Saturday, September 8, 2012

The Tiny House Movement

I read with  interest this week about a local family who are building a "Tiny House".

The idea of the "Tiny House" is getting around, for example:

Photo Credit: RowdyKittens
I find this a very interesting take on the idea of fulltiming, and how fulltiming in an RV can be an environmentally friendly choice.

A tiny house is usually built on a trailer frame, because in almost all jurisdictions the building codes prohibit construction of permanent dwellings below a certain size.  Therefore Tiny House advocates usually need to build their homes on wheels to circumvent the building codes.  So a Tiny House is usually a type of RV.

Photo Credit: RowdyKittens
While there is significant overlap, the main difference (IMHO) between the Fulltiming movement and the Tiny House movement seems to be as follows:  tiny houses are not intended to move around a lot, where fulltimers (living in a conventional RV) tend to be more mobile - therefore (sometimes) burning a lot more fuel.  But it isn't necessarily so, and there are lots of RV fulltimers who are fervent environmentalists. An example of green fulltimers would be http://www.greenrvlife.com/.

Photo Credit: Joncallas
I often yearn to downsize, and free myself from the lifetime of junk I have accumulated.  Maybe someday I will  be a Fulltimer or live in a Tiny House.

1 comment:

Bob said...

I think the whole concept is pretty neat. Especially the idea of getting around building codes by essentially building a trailer.
Only thing is though, I have to say I think I'd go bonkers. Eventually anyway.
Which is not to say that I don't think we have too much cr*p in our lives, because we do. The cr*p I can do without, but having a bit of domestic space works for me too.