Dillashaw - Tiny Houses: The Perfect Tiny House, With Tiny House Example Plans

Living in a smaller space isnt new. There have always been people that lived in small homes, whether that was in small apartment space in cities, those that preferred to live in trailers, or retirees looking to downsize. Often those choices came out of a financial necessity; with tiny houses there is an intentional decision to live in a small space that will suit all of your needs for a long time to come. With only 300 or so foot to play with often a tiny home will have everything you need in just one room.

Traditionally smaller houses that put nearly everything in one room, the infamous studio apartment, have been made cynically. It is a small space an investor saw could be turned into a living space for a reasonably high rent. The conversion is done cheaply and what was a lounge room and hallway is now a bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and lounge. Rather than having storage space that is built cleverly into walls, a bed that works well as a couch during the day, and a dining table that folds out; instead the creators would throw typical, and cheap, furniture into a small space and tell tenants to grin and bear it because they were getting slightly better rent than average for the area.

The problem with these smaller spaces is not that they are small, but they are poorly designed: both structurally and in terms of decoration. The space is used only in a horizontal way when there are many ways to give yourself more breathing space if you simply used the walls to store and hold things. No thought is given to using furniture to create mini-compartments in the space, and lighting is limited to a dingy light bulb. Compromises must be made in a tiny house, for example a huge wardrobe full of coats is going to be difficult to accommodate especially when some under bed storage and a simple coat hook could accommodate nearly all of your clothing with almost no space used.

So this comes to one of the biggest reasons that tiny houses are becoming popular with average people and not just Spartan hermits. Advances in technology and innovations in design mean that using a smaller space is now much easier. Just consider something such as the humble television, where it used to require an entire room of its own to reasonably fit in an area; it can now be tastefully fitted directly on to the wall. There has also been a lot of work in making smaller spaces, especially in densely populated cities like Tokyo, so that now you can easily find plans for entire kitchen units that can be folded away when youre not using them. We have also gotten much better at making kitchens and bathrooms that can work in small spaces without needing an outhouse.

Lastly, fashions and tastes have changed over the last 20 years, influenced heavily by Scandinavian countries, to start having a minimalist look. People are actively choosing to have a cleaner and less cluttered look around them. Bulky wooden cabinets and four-posters are seen as gauche and the naturally smaller furniture is taking its place. Once you reduce clutter and excess furniture you naturally require less space.

Just because there is the option for a small house doesnt mean people are necessarily going to want smaller space, or compromise when they dont need it. Why have fold-out corners of office space when you can just have an office in its own room? Lower cost might seem like an obvious reason, but the cheap cost should not be overstated initially. Compared to building a two-bedroom house yourself building a tiny house is going to be much cheaper, but you do still have to pay to build the tiny house and unless you are going to do every element yourself it is certainly not going to be cheap.

In fact certain elements of the designs of a tiny house are going to be slightly more than your standard big empty rooms that you fill up with furniture. It is difficult to later rebuild a small space to fit your new needs, so a tiny house needs to have space for a sofa bed built into it, and you need to consider how shelving will fit in. In addition, you might struggle to build a tiny house in some locations because its not fitting in with the image the area is cultivating.

Yet there is still ample money to be saved. As much as you may lose flexibility in terms of re-shaping your home later, it does not cost that much to build such a small building and the more hands on you are, the more you can save. Estimates say that if you build the home yourself it can cost as little as $23,000. It might not be entirely realistic to do it all yourself and that cost is not taking into account everything you might want to do to the property and the huge variation in the cost of land, but any way you look at it, that is far less than the $200,000 plus you might pay for another home and it will come with much less interest. The big savings you can count on though are in the maintenance of your home.