There’s a craze going around in the “sustainable” world of climateers and greenies about “Tiny Houses”. They tout the “smaller carbon footprints” and in one video saying ” …tiny house living can lead to a more ethical relationship with the environment, and might possibly lead to a mitigation of climate change.” Yeah, sure.
The two most common benefits often listed by Tiny House proponents are:
Environment-Friendly
– Since your Tiny House is going to be small, you can make a lot of it out of recycled, repurposed, and salvaged materials. In addition, to make your house look cool and unique, it also saves the number of new materials from being made.
Energy Efficiency
– The energy needs for a tiny house are much smaller than the energy needs of a traditional home. Smaller appliances and a smaller space use less power to heat and cool the air.
I don’t think I’d ever be ready to move my entire life into a tiny space like this, nor do I think I’d want to live in one that looks like it was salvaged from a scrap pile…

But, I can think of one good reason for having one in my backyard: extra relaxation space doubling as a guest house.
Plus, guess what I found out? You can purchase all the parts and instructions on Amazon. It reminds me of the way Sears-Roebuck used to sell entire kit homes shipped by rail during the early part of the 20th century.
This one looks pretty cool, and it is said you can assemble it in about 8 hours.

In the description, the plans say that this kit house can be built in less than a day – about eight hours, when two adults team up for the job. Well…. maybe, assuming the instructions aren’t written in Sanskrit. That also doesn’t include pad preparation time.


But, you can probably pull it all off in a weekend. It can also be a studio, sun-room, garden house, pool house, mother-in-law sequestration facility, or truly anything your heart desires.
There’s no HVAC, electricity, or Internet to this DIY home, you’ll need to do that yourself. But that’s all pretty easy. I can see solving the HVAC problem with one of these roll-around heat/cool units once you get some electricity, and you could probably get WiFi or wired Internet using either a power line LAN extender or a WiFi extender.
There are other models too, ranging from a traditional log cabin look to an external office style.
I can see adding a tiny house to extend the American Dream of “living large” in your backyard, but not for a primary domicile.
Plus, imagine the looks on the faces of your green oriented friends when you tell them you are now a tiny house owner, but you had it shipped to you (using fossil-fueled transportation) and added it to your existing home.
The result: schadenfreude, via priceless political incorrectness.
Buy a RV. That way you can have a tiny climate-aware house and burn lots of gasoline at the same time. Win win!
Tiny houses are useful for people who intend to live in the motor home or the boat (on a trailer).
Here, as in most places, it is an offence to occupy land as a residence without having an approved dwelling on it. So the question is, how small? In the jurisdiction I operate in, a complying dwelling can be constructed in as little as 15m2. It is unlawful for land developers to tell you how big your house should be, but they try it on anyway – until I turn up. 15m2 is a bit tight if there are two of you and you are horizontally challenged, but if you have that, then the authorities can’t get at you for living in the boat or van. Doesn’t need a building permit if it is on wheels. Doesn’t need a road or marine transport permit if its just parked on your property.
Every single one of the proprietary designs that I have looked at has been hugely over-priced, and all of the suppliers of these eventually seem to go bust. There are some standard engineered designs that any timber or steel frame fabricator can make the panels for, can arrive on an ordinary truck, be unloaded and put together manually.
Shipping container dwellings can work, if you are expert at welding and plasma cutting, and you get the container on-site free or dirt cheap. Otherwise it is a gimmick or virtue signalling. The corten steel they are made from is much harder to work than standard construction steel.
There are lots of places where these do not meet building codes. Many cities and counties have a minimum SF for a residence. So they may be suitable as an additional building on a property but not as the sole home.
and we had the same issue where I live a small transportable was placed on a block and the better off town residents wanted to bring min area laws in , we cant have people moving into sheap small AFFORDABLE homes can we?curiously that SAME area was what the older resident have in the hospitals aged care units which I pointed out. and oddly enough they shut up.
These are many examples of Eco-Friendly houses in the hills above Caracas…
Water supply.
Sewage.
And those “foundation alternatives”? 🤣
Amazing how these watermelons are always shooting themselves in both feet.
When I was 9 years old I built a “Sustainable Tiny House” out of White Poplar trees, on 400 acres of winter wonderland in Northern Ontario, using only the energy provided by my body and a 5 inch axe head. It had a fire pit in the center for warmth but no “bathroom facilities”. Sooooooooo, I had to go back to reality to take a S*** !
Tiny houses are a neat concept but seriously, any good travel trailer is probably better. Plus you can pack up and move a travel trailer when climate change forces you off your current location. I’m not sure why the left is promoting tiny houses unless they are preparing us to all live according to agenda 21 so the elites can live even higher.
They’re trendy. RVs and mobile homes are too redneck or boomer.
Most of the tiny houses shown on TV programs are simply RVs that look like small homes. They all have axles, wheels, tires and a hitch.
How about a nice little caravan or a motor home with all mod cons once you’ve hooked up to a power supply. An extra bonus is your not tied to the one location but free to travel within reason.
Lots of small units of various compositions, age and durability disintegrated during Harvey, not even to get into the supposedly better bigger ones, with too many taxpayer funded. Which brings up the question of codes and more importantly, safety. Dig a basement for tornadoes, or just throw an ax in the yard, as they used to claim worked.
Lots of RV’s survived Harvey, especially those hidden in the trees and well anchored. Lots didn’t, but many more than ever are sitting around for the next storm.
Least footprint would be a tent, or raincoat, available ax.
Here in Seattle, we’ve gone a step further and gone with tents insulated by used hypodermic needles. You can’t feel a thing in the cold. It’s wonderful.
/not actually in seattle
Buy a used RV trailer. There done. You probably get more amenities.
It’s just another gimmick that only the dumbest of the dumb could fall for.
We’ve had these thing for years, they are called RVs
Screwballs, always screwballs.
Tiny houses? We have had them for the last 100 years. They are called RVs/manufactured homes.
You can put a 8X20 on a concrete pad with a double-carport awning over the whole thing for less than a new car. You got porch, you got shade, and hopefully no payments. Well, we always have to make payments to the tax man.
…”tiny house living can lead to a more ethical relationship with the environment”…
===============
Mother Nature don’t do ethics.
I thought that the main purpose of the “tiny houses” was to shelter the homeless?
Wealthy people could have several and house illegal aliens in them. Think of the staggeringly huge virtue signal that sends!
No shower, no toilet, heck I can do better than that. A tent on public land in SF.
Using golden showers? 😉
Basically, trendy mobile homes. Unless they’re building from salvage they’d get more bang for the buck buying a used RV trailer with a slideout.
Unfortunately, many local governments are doing all they can to assure that no good deed goes unpunished.
Tiny houses could become ‘glorified beer fridges’ as council plans building code crackdown
“…He estimates it would have cost him about $50,000 to make his building compliant…”
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/property/112389030/tiny-houses-could-become-glorified-beer-fridges-as-council-plans-building-code-crackdown?fbclid=IwAR3ke5ZHPGIs_Mtm3XZh2iSXGE_2CGiYtepUghrsfQnwbWJ6nS469h8OJ58
No offense, but, was this a paid product placement? Because I’m seen the same thing at multiple sites, such as Bored Panda https://www.boredpanda.com/diy-guest-house-8-hours-allwood-solvalla/
Now this is not a paid product placement. We never do anything like that here, however I thought it was neat and didn’t see one of those other ones your reference on a different website.. and given we’re in the middle of the tiny house craze here where I live…. I wrote up my own version.
Just wondering. Tiny houses are actually cool. Love watching the shows on TV, very creative. Would be great for a beach house or lake house.
If people are to live in that thing, it will not pass building codes for most of the USA.
8x 20 & and 8×40 foot shipping containers with 1 window and 1 door cut in and stacked on top of each other will make for great camps for millions of people…same with train Box Cars….cities located in states that are proposing total renewable by 2030 need to get on this from a zoning standpoint…..stack em around existing homes…and fill up back and front yards…parks and city owned property….state lands….kill 3-4 birds in one fell swoop….homeless, low carbon foot print, cost effective, politically correct, heal the climate…show the world we care. Once in place, like in maybe 20-30 years welcome the arrival of the Chinese Army….to take over the Country and create a slave labor nation… (anyone know how I can invest in shipping containers?)
Fascinating, some very valid criticisms in this article, pity the author was to lazy to find anything more than a straw man to level them at, especially since it even comes close to being mildly amusing at times. If solar panels, electric heaters/fans, composting toilets and 4G/5G internet didn’t exist you would be completely spot on though.
Nonsense.
All gibberish based upon your own false strawman premise.
Pathetic.
These would work out great for this fella [my 5-month-old GSD]: