Can you imagine living in a 120-square-foot house? Yeah, me neither. (Where would all my shoes go?)
But I'm really kinda digging this tiny house trend. True, most of these less-than-500-square-feet abodes are second homes (and I'm still struggling to save for my first), but I love the idea of making it more about enjoying the land and less about fitting all your knickknacks.
Check out the audio slideshow for more daydream-worthy homes.
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Laurence Aurbach Posted 7:04 am
16 Feb 2007
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wiscidea Posted 7:30 am
16 Feb 2007
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Book Review: Little House on a Small Planet
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto
Just as hunger isn't caused by scarcity of food, homelessness and our "housing crisis" aren't caused by a lack of houses.
So says Frances Moore Lappe in the foreword to Little House on a Small Planet- a wonderful book by Shay Salomon with photographs by Nigel Valdez. Shay asks the question "How much space does it take to be happy?" and then proceeds to answer the question: not very much. She then proceeds to ask why there are big houses (Keeping up with the joneses, easy financing, "because we can") and instructs us to find new Joneses or forget the Joneses.
It is not just about how you design, but how you live. Chapters with titles like "Choose what you need" and "build a glove, not a warehouse" and "make a room of your own." It is a lovely book that teaches you how to "live in less space and have more room to enjoy it. Dozens of tiny houses are beautifully photographed with what must be a very wide angle lens- one of my favourites was a 180 square foot "cob cottage where a couple lived for ten years, and apparently still talk to each other.
I must point out that with a few exceptions these houses would fall into the crunchy granola school of design built by free spirits who believe that (we quote out of context) "architect designed" is synonymous with "don't ask how much it cost" and that there is a bias towards warm climates where one can always go outside.
Nonetheless it is the spirit and conviction of the people in this book, who not only believe as I do that we should all live with less, but actually make the decision to go out and do it and explain how. It is an informative and inspiring addition to the canon.
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Forward!
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sunflower Posted 7:40 am
16 Feb 2007
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sunflower Posted 7:42 am
16 Feb 2007
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sunflower Posted 8:01 am
16 Feb 2007
Dirty hippies have more fun.
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willa Posted 10:37 am
16 Feb 2007
Of course, to each his own. If the zen feeling of the space, or the dirty-hippie feeling of the space, or whatever, is totally your thing, then hey, why not? And I guess if your existence is really minimalist, you don't need furniture, so it all works out. :)
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sunflower Posted 12:45 pm
16 Feb 2007
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Biodiversivist Posted 12:50 pm
16 Feb 2007
They are appealing, like owning your own boat, but in reality, the appeal wanes with time as more and more money and labor is spent maintaining it. Best to rent vacation places (and boats), more variety, less cost, much better environmentally.
Rather than pour concrete, build septic systems and wells, I parked a fully self contained RV trailer on my property while the kids were young. It left no trace behind, cost $4,000 used.
My experiences and life lessons from Lizard Hill
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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caniscandida Posted 5:56 pm
16 Feb 2007
How grey are mine hairs,
O Mother,
Dear Mother,
How grey are mine hairs,
O Mother,
How grey?
As an old bear thine hairs,
O Child,
Sweet Child,
As an old bear thine hairs,
O Child,
As a bear.
Well, whatever. The set-up is too much work, and the typography is misleading, which is to say potentially lying. I.e., the importance of the blockquoted passage is undeservedly elevated. I doubt I shall be doing this any more.
Anyway, back to the thread:
Small spaces can be fine, but you need a lot of preparedness for how to cope with them. If I were on that highway 78 in Pennsylvania, trapped, alone, inside a car, for 24 hours, with no supply of food and drink, with no candle and matches, with no toilet paper nor space diaper, I would have either died, or lost my mind.
I stayed briefly once in a very spacious teepee in Montana. The main problem that I have with that sort of dwelling, including yurts and Navajo hogans, is, you cannot look outside. I find windows to be essential to the good life.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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mihan Posted 1:34 am
18 Feb 2007
"Grey" is perfectly acceptable. Good enough for the Queen...
I just discovered that standard American English (which I didn't encounter until college, so I can't spell worth a damn) is "judgment."
It still looks wrong to me.
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amazingdrx Posted 2:02 am
18 Feb 2007
That's the beauty of cement Willa, no need to build boring old boxes everywhere. Well one of them. With fiber and steel added it's really strong and inexpensive as well.
Your furniture wouldn't fit? Come on. Hehehey.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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amazingdrx Posted 2:10 am
18 Feb 2007
It can be bermed into the earth for heating/cooling and get enough energy to operate with solar and/or wind power.
Add more units and connect them together as the family adds members.
Oh yeah and for flood victims, they will float like a houseboat. You just need an anchor.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Gar Lipow Posted 3:50 am
18 Feb 2007
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sunflower Posted 4:59 am
18 Feb 2007
I am a scientist, not an artist. I like numbers more than words. Discovery and experimentation is my joy. I have learned much from architectural experimentation and can volunteer some observations.
The building site dominates building materials and design. Forest insects have antenna tuned for millions of years to detect dead wood. A wood building in a forest is a huge mistake. Poured concrete (8 inches thick) is very materials energy intensive but can be justified if the building is located and designed to last many centuries.
Using concrete for thermal mass with external insulation and passive solar energy is quiet, comfortable, and sustainable. Materials (mostly sand and rocks) are low cost, if and only if the owner does the work without labor cash flow (leverages no bank interest, no income taxes, no management expenses). Earth berms are not much additional value because of the thick external insulation. Poured concrete does not limit architectural creativity, but does require professional engineering.
Tiny building have different personalities. One is extreme low cost for construction and heat. Windows are very important for preventing claustrophobia.
Ferro cement is just a half inch (1 cm) thick, waterproof, long life, low cost, and benefits from the strength of dome shapes. Compound geodesic angles are limited to the hot-wire sliced polystyrene. The galvanized chicken wire can be passivated in a few weeks of weather prior to trowel work (sounds like a lot of trowel work). No need for chemicals. Geodesics have a high tech feel. It takes a year or so to get used to waking up in such a radical building, but much more comfortable than a trailer.
A note to reactionaries: Dirty hippies can also be conservatives. Do not be fooled by building appearances and environmental rhetoric.
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amazingdrx Posted 9:29 am
18 Feb 2007
I like the idea of pouring the thicker part of the wall inside, then the foam, then a 2 inch surface layer of cement on the outside, all in one pour. With heat exchange tubing in the inner mass of the floor.
A contest is needed to design one of these suitable for scientists to live in in antarctica. If it would work there it would work anywhere. Zero emission on the ice cap. It would publicize the horrible pollution of antarctica from fuel oil powered oil company geologists (masquerading as environmental scientists) who live there now as well as super efficient housing design to stop GHGs.
Choose 5 finalists to be pre-built and shipped down there for a year long test. Make it happen Grist. Call Brad Pit, he judged the New Orleans green home contest. Hehey.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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PHPH Posted 9:30 am
18 Feb 2007
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sunflower Posted 12:26 pm
18 Feb 2007
The sun only shines six months in the Antarctic desert.
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tico89 Posted 1:04 pm
18 Feb 2007
Gar: someday, somehow, all books will be available on the internet. Actually, that was the point that occurred to me first, as all that I have in huge quantities are books, and I much prefer reading off paper than computer screens. Well, and some personal souvenirs. Generally speaking, though, most decorations are only to show off to visitors, and in houses that small, there won't be too many visitors (just those that like the outdoors).
For a really, really, small house, look here. Doesn't exactly fall within most people's income, however. Not much land to enjoy, either.
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Nucbuddy Posted 3:09 pm
18 Feb 2007
google.com/search?q=%22hard+drive%22+capacity+%22million+books%22
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Nucbuddy Posted 3:34 pm
18 Feb 2007
bbs.monolithic.com/viewtopic.php?p=11249&highlight=sun#11249
Best thing you can do to improve the comfort of a house is control the sun. Worst way to do this is to use a design without overhangs..
bbs.monolithic.com/viewtopic.php?p=12152&highlight=sun#12152
As to how much of the shell can be disappeared before the salient characteristics (strength, energy usage) disappear, it depends. Depends on climate. Depends on siting. Depends on how the in-fill walls are constructed, etc. These structures are awfully versatile, and you have to do some intentionally dumb things to mess up their performance, such as one I was told about that chopped a hemi in half and filled the exposed face with glass and turned it to the South. Sun just about ate them alive.
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amazingdrx Posted 3:46 pm
18 Feb 2007
It's a beautiful mother wall and it's not gonna crack.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Gar Lipow Posted 11:32 am
19 Feb 2007
Sorry - too attached to the paper kind.
Anyway, you don't have to move to ultra-small to be sustainable. There are all sorts of low input means of constructing homes - straw bale construction, super adobe - or for more conventional homes, strawboard, bamboo framing, recycled wood etc.
Climate control: passive solar - good insulation, controlled air flow, thermal mass, no thermal bridges, south facing windows. You can supplement with a tiny amount of conventional heating and cooling. Once embedded impact of the building, and climate control requirements are taken care of, environmental footprint otherwise is not much affected by square footage. Of course these tiny home are not seriously proposed as what we all should live in anyway. They are making a point an important one. Because while 120 square feet is too small for me, I have had no problem in the past sharing a 750 foot home with one person. Come to think of it, I grew up in as an only child with two parents in a 700 foot home, and never found it a great hardship. But the point is, we really don't need people to live in smaller homes than they are comfortable in. It just takes more work to make 2,000 square feet sustainable than 700 square feet.
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caniscandida Posted 8:09 pm
19 Feb 2007
<<
I am a scientist, not an artist. I like numbers more than words.
>>
A bit of a Non sequitur, perhaps, if it suggests that scientists are uncomfortable with words (but they are some of our most elegant and impressive stylists), or that artists are innumerate (many artists, including myself in my small way, have delighted in calculating angles and measuring out spaces, for example; and in the latest "Mystery!" program, a new and very good "Inspector Lewis," it was a lot of fun that the writer -- an artist -- situated a helpful clue in the concept of "perfect numbers," those whole numbers which happen to be the sum of all their whole-number factors not including themselves, e.g. 6 and 28).
<<
Discovery and experimentation is my joy.
>>
Wonderful, mazal tov! But finding joy in those things is certainly not unique to scientists.
On concrete: I do not doubt anything that our excellent conservative friend Sunflower tells us about it. I would just point out that while concrete has been used to produce much truly great architecture, including the noteworthy buildings of the Romans, above all the dome of the Pantheon, the most numinously wondrous dome ever built; nevertheless, it is unimpressive, not to say forbidding, as a material for small, intimate, homey structures.
On where to put the books, shoes and kids: Well, there you are. It is not for nothing that in civilized societies, small dwelling-places have usually been associated with recluses, leading a simple life, celibate, in effect impoverished, and thoughtful about matters dealing with religion.
And usually those small residences are temporary, seasonal, transitory. The Christian Anchorites of the Middle East in Late Antiquity, and their followers later on in Europe, who felt called to spend their lives in "cells," apart from contact with other people if they could help it, were always very few. (Or better, are very few. The anchoritic, eremitical vocation lives on today, even in North America. The American monk Thomas Merton commented that fire-watchers in fire-towers in national parks are de facto hermits; and if they find that job not unpleasant, then they perhaps have a rare but true vocation to the eremitical life.)
But at least the temporary residence in a small space is perhaps valuable to many more people. The traditional religions of India sometimes encourage a sense that our lives should have different parts, lived in different ways; and that among those parts, there should be one that is characterized by asceticism, solitude and apartness. In the dissemination and evolution of Buddhism, this concept resonated in China and Japan. Shambhala, the amazing publishing house that specializes in beautifully designed small paperback editions of religious classics usually from the several South and East Asian traditions, has a beautiful volume titled "Four Huts: Asian Writings on the Simple Life," with four texts, one Chinese and three Japanese, related to living in a small space apart from other people. Included is arguably the greatest of brief Japanese religious classics, Kamo-no-Chomei's "Hojoki," which Burton Watson translates as "Record of the Ten-Foot-Square Hut." If, in designing a survey course of Asian literature, a professor had time for only one book to represent Japan, it has been said that that text should be the "Hojoki."
On the modern Christian side, unforgettably powerful is "Poustinia," by the Orthodox/Catholic Russian/American/Canadian ascetic/activist Catherine de Hueck Doherty. "Poustinia" is a traditional Russian Orthodox practice, referring to a hut, or any closely confined dwelling, into which a person retreats, for a while, in order to pray. The word means "desert" in Russian, she tells us, and so stands in the tradition of the anchoritic Desert Fathers and Mothers of Egypt in Late Antiquity. An isolated cabin in the woods would work fine; but so would a room in a cheap flophouse in any city. One does not need to bring much: perhaps an icon, a candle and matches; prayer beads; a couple of books, one of which might be a Bible, to help concentrate the mind on remembering the plight of the people outside; a pot to boil water in, a cup, and a supply of tea.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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spaceshaper Posted 10:01 pm
19 Feb 2007
In the Antarctic, I believe a steady-state heating condition applies pretty much all year, even in the summer. Thermal mass would seem to be of significant value only if you were to be so foolish as to not have an airlock on the doors, or to leave them open.... What really matters is the insulation, not the mass.
In fact in an unheated small building thermal mass can be a detriment: a thermally-lightweight small enclosure such as tent can actually be warmed pretty quickly by the body heat of its occupants. Don't expect this in a stone hut. This of course is why sleeping bags are made of down.
I should mention that thermal mass can also be valuable in turning an intermittent heat source such as a wood fire into a steady emitter more like a modern heating system. To maximize this benefit the mass should be concentrated close to the heater, as in a traditional Russian stove: mass in the shell of the building is of lesser value.
In this as in all our building practices it would behoove us as we go into a more frugal future to look at traditional ways of doing things which are local to our own area: how did people manage to live comfortably in this place in the past, before the the profligate use of cheap energy became the norm?
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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kmp Posted 12:06 am
20 Feb 2007
I spent five quite lovely years living in a 350-sf apartment in Boston's North End. Not quite the challenge of 120-sf, but pretty small. My bathroom was an appalling pink tile box, with a shower stall, toilet and nothing else (I have yet to live down the "bathroom-without-a-sink jokes). The kitchen was fully half the space, yet the living area had exposed brick walls and high ceilings and a lively view of the Sons of Italy across the street. I loved that place.
However, like Gar, books are the one material thing that I can't seem to sacrifice - I did manage to find room for my thousands of books in my 350 square feet. Although, I have to admit, I stopped buying hardcovers unless it was absolutely vital.
And I pretty much stopped buying everything else... I used to joke that if I wanted a new mug, an old one had to go. Same thing with a sweater, pair of shoes - I wouldn't buy a bottle of shampoo until I knew the present one had only a wash or two left in it. It was quite liberating in many ways, because you simply did not have room for stuff so it freed you from feeling the need to buy random stuff. If I loved something enough, or needed it enough, I could always find room.
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Biodiversivist Posted 2:42 am
20 Feb 2007
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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sunflower Posted 3:27 am
20 Feb 2007
The architecture is nothing special, no added expenses, just insulation on the outside of load bearing walls. Try it, you'll like it.
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caniscandida Posted 6:14 am
20 Feb 2007
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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Nucbuddy Posted 4:08 pm
20 Feb 2007
Why do you believe that our future will be more frugal?
.
Spaceshaper wrote: the past, before the the profligate use of cheap energy became the norm
Do you believe that energy is cheaper today than it will be in the future? If so, why?
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