[tinyhouselistings.com]

I love this! The only thing I would need to figure out is what to do about severe weather...Tornados, for example. Perhaps build a root cellar? I wonder how much extra that is?

I built a tiny house in an area with extreme weather, "wreckhouse winds" in Canada on the coast. It is holding up fine after 5 years. The neighbors usually come to check it out after a sou-easter and it is still where I built it. Also dome-shaped tiny houses can withstand all kinds of natural 'disasters'.

vermontnl Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I built a tiny house in an area with extreme
> weather, "wreckhouse winds" in Canada on the
> coast. It is holding up fine after 5 years. The
> neighbors usually come to check it out after a
> sou-easter and it is still where I built it. Also
> dome-shaped tiny houses can withstand all kinds of
> natural 'disasters'.


Hey Vermont, have you had any tornados or very high winds? I don't know what wrecking winds or Sou-easters do. What would you say allows it to stand when trailers typically are the most prone to tornados and the like?

Look at this one...

[tinyhouseswoon.com]

GREAT blog I found about small houses off the grid: [www.120squarefeet.com]

There's only one reason to buy a tiny house - because you can't afford a bigger, more comfortable spacious beautiful house where you won't feel cramped and you'll have enough personal space - overcrowding leads to aggressiveness. It's also harder to keep a dinky house clean and neat and tidy than a regular sized house.

Plus a lot of those tiny new houses cost way too much money for what you get. You could buy a bigger older house for the same price and have a ball fixing it up. That teeny Trekker house costs $19,000. You get No Land with that. My brother bought a small 1100 square foot, two bedroom ranch house with a half acre in upstate NY for $25,000 and it's cute.

Doesn't make sense to me unless you're trying to make a statement.

I love my big beautiful home and Thank God that I'm living here in the mountains with a creek and land to garden. Fresh air, no traffic, fresh mountain water, plenty of room.

I don't mind living small but the kids need space to make a mess and run around when the weather outside isn't friendly. I'd still want some dirt around my place to grow plants though, and a porch. Tiny would be fine for me later on when the kids move out. I don't find it difficult to keep tidy and clean but I can be a bit of an organizational freak so lol.

This house is ridiculous.

[www.huffingtonpost.ca]

And this one is even smaller!
[www.thelittlehouse.ca]

I like small places. I live in a village with some houses a half mile away worth $2 million. I went past million dollar houses to come here to post, LOL. I don't envy them a bit. You have to put a lot of energy into maintaining that. I just have no interest in keeping it up.

I read Tori Spelling's autobiography because I thought it would be interesting to know how she liked growing up in mansions. She is infamous for living in the biggest house in CA, supposedly. Something like that. She used to curl up into closets or little spaces and I think it was due to wanting that cozy, intimate environment. There is something too cold for me to imagine living in a huge space.

It's funny you mention Upstate NY. I wish to live there. I have looked on Craigslist and there are so many places like you describe with land and a small house on the cheap. I agree with you but I think people are attracted to the simplicity idea of paring things down to the bare minimum. The energy used is also greatly reduced. Even a small house might generate several times the expenditure. The blog I linked is very helpful in any case because they are living off the grid, so it provides info on how to do it.

coco - I agree that kids need space and I think the more rural the better, coco. I wish my two older girls could have grown up here in VA in 'the big house' instead of NJ in 'the little house' where they shared a bedroom. Also I enjoyed those photos of the tiny and large houses in Toronto; I never realized that city is so expensive. I could live in a smaller house someday, maybe 2000 square foot, if the ceilings are at least 9 feet, there are lots of big windows, open floor plan instead of just a bunch of separate rooms, at least three bedrooms - one for me, one for my husband and one for guests - two and a half baths - I like having my own bathroom.

LOL, that's what you consider small? Wow girl, do you clean all day long? How do you keep it organized? The floors alone, whew!

Don't take this the wrong way but ... I think I see how you believe poverty doesn't really exist. What you just described as living space for 2 people is beyond luxurious. I can't even imagine.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/12/2013 02:55PM by coco.

It's just that after having lived in a dinky house with one bathroom and two bedrooms for five people, now we're in the big house. I got spoiled. So someday when I go smaller, I have my standards that are in between big and little. It's great not having to share a bathroom with other people - you can just keep your stuff all over the place and not have to clean it all the time. And 8-foot ceilings seem claustrophobic after you've had 9-foot ones,loads of windows and light are happiness-inducing and an open floor plan makes any house seem bigger and flow. But if you don't get along so well with your house-mate, you want the separate rooms where you can get away from each other

I think it's always the plan to have land with the house. I wouldn't want to live in a small house with no land.

I bet that those people who love little houses love the way the houses are so well thought-out in terms of organization. That has to be the reason for it.

banana who Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> You have to put a
> lot of energy into maintaining that.

(Not so sure of that - stuff breaks down on smaller houses as much as large ones and maybe it depends on how new or old the house is. Where we live now, we have no lawn to mow; it's all natural landscape, mountains, hills.)


> There is
> something too cold for me to imagine living in a
> huge space.

(I guess it depends on how big you like it - maybe 10,000 is too huge, but 3500 is just right.)


> It's funny you mention Upstate NY. I wish to live
> there. I have looked on Craigslist and there are
> so many places like you describe with land and a
> small house on the cheap.

(Where I grew up and my brother lives is way up at the top of the state, near the boarder of Canada and it's extremely cold there - below 0 often in the winter - you might not like that.

NY State has some beautiful areas - we love the Catskills, but it's probably way expensive to live there. The Adirondack Mountains, like Lake George area - my old stomping grounds - is beautiful.)

> I agree with you but I
> think people are attracted to the simplicity idea
> of paring things down to the bare minimum.

(Now that I'm an empty-nester, I planning on paring down my 'stuff' and getting organized for retirement someday. But that's just my closets full of things - I hate the minimalist look in decor. The modern minimalist furniture makes it look like an office or fast food joint.)

I don't like that décor either, blech. Minimalist means something else to me entirely. I decorate like the hippy bohemian I am, I just don't fill the space up with lots of stuff. I keep it simple with lots of emptiness. Even when it's a small space, I still want that sense of actual "space".

Oh, I like Bohemian decor. I can see how that's your style. Are you on Pinterest - there's a ton of photos of Bohemian decor there. I have one Pinterest account for decor photos and another account for Raw Food Recipes.

I can't do it without never leaving the computer again, lol. That pinterest thing is DANGEROUS!
I've got an enormous file on the computer of images that I love, more pictures than I can even look at. Every now and then I open that up but that's all I allow. That and scouring thrift stores, that's so fun and inspiring.

Here's the minimalist decor -

[www.minimalisti.com]

Like I said - they look like cafeteria room chairs.

Here's Bohemian eye candy for you -

[www.houzz.com]

Totally love the bohemian style, lol, that's exactly me. Mine is more simplistic than that though, I get antsy when things are too "busy".

That modern stuff is horrible, who could feel comfortable in a living space like that? It's so cold. I have to say though, the room with the brick walls, wood floors and ceiling beams is gorgeous. Not what I'd do with that space at all but the actual room I love.

One thing I noticed about the minimalist decor that makes it look 'cold' is the almost total absence of soft warm fabric - curtains, rugs, pillows, throws, etc. Also, often there is mostly sharp angular furniture rather than curved. I love brick that's painted white or whitish with the brick showing through.

I can be comfortable just about anywhere. The modern, minimalist places look fantastic to me. They remind me of an external reflection of what I would like my mind to be...uncluttered and peaceful. Love the floor to ceiling windows.

You're right - the architecture is beautiful. I just don't like the decor - the angular hard stick furniture. The black brick photo is good, though.

I don't like the one with the cow on the wall and a couple have tacky furniture.

[tinyhouseswoon.com]

[www.youtube.com]