The Tiny House Handbook - Charlie Wing

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the shell of their tiny home.

      The little house on its foundation of telephone poles and containing a compressed but complete kitchen, tiny wood stove, and two sleeping lofts, has now been continually occupied by single and couple tenants for forty-eight years.

      Four years later found me at Cornerstones School in Brunswick, Maine, where adults from around the US and Canada would attend 3-week workshops on designing and building their own passive solar homes. Mornings, 9 to 12, would be spent in the classroom. Afternoons, 1 to 5, the students would practice construction skills.

      The classroom portion consisted of fifteen lectures based on the fifteen chapters in From the Ground Up, the owner-builder text I had lately coauthored with John Cole. But what about the construction skills? How could forty students saw wood and pound nails for fifteen days without creating an immense heap of scrap?

      Then I remembered the little 12’ × 20’ house. What could be more instructive, satisfying, and economical than constructing actual tiny houses that could later be sold for the cost of the materials? Over the next few years Cornerstones students completed a dozen. Construction took place in the Cornerstones parking lot in the heart of town. Upon completion, a pair of forklifts volunteered by the local lumberyard would load the completed building onto a flatbed trailer for delivery to its purchaser.

      I purchased the last of the tiny houses and moved it to its present site on an ocean cove in nearby Harpswell, Maine. I lived in it for a year. The annual property tax including the oceanfront site was $120. The winter heating bill totalled one-half cord of hardwood.

      I miss that tiny house. I’m going to build another.

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       From the back door, southwest reading and thinking corner. Sleeping loft overhead. Corner of 36” × 80” writing desk at bottom right.

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       From the kitchen/dining area, looking at sleeping loft, Jotul 602 wood stove, wall-hinged writing desk over couch (in working/down position).

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       From the woodstove, looking toward kitchen/dining area (kitchen is behind bookcase). Second sleeping loft over dining area has been removed.

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       From the driveway. A 6’ × 20’ extension to the rear added—at the request of a lady occupant—a bathroom and a walk-in closet. Total floor area is now 360 square feet.

      Shelter accounts for the largest expense in most homeowners’ budgets. Monthly and annual payments go to mortgage principle and interest, property taxes, insurance, water, sewer, maintenance and repair, lighting, and fuels for cooking, heating, and cooling. Phew!

      Of course, the smaller the home, the less the expense. The wealthy have always afforded large homes, even mansions, but while the housing trend of the recent past has been toward mini-mansions for all, incomes have not kept pace. The disparity in income between the wealthy and the rest of the population has never been greater.

      In response there has been a surge in interest in smaller, even “tiny” houses. Of what does the market for tiny houses consist?

       young couples looking for starter homes

       renters finding it impossible to accumulate a $50,000 downpayment

       empty nesters no longer needing four bedrooms

       the elderly desiring to live in on-property accessory dwellings in lieu of assisted living facilities

       and, of course, the homeless

      In this first chapter we will introduce—or should we say, “reintroduce”—the outlandish idea of living on less in less space, even a tiny space.

      With all the recurring interest in tiny houses, no one ever promoted the idea more eloquently than Henry David Thoreau. As chronicled in his classic, Walden, Thoreau constructed and lived in for a period of two years and two months a simple 10’ × 15’ cabin on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. Here, condensed, are his thoughts on shelter:

       If one designs to construct a dwelling-house, it behooves him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clue, a museum, an alms-house, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary…I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night; and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable alternative. You could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for rent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this…

       Though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes… in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a shelter. In the large towns and cities, where civilization especially prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an annual (rent that)… now helps to keep them poor as long as they live…

       It is evident that… the civilized man hires his shelter commonly because he cannot afford to own it; nor can he, in the long run, any better afford to hire…

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       Replica of Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond

      Source: RhythmicQuietude at en.wikipedia https://commons.wiki-media.org/wiki/File:Replica_of_Thoreau%27s_cabin_near_Walden_Pond_and_his_statue.jpg licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

       Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. There is some of the same fitness in a man’s building his own house that there is in a bird’s building its own nest. But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and

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