl up on My Pull-Out Bed! It's not that I'm getting lost in 100 square feet, but things do feel a little backwards!

I imagine that most people wouldn’t be as disoriented as I am in my own darn house, but I’ve always associated my relative directions and the cardinal directions. It all started when I was four years old and my babysitter attempted to teach me the difference between my left and right hands. We were heading west on a walk to the park and I immediately began confusing left and right with north and south. So I got very disoriented about right and left remaining relative to my body when we were turned around and headed east while walking home. Fortunately, I got it sorted out over the years, but most days it’s still easier for me to point west than it is for me to remember which side of my body is the lefthand side!

I went through as similar period of disorientation the first time I moved a tiny house. After six months of living in Bayside Bungalow, we moved the tiny house a few blocks away and oriented it 180 degrees differently. Fortunately, I’m discovering now, as I did then, that Home is Where Your House Is.

And I love my house in its new spot! It’s also now oriented for how I originally designed the house. My bed is to the east, making it easy to wake with the sun. The porch is to the west so I can enjoy sunset skies. And the kitchen is to the south so I can enjoy sunshine on my face while making lunch or I’m doing my dishes. (Also, the sun now can’t shine on my food jars and degrade the contents. I was never particularly worried about this since I eat through my dry food fairly quickly, but it’s not ideal for the sun to be beaming right on it!)

This orientation and location have a few other advantages, too:

• 

  The Lucky Penny is now closer to Karin’s house Serenity so we can say hi from our porches.

• I have a big beautiful oak tree overhead, which will block summer sun from blazing through my skylight.
• I’ll get more winter sun through my south window than I did when I was tucked just north of The Big House.
• I have a great view of the community from my southern window, so I can see people coming and going.
• I am more nestled into the garden so I’ll be more observant of it.

Thank goodness home, is (still) where your house is!

Westermorrow Tiny House Design-Build

On Friday we wrapped up the first ever Westermorrow class – a Yestermorrow Design-Build School course taught on the West Coast. The Tiny House Design-Build class, which has been offered just once a year in VT, has filled up so quickly recently (this past year’s class filled up in just 30 minutes!) that Yestermorrow decided to offer it again here in Portland.

What an amazing experience for all of us! Patti and Lizabeth road-tripped across the country to be here. Dee Williams came down from Olympia to co-instruct with us! And our students came from California, Utah, Virginia, New York, and Illinois. We even had a student join us from South Africa and another from Montreal, Canada! In fact, the only student who was actually from Portland was our client, Merek.

We set up in St. John’s, a neighborhood in North Portland, so that we were able to build at Green Anchors (where I built my own tiny house, The Lucky Penny). We had our studio space at The Colony. And half our class stayed at Caravan – The Tiny House Hotel where they were able to try on tiny living for two weeks while building and designing. Several of them said this was a great experience and two of the seven decided that maaaybe they don’t want to live in a tiny house after all. (They both ended up designing wee houses around 600 square feet - still small enough that they’d qualify as Accessory Dwellings here in Portland, OR and a fraction the size of the average home built in America today!)

We started out our studio time with field trips and presentations covering everything from plumbing and electrical systems to regulations and interior design strategies for small spaces. In the field we started out with safety and tool orientation and then built sawhorses to practice measuring twice and cutting once. By the second week our students were shifting between the build site and the studio to move the house as far along as possible while also creating awesome tiny house designs.

There were definitely some differences between teaching the class in VT and OR. It was strange to not be on a residential campus where sleeping, eating, designing, and drafting are all just yards from each other. But it was also fun being in a more urban setting. I missed being on the scrumptious Yestermorrow meal plan, but it was fun exploring St. John’s eateries (the food carts, Proper Eats, Signal Station Pizza, Super Burrito Express, Big Kahuna’s BBQ, the baowry, etc.) And the second week, once people were comfortable with the area, I switched back to Simply Home’s Community Dinners, which are one of my favorite things!

On the build site we constructed the shell of Merek and his partner Erin’s tiny house on wheels. Their little house has a ½ and ½ roof, meaning that part of the roof is shallower and part is steeper. This allows them to have plenty of headroom in the loft and a more interesting roofline. We nailed the framing together (apparently the Doug Fir we have over here is much harder than the spruce used on the East Coast – we bent a lot of nails as we practiced!) Over here on the West Coast it seems most tiny houses are glued and screwed together instead, so we weren’t aware of this difference! We got the walls framed, sheathed, and raised and the ridge beam, roof rafters, and the first course of plywood on the steeper pitched roof before we had to turn our attention to Presentation Day.

I LOVE Presentation Day! It’s always so inspirational to see what our students create with two weeks of tiny house design and build experience (and for 7 of our students this time the experience of living in tiny houses, too!) We had awesome designs this time around, including several tiny houses on wheels (with a huge variety of layouts and roof shapes and multi-purpose furniture) and a handful of clever ground-bound houses (including an off-grid cabin with creative sleeping for the whole extended family and a small home with space for motorcycles in the living room!)

It was an honor to co-teach with some of my tiny house heros: Dee Williams, Lizabeth Moniz, and Patti Garbeck. I’m appreciative of all the folks who helped make this happen, from Mark, Dan, Luke, and Katie at Yestermorrow, to Matt, Mark, and Kevin at Green Anchors and Rita and Dana at The Colony. I'm thankful that Merek and Erin entrusted us with the beginning of their little home. And I’m especially full of gratitude for our incredible group of 14 students for inspiring me all over again! I can’t wait to follow along on their tiny house journeys! Stay tuned!