tiny homes to inspire

Amy, those hobbit homes are simply scrumptious! It seems there are more and more earthen sheltered homes these days.

Oooh, I like this one! She made room for a tub! And the shower is awesome, too.

Jocelyn Campbell wrote:Oooh, I like this one! She made room for a tub! And the shower is awesome, too.

I like that there's actually a strip of counter top long enough to cook! I also like her stairs to the loft. Are you ready to tackle a skid-able version of this at Wheaton Lab?

Jay Angler wrote:Are you ready to tackle a skid-able version of this at Wheaton Lab?

Not at the moment, but I do wish I could build a tiny house here!

Flo's beautiful home is inspiring and well designed (everything neatly fitting into place!)  Wonderful.  

I've done some research on American Clay plasters and here it is, used inside this tiny house. Along with other fantastic features, too.

Just watched this fascinating youtube vid on a small but natural home she's made and lived in for 20 years!  Love her lifestyle!  Only wish it went into detail about what she eats, e.g. grows...

This is quite the luxurious tiny home, but I love many of the design elements in this one. Plus, they show her reading the Hand Sculpted House book - nice!!

I agree - I love the living roof over the deck and spare room! She's clearly put a lot of thought into it and it's clearly a "professional" looking house rather than some do-it-yourself ones I've seen that don't always pull together. Usually I have a problem with the kitchen not being large enough to easily cook in, but she seems to have managed that here also.

Personally, I wish the "departments of making you sad" would consider that 100 years ago families that often had at least 6 people in them, made do with 800 to 1200 square feet, and now many families have only 2 -3 people and yet houses have gotten larger. We shouldn't have to build on a trailer, with all the restrictions that gives, in order to build small, efficient homes. Even worse, you can't build a workshop beyond a certain size if your house isn't a certain size. A friend wanted to build a "two-car garage" workshop for his art-jewelry business with a loft over it for his photography business and was told if his house was an extra 1000 square feet, it would be allowed. To me, that's totally backward! Let's have smaller houses and larger work-shops so people actually learn to do stuff and fix stuff and build stuff and up-cycle stuff!

Kirsten Dirksen has many videos where a house is very small and low impact. I always wonder how many "so low of an impact the building codes don't allow them" houses there are too. For example the video below is certainly super low impact, and you could pretty much walk on the roof and not know it was there if it didn't have the walking path in the front. But as soon as the Department of Making You Sad finds out it's toast, so the cautious person isn't posting videos advertising it. I'm a fan of the green roof also providing shelter from the roving eye of Google Maps- used to be that Cob Cottage Company in Coquille Oregon was only visible due to the greenhouse, but now several of the newer buildings are missing that green roof and they stick out when you zoom in. I'm not sure what kind of vegetation I'll try growing on my future green roof, probably some combination of perennial groundcover and flowering plants for bee food, which doesn't require real deep roots. Tap roots and waterproof membranes don't mix! It's annoying to think that a person would have to "throw away" money to build the minimum permitted by code setup including concrete foundation and septic, and still have to hide "accessory buildings" from view to live in a space you enjoy without it costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.


Being Paul-tall myself, I don't see this being an option no matter the shape of my knees, but more power to him! I think an Oehler-Wofati house would be great, so long as you build where there's no codes to be turned in by the neighbors!