Do you live in a tiny house?

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I could probably live ALONE in a 200 sq foot space with lots of land. I wouldn't mind that. Sometimes, I would camp on my land.

But I would find it difficult to share that little amount of space with someone else.

I get you, Yellowtamarind, about the "small footprint" and the environment and all that.

I'm not creative in the architectural sense. I don't want to spend my life on "projects." I'm not very good at "making excellent use of limited space."

I like hiking and things like that. I like to read. I like to contemplate Nature.

Actually, small flats in cities is the way to go to reduce one's environmental footprint. A small house can use up a lot of resources - or not, depending on what technologies and materials are used.

Our house is just under 1500 sq. ft. We could make do on a little less, as long as we had proper storage, either in a separate building or a basement. We used to live in a 1,000 sq. ft house with no basement and only a tiny garage. That was horrible.

When we were first married, my husband and I lived in a cute 500 sq ft apartment, and that was "just right." Kids, though, take up a LOT of space.

I like the idea of tiny houses, but they wouldn't work for me. Everyone in my family is a musician, and well, that means gear. LOTS and LOTS of gear. I, alone, have a digital piano - and if I had the space, I would prefer a baby grand. My husband alone has four guitars and a couple of amplifiers and such. My son has a double bass and and an electric and an amplifier, etc. The list goes on (truly, I have just touched the surface.) From the beginning of our marriage, when we've looked at places to live, we've had to think about where all the music stuff is going to go.

If I had a tiny house, I would build it on a large parcel of land and live off-grid. If I had the money now, I would build such a place as a get-away.

Imagine confining a Neanderthal man into a 1000 sq foot space!

I currently live with my elderly parents (mutually beneficial arrangement) in a fairly substantial house. However, I could probably go to 200 sq. ft. with no problem. I did share a 450 sq. ft. apartment with my ex wife once, though she has issues with anything less than 1000 sq. ft.

In the late 1990s I bought a studio flat in London that was only about 250 sq. ft. Prior to that I had rented two similar-sized properties. Even with places that size, I struggled to keep them clean and tidy. I now live in a two-bedroom terraced house, and most of it looks like a building site, with bags and boxes of stuff everywhere. The front garden is also a bit of a mess.

The London flat cost me £35,000 by the way. A similar property in the same area would now be nearer to £200,000 thanks to the government's crazy policies, including rock-bottom interest rates. A large percentage of people in London can now not afford to buy even these sorts of properties.

My house is pretty small, but it's awkwardly designed and built and it's in town so I don't like it that much at all.

Replace "music" with "computers and critters" and you'd have our house. I have this fantasy of a tiny house on the edge of a meadow & woodland...in front of an outbuilding resembling Warehouse 13.

Interesting post. I'd love to live in a tiny house, but I'd want one where there was glass everywhere, in the middle of nowhere and had a big covered deck so I wouldn't feel cramped. As opposed to most women I know, I am a minimalist. I have always hated stuff. My apartments/houses have always been pretty clean, with very minimal amount of decorations and only decorations which I love. However, if it was a tiny house with very little windows/glass, I'd go nuts as I am claustrophobic. The apartment I live in now has very few windows and it drives me insane day in and day out.

I live in a 40 square meter apartment and I must consider myself lucky to be an ok diy´er, so I can create more room for things. Now and then I think of kicking the walls to move them a little - and I would like some more space - but not more, that I could easily overview. Feels more secure.
The space I haven´t got in my apartment, I do have in my garden of 300 m2 of wilderness - 7 km away.

Last edited by Jensen on 10 Oct 2015, 10:48 am, edited 2 times in total.

I remember an exhibit about Neanderthal houses made from mammoth bones and leather at the American Museum of Natural History some years ago. They had a reconstruction on exhibit and it probably gave less interior space than a typical modern trailer-based tiny house. I know that one of those bone houses had a maximum inner diameter of 26 feet, so (if it was a perfect circle) that would be an area of about 128.3 sq feet. An the center part of that would be hearth, and then there would be some hearth maintenance.

I suspect they were outdoorsy types and saw the areas around the bone house as living spaces, much as modern tiny house people often do.

You get an idea of what the living space was like from this:


There is a reconstruction of what that life must have been like in the Chilterns:


I am weirdly fascinated by tiny houses. I think there is a fantasy connected to them of a kind of freedom from ties. It sort of goes with the off-grid thing. You could conceivably live in your own cozy shelter with no mortgage, no flatmates or housemates, no utility bills, no responsibility but to your own survival and no need to observe time other than the rising and setting of the sun. And I think it has elements of immersion in nature. People aren't generally dreaming of a tiny house in a trailer park, cheek by jowl with humans.

But it isn't a real dream of mine--not something I want. More like a mental toy. I watch videos on youtube of people in their tiny houses or building their tiny houses and find it oddly compelling, even though it isn't for me. I think it was bordering on special interest level a while back. I suspect that many people would find the day-to-day reality harder than they imagined. I spent some time living in cabins in Vermont and I had some studio apartments in New York that were on that scale... not an easy way to live.

I think that something more important than merely square footage size literally on paper, is how well that space is layed out in terms of any divisions into areas, and how much storage potential is built into the space.

Among the places I've lived are two studio apartments that were about the same square-footage (something like 400 sq ft).

One of these studios was simply but cleverly designed to make maximum use of the space, carefully dividing up the areas needed (living/sleeping, kitchen, bathroom, closets and storage) in such a way that the place actually "felt" spacious, storage felt more than adequate, and there were even options for changing the placement of furniture in the one living-sleeping room.

The other studio was the same "footprint" in terms of outer shape and square footage, but its design was a disaster. The arrangement of the individual areas of use don't make sense and actually cause the living/sleeping area to have no options regarding furniture placement and freedom to change things without causing awkward things to happen. There is even an "entrance hallway" awkwardly built into this studio that stick out into the living area stupidly. Aside from kitchen cabinets and one walk-in closet which also houses the water tank, there is no additional storage, and zero storage in the bathroom.

Both of these studios had the same footprint to work within yet one of them is very frustrating and cramped to live in, while the other didn't feel that way and had thought put into it.

It's all in what you actually design into the space with the small physical footprint. You can design pointlessly and make stupid use of the way things are laid out structurally, or design smart within that small space.

Sadly I'm living in the stupid one right now.

I have lived in a small flat for about the last 20 years. I have come to prefer it to the average-sized homes I once had. I enjoy the ease of cleaning, challenge of efficient space utilization, and no maintenance of yard, plumbing, roofing, gutters, and so on. Today when I visit those with more typically-sized housing I think "e-gads, what a pain to bounce around in so much space."

The tiny-house craze I see on TV has surface appeal, but the extreme smallness would not work for me because some amount of space is required for the many "toys" associated with my special interests in media production such as photography, audio recording, graphic arts, and such.

My ideal space is a single-room loft type arrangement. Interior walls bug me.

I am not one myself, as I too and am in a 650 sq ft apartment. less when you consider alot of it is closet space and a way too big kitchen with barely any cabinets or countertops, just open area...

Some people I think feel more secure in smaller spaces. Also the maintenance of a larger space would be a nightmare. Me and my wife together live it utter chaos and barely ever clean. I mean, it's not a hoarder house or anything, but I couldn't imagine being responsible for all that space.

Count me in on the "small house/big land" idea. I'd be fine with my current space, maybe even a little less if I had a decent size piece of land. While I don't get the super small space thing at all, people with enormous houses I dont get either. I live near the beginning of what would be considered the Jersey shore. You drive a couple of miles from here and you get some HUGE houses. I worked for an appraisal company who did Tax Assessments in various towns in Monmouth and Ocean counties. We measured and valued all the homes and I did some of the data entry and boy, some people have REALLY big houses. Like 20K sq ft houses with 8 car garages, elevators and guest houses on the property that were 2,000 each! Houses so big you couldn;t fit them in a single photo from ground level, you'd have to do it from a helicopter. I don't know what one would do with all that space unless you're hosting live arena football games in your living room. It's just to flaunt what you have I suppose

I would love to be able to camp, hike and have large (really large!) fires on my land. I wouldn't need much space inside because alot of time would be spent outside on my own private land. What a dream that would be... I'd be able to start my own large garden, it'd be great.

Me too -- while I don't fancy the idea of the super-small space and I would rather have SOME more space than what I currently have, and better laid-out, I also don't get the other extreme, where people want to rattle around in HUGE, huge houses with more rooms and more space than they even need.

I would like a "happy medium" -- for me that would mean enough space to spread my things out a bit, not have my musical instruments cased-up under my bed, have more storage space built into the place.

All I really want and need is a spaciously designed 1-bedroom apartment or house, and in my dreams it would be set in its own acreage or at the very least have a large yardspace around it, giving me some sense of separation from neighbors. I don't need multiple rooms I will never use, I just need each room to be of adequate space, well thought out, and no space have built-in redundancy.