Could you live in a tiny house? I could! At least I think I could, but do I really want to.
If you don’t know about tiny houses, they are just that. They are a house, and they are tiny. The typical tiny house is trailer mounted, made of typical house construction, and is no bigger than the trailer. Think about a flatbed trailer that carries ATV’s or cars. They are typically eight feet wide, and anywhere from sixteen to twenty feet long (give or take). Doing the math, 8 x 20 = 160, or rather 160 square foot home. Could you live in 160 square feet? You’d better downsize first. While 160 square sounds small, and it is, but most tiny houses add a loft where a mattress is placed to make up the bedroom, so add 8 x 12 for the bedroom.
With the loft we are up to 160 + 96 for a grand total of 256 square feet. As a single guy, I could do it, especially after my minimal purge. You’ll most likely have power wired in the trailer, so you could plug in, maybe located in somebody’s back yard. Optionally you could choose to rough it and have candles, lanterns, propane for heat and cooking, and maybe a small wood burning stove. I found a one square foot wood burning stove that would heat a tiny home just fine, even in the dead of a Colorado winter. You could have the tiny house plumbed for water, or you could haul water in. There are a vast array of waterless toilets, and people have been bathing without running water for millennia.
The problem however comes when you try to find a place to park your tiny house. I could talk a family member or a friend into letting me park in their back yard. Or I could pay somebody a small amount to let me park on their property. I could even buy some land and put it there. This all sounds good until the city or county finds out what you are doing. Most municipalities, and the federal government, have laws about dwellings, and the specs on a tiny house raise big red flags. Laws control the size of a house, the amount of time that you can live in a temporary home, which includes tiny houses, and how long you can live in a temporary home if you are in somebody’s back yard.
Story time: My folks travel full time, and they have done so since the mid 1990’s. They are members of a large resort club. As a member of the resort club they can stay up to two weeks at any club and then they must vacate for at least one week before they come back. So basically they travel in spurts of one to two weeks and any location. They go North in the summer and head South for the winter. An option for members is to stay for an extended amount of time at select parks. They can choose to stay up to six months at a time. However, at the six-month mark, they must vacate due to law. Most of these parks are designated and travel parks and not mobile home parks, so six months is the longest amount of time. A person, and their RV or tiny home, must vacate the property for at least two weeks before they can come back to stay six months again. My point here is the law. There are laws, and you can’t get around the law.
There are travel parks where you can park your tiny house, hook up to power and water, get cable TV, have black water hooks and the whole shebang. If you are going to do this, you’d might as well just by an RV or a travel trailer, which I’m looking, well, because, I’m only kinda minimal. If you build a tiny house yourself, you are looking at a $20k to $40k spend. If you buy from a tiny house builder you are looking at $50k to $70k for decently appointed unit. I admit, tiny houses are so much cooler than a travel trailer or RV.
Ok, now you have a tiny house and it’s time to move. What will you use to move it? Tiny houses are very heavy, and most small trucks, and some large trucks, depending on the size of your tiny house, are too small to pull a tiny house. The whole idea behind a tiny house is to minimize, so why would you drive a Ford F-350 around just to be able to move your home? If cost is no problem for you, and you like having cool stuff, then by all means, buy that 26 foot tiny house and pull it with your F-350 Platinum, and I’ll park my similar rig next to you after I win the lottery.
Living in a tiny house for me would be a big YAH! However, not knowing when I’m getting in trouble with the city or the feds would be too much stress. I would also need to buy a $60k truck to pull it. Unfortunately, the cons outweigh the pros, so for me, right now, a tiny house is a nah.
I’d like to hear your thoughts. Please comment below as many others would also like to hear your thoughts.
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