A Tiny Natural House

Another tiny houser lives just around the corner!

This week I had the pleasure of meeting a carpenter who has built her own tiny house in the backyard of the property she owns in Northeast Portland. Katie's green eyes start twinkling as she shows me around her Little House: her cozy abode, her labor of love. Katie's only a few inches taller than me and she teaches carpentry for a living. Needless to say, I have a new hero. And since her house is still a work in progress and she's one of my nearest neighbors, I hopefully have a new mentor as well. She'll be working on the Little House each weekend this spring and I've promised to set aside the books when I can to help out.

Katie considered building her tiny house on a trailer but decided against it for two main reasons. First, she wanted a wider house. The 8'5" restriction on width that makes a tiny house on wheels street legal is a major constraint in terms of layout. It's amazing what people have managed to do with less than 9 feet of width, but it's even more amazing what you can do if you have three more feet with which to play! Second, Katie wanted to use natural building materials and was particularly interested in trying out light straw clay for her wall system.

Unfortunately, natural building wall systems and mobility don't play well together. Natural materials are often heavier than synthetic materials and they are more fragile. Plaster and tile are likely to crack if moved and natural insulations are more likely to settle. Natural materials also take up more room to achieve the desired effect. For instance, straw bales provide fantastic insulation against cold and noise infiltration, lend themselves to neat windowsills and windowseats, and create an amazing surface for plaster. I've worked on two straw bale houses and I look forward to building my straw bale dream home someday. In a place like Walla Walla, where straw is a waste produce of the wheat industry, straw bale is a sustainable and appropriate building material. But even if you place bales "on edge" (on their narrowest side), you're still looking at fourteen inch thick walls!

Light straw clay walls can be built much thinner than straw bale walls, but they still require more space than stick framing. Katie's light straw clay walls are 8 inches thick to provide the same insulating value as a standard 2 x 6 wall. Light straw clay is a mixture of clay and straw that is compacted into the wall cavity using either plywood slips or woven mats to hold the material in place while it dries. Light straw clay has the insulating properties of straw with the massive properties of clay and once it is covered in a homemade plaster the walls have a beautiful natural look. Katie's will be a nice creamy color that will brighten up the space and contrast nicely with her dark wood trim and floors. The thickness and fragility of natural wall systems simply aren't practical for a tiny house on wheels. So Katie decided to build directly on-site.

After drafting up dozens of different floor plans she settled on the current layout which includes a main room for socializing, cooking, and lounging, a bathroom, and a sleeping loft that extends over a deep porch. Beautiful beams that run across the width of the house will remain exposed when the peaked ceiling is covered with lath strips. Her bathroom will be a wet bath with a shower head in the ceiling and a drain in the floor. It will include a compost toilet, a soaking tub, and a little corner sink. Katie says her love for entertaining was a guiding aspect of her design. Even though her house is only 190 square feet her fold-out table and open kitchen plan allow her to comfortably host dinner parties for a dozen friends at once. Many of the materials for the house are salvaged including beautiful wood flooring, roughhewn trim, and an apartment-sized electric range and oven. She has shaped her house around the windows and door that she acquired for free. (She's currently on the lookout for two round windows for the loft. If you know where she can score a couple, let us know!)

Katie has enjoyed the sense of independence of doing most of the work herself, but she's also grateful for the help of some talented friends and family members. A group of friends joined her for a light straw clay work party. Her sister, an electrician, is doing her electrical work and a friend who does iron working is helping with shelves. She plans to have a couple more work parties this spring so that she can move in and enjoy summer in her Little House. She is particularly looking forward to sitting out on her covered porch in the evenings to watch her chickens pecking around the garden while the sun sets.

Cheers to that!

Successful Window Shopping

When you're looking for windows instead of through them window shopping tends to be an expensive excursion. Fortunately, it wasn't nearly as expensive as it would have been if Jane had sprung for new windows. She decided to use salvaged windows for her tiny house for several reasons: she's interested in reusing materials to give them a second chance and keep them out of the landfill, she wanted to save money, and she enjoys the character of found objects. We're not going for the cobbled-together look that characterizes so many house trucks, but we knew that using some salvaged materials could give the house some quirky character. Jane likes Britt's Bungalow but feels like it's a little too straight-edge for her style.

So this week Jane and I made a trip to a nearby window liquidators to scout for windows for her tiny house. We had our wishlist in-hand but since we were looking for salvaged windows we knew that we'd have to be flexible about exact dimensions. We also knew we'd be taking a risk that some of the windows wouldn't be in ideal shape. So we set out determined to inspect everything carefully and to set some standards.

All salvaged windows must:

• Be in good working order with all their necessary components
• Have wooden interior frames or wood-clad interiors
• Be double-paned and have screens
• Open in the proper direction according to the tiny house layout

We found a fantastic 5-foot wide sliding door which will be the main door for the tiny house. We snagged a pair of windows that will make good dormer windows in the sleeping loft. We also selected several windows that will work for the kitchen windows. Jane considered purchasing one large new window for the window seat so that she could have exactly what she wanted, but she ended up deciding that going with a fixed picture window and two operable windows on the side walls would provide nice cross-ventilation while saving her several hundred dollars. All-in-all the windows and door cost just over $1,000 (about a third of what they would have cost new).

The design process is, of course, iterative, but having some constraints can actually help make the process more manageable since we're not starting with an endless series of choices. Besides, it's sometimes easier to design around a neat found object than to try to find exactly the right piece to fit into the plan, so the windows are a great find.

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" /]

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!

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...

You Know Those Boxes in the Garage?

The ones you never unpacked from the last move?

I don't have any of those! Hooray!

Today I unpacked my belongings into the tiny house and all my thoughtful consideration as I downsized seems to have paid off. The goal is to have a place for everything so I can put everything in its place. I'm pretty close to meeting that goal. With a few more tweaks I think I'll have it.

My cordless drill and driver set was put to use for a couple of "remodeling" projects. Some of the spaces that worked well for Brittany weren't as ideal for me. I am more a drawer person than a shelf person so I changed the height of a couple of shelves in the kitchen to create space for drawers and baskets I could use for kitchen gadgets and food. I also changed the bookshelf heights to better accommodate my small book collection and I raised the height of the window seat so I could slide my laundry baskets under there since I plan to store my scarves, mittens, hats, etc. in them this winter. I moved a couple of hooks, too, and I'm realizing hooks are awfully useful for taking advantage of vertical surfaces in a small space.

Then it was just a matter of unpacking everything into the spaces. There are a few things that seem luxurious and unnecessary (do I really need a hand mixer? probably not, but if it makes me happy, it's worth having!) Everything fits and there's room for more but I'm going to make a concerted effort to not accumulate any more stuff!

I don't have electricity or water set up to the house yet, so tonight I'll be using candles and probably turning it early because I'm exhausted. It seems like it shouldn't have taken all day to get settled, but moving always takes longer than expected, even in a tiny house!