321–330 of 351 posts
Hey van dude, if you read this and you get to the Bay Area I've got a guest house attached to a shop like your dads. Be fun to chat and we can fix up whatever needs fixing.
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He owned a house before, so that's a moot point, he could have used his own house before selling it. But of course his lifestyle is enabled by his environment. It is easier to do that in the US than in Europe, easier in the Western World than in the third world, easier if you started off as a developer rather than a min wage employee with the burden of student debts, easier single than couple with kids, easier as a m…
Can you elaborate on why you think this would be more difficult in Europe? I can imagine Europe wide fitness chains not being so common. http://www.basic-fit.com and friends seem to be building something like it. But then again, public swimming pools, and even public showers are more common and often highly subsidised.
- Access to public bathroom is going to be another - like even public bathroom in place like Walmart-equivalent cannot be assumed to be generally available.
- Legality and Cultural acceptance is going to vary country by country. In my home country, a single man living in his van will be reported to the police the second nights he stays in the same place, and he will be asked to move somewhere else at the very least.
- You pointed out to a gym being available across Europe, but the replacement, swimming pools are not anywhere as available as gyms. There is no public toilet at the public library that is next to my place. Public shower are often restricted to professional drivers and I haven't seen one outside of the highway or trucking road.
- Insuring your car requires to have a physical residence in a country, and you generally can't legally be more than a few months in a country with foreign registration. Similarly depending on the age of your car, your country may require a yearly car check which mean you need to be around there at that time.
- Internet access - you will need to prepare that a bit more carefully.
- What about taxes ? That's another thing you have to know when crossing several countries.
- Stupid little things like currencies.
So going across Europe is going to be more adventurous than in a country that has road-trip in its DNA, and depending on the country, even staying in a single one is going to be more adventurous. Of course it's all relative, that is harder than in the US, but nowhere as hard as for Syrian refugee in Turkey.
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...social taboo When I've lived in mobile homes, I've found them to be substandard in various ways. One might be prepared to accept that in exchange for their advantages, but if not it seems perfectly rational to seek other solutions with different trade-offs. E.g., most mobile homes are over 70' long, while tiny houses are much shorter.
The social taboo had nothing to do with quality and everything to do with the mobile home = trailer trash stereotype. Tiny houses are what happens when a garden shed has sex with a travel trailer. Practically tiny houses copy the floor-plan and interior design of an existing high end travel trailer and paste it into a traditionally constructed building. The result is basically a travel trailer optimized for staying i…
Beyond class, the other major reason for Tiny Houses appearance is acceptance in local communities. If they look nice, people and the law tend to leave them alone. Also it is nice to be nice for appearances sake.
Because they don't move that much they often get wide permits and skirt the trailer or put it onto a pad such that it appears to be a small house rather than a something on a trailer.
I should say also this perception that Tiny Houses are, well, Tiny, is not quite accurate.
Some of them are very small, 200 sq ft. Many of the new builds for living full time are easily 500 sq ft if you include the loft space.
In America that may be still very small but in many countries such as mine, that is actually larger than many townhouses most people live in.
As for later discovering that they need more space, that is not something that scares Tiny House people. They already built a small house, constructing other modules to do other things doesn't scare them much.
It is difficult to overstate how much less expensive they are than the traditional housing route. 50% of the cost of building in the West is paperwork. That is half off the most expensive item most people buy in their lives.
The main hiccup is about Land. This is solved in different ways, I intend to buy mine.
Most Tiny Housers spend money on quality materials. I've worked in construction before and know that most 'modern' builds won't last much longer than a 30 year mortgage due to cutting corners, substandard materials and an overall lack of attention to detail. I fully expect my TH to last at least 50 years, probably longer, be constructed from state of the art materials, and still be 1/4 of the cost of the average house in my area (excluding land).
Of course not everybody can go this route but it beats being homeless or paying a mortgage for decades. Besides, as a geek it is fun to find out how things work, it is an education.
> My focus for the first 6 months was creating a programming language, which I call Kong
Why on earth would you do that - especially as a sole developer in a niche as hard as indie game development?
I love stories like this. Well documented, well thought out, and with a 6 month update... excellent. Now I'd love to read one about someone who's done this with a family...
Did a 2 year trip with wife and daughter (2-4yr) from UK to Malaysia to California to south America. Met a few other families (usually German, swiss) along the way. Craziest being English family with 3 daughters 11,9,7 in a VW t3 / vanagon. The trip was great but couldn't do it permantly.
Great article, small technical issue: First, cut all the 0 AWG wire. Why 0 AWG? Because I had a 1500 watt inverter, which meant I could be pulling 150 amps (1500 watts output / 120 volts output × 12 volts input = 150 amps input). That's nearly the right answer, but "watts / volts × volts" is not going to end in "amps" as an answer. I'd suggest: 1500 watts / 12 volts = 125 amps. I also whole heartedly agree with him w…
Super cool. I have a VW T3 and would love to have your talent. Travelled 8 weeks through Scandinavia with it. Now I got inspired to build more stuff in it. Q: Is it allowed in the US to park and sleep where you want? Heard different stories.
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This but slightly more organized is pretty much the standard answer for anti-hoarding: put all your stuff away, keep track of what you actually use over the next week/month/year, and get rid of anything that hasn't been touched.
You have to watch out for Thanksgiving. I own at least 4 potato mashers, cheese graters, and corkscrews. Each is a once-a-year item (for me) that gets stored during spring cleaning and is easier to replace than find again.
Cheese on salad and tacos, corkscrew when friends came over (it's part of a multi-use tool, anyhow), and potato masher all the time, lately on potatoes from my own garden!
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If everyone followed this logic, who would you borrow from?
This is where an [idealised] conception of communism wins, there's a local workshop with all the tools kept in common between people in the area. If you're away from home, you just go to the local workshop. Strikes me as an idiotic waste of resources that a street of a hundred houses would have 50, say, power drills. Most likely they're inferior for costs purposes, they break because they're designed to (capitalism F…
If you take an object that I use less frequently, say a small tack hammer, I still need it when I need it. I need it for maybe 1 minute or less. I'm supposed to do what? Take my project down to the library, hit it with the hammer, haul it back home? Go borrow the hammer and take it back? Now I've cost myself more in time & effort than it would have cost to just own & store the hammer.
Does your solution only apply to more expensive items? More specialized? How does it account for discrepancies of usage patterns?
What if I need the work-light but I'll interrupt someone's project?
No, I think I'll just have my own set of tools, thanks.
I would be okay with a "library for [tools, whatever]" for people who don't often need a screwdriver or corkscrew or something, I guess--but I'm not going to use it. We have an approximation, with maker spaces, companies that loan tools (auto zone etc), neighbors, and tool rentals. (I don't use those either.)
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Did you notice any patterns about what you wear / don't wear from doing this? I do a similar approach, except it's insert freshly washed shirts into middle of closets, so anything that hits an outer edge I don't wear much, and is the best candidate for pruning.
I've found there's shirts I like owning but not wearing. No rhyme or reason, they're not damaged or stained. I just don't like wearing them.
But they don't fit me well and so I rarely wear them.
Need to lose some weight and then it won't be such a problem...