10 Tiny House Considerations
The 500 Things Project Ep. 12
It’s been almost a year since we moved out of our yurt experiment and I am still thinking about it. Mostly I shake my head at the version of me that thought it was a good idea, but lately I’ve been taken aside by wistful hubris: “I bet we could do it so much better. I bet we could make it work if only…”
Don’t worry, Mom. I have zero plans to move back into a tent. Pinky promise. (If I ever say so, please beat me over the head with this blog post. Or anything else at hand. Thanks.) But I do have Some Thoughts about the process that I’d like to share in case someone you love is 25 and feels the need to scratch one last itch for Questionable Adventure before their prefrontal cortex finally comes into its own. Here we go.
10 Thing to Consider Before Tiny House Living
Have you tried camping?
Living in a half-finished situation for six months might work for some people, but if I had gone even one weekend without running water before charging ahead on yurt building, I would have realized the error real quick. Give yourself the chance to make an evidence based decision.
Budget thoughtfully.
The usual rule of thumb for a big project is to make your budget and then add anywhere from 15-25% to account for the unexpected, but that only works if your initial budget is right. We had six weeks and something like $3000 to get going but in hindsight we needed closer to six months and $10000. Patience would have paid off great dividends.1
Prioritize necessities: Light.
I don’t know how submariners do it. I lived without a window for five weeks, with the whole world outside my door and plenty of fresh air, and I nearly lost my mind. Somehow I didn’t realize it was affecting me that badly until we had fixed it, which may be why we didn’t do it for over a month. START WITH WINDOWS.
Prioritize necessities: Water.
We used 7 gallon jugs we could fill up just across the road, but like a lot of things, this got old real fast. Even a spigot outside would have been a game changer.
Prioritize necessities: Waste management.
When our first stab at a DIY composting toilet didn’t turn out how we expected, it fell to the bottom of the to-do list while we focused on staying warm and also employed. I would not recommend subsisting on the equivalent of a DIY porta john for more than… never. If you are not a pro at pooping in the woods (I know some people are and kudos to you), this is a must have before you hit go.
Remember you will be in close proximity, all the time, to every part of your home.
Don’t use materials you don’t want to smell on the daily. And I’m not talking about our DIY toilet, if you can believe it. We decided to smush a layer of fiberglass housing insulation between the inner liner and the outer shell, which was a messy job but worked very well. Then the weather turned warm, and it still insulated but smelled awful. Go with the lower R-value but infinitely more handleable reflective bubble wrap. Or anything else.
Go big.
Ironic advice for tiny house living, perhaps, and again each to their own, but there’s likely a reason the most popular yurt kits are 30 feet in diameter. Our 24-footer was big “enough” but it wasn’t comfortable. Because of circle math, a 30 foot diameter yurt has 50% more area than a 24 foot yurt but wouldn’t have been that much more intensive to build.
Keep the outside outside.
This is the purpose of a shelter, yet by the end of our stay it had warmed up and we were joined inside by the most persistent crabgrass, a colony of ants and, one night, a woolly bear IN MY BED. These could have been prevented with basic proactivity involving some Roundup and a simple hard barrier around the bottom edge of the wall.
Use protection.
Unless having morning sickness in all of the above circumstances sounds like a good plan to you. I could turn this item into a whole essay I’m not ready to write2, so I’ll leave it here for now.
Make it beautiful.
It’s difficult to build beautifully and poorly at the same time. The best and most beautiful part of the yurt was the actual bones of it, the wooden wall and roof rafters. No regrets there.
So that’s the list. Hear me now, though: the takeaway here isn’t that if you build a tiny house you must have windows and running water and whatever. I hope instead that it’s a call to make decisions that reflect what matters to you. I can’t guarantee that I’ll never make a dumb decision again (ha), but now I know my future dumb decisions should not include voluntary alternative housing. I can also hope that I spend a lot more time and energy preparing for big projects.
Until next week -
Love,
Amy
FYI, those numbers don’t account for all sorts of things we didn’t have to pay for, including discounted lumber, access to essential tools and equipment, and rent-free land.
That essay starts with the sentence, “I would not trade my baby for the whole ding dang world.”