71–80 of 344 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the economical choice being squeezed out by landlords who can make more money off of hipsters living in over-engineered sheds.
Has that happened, like, anywhere?
There's definitely an appeal to engineers in building your own house from scratch. As an example, I built an 8x12' shed (details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/2kof5x/i_built_an_8x12... ) several years back. All it took was a few months' worth of weekends and a few trips with a borrowed full-size pickup and I had it together. Obviously you'd put more effort than that into making a house (you need insulat…
You probably know that you can find longer dimensional lumber at a lumber yard instead of a big box store. I am building my own 2-story 2-car garage, and was surprised at how many independent lumber yards there are tucked away around town. I needed long 2x8s for my rafters, no problem finding them up to 20'. And engineered lumber comes even longer. I'm making the upstairs into a finished living space with kitchen and…
Tiny house retention seems to be fairly poor. Search a bit for "give up tiny house" or something and you'll get a lot of people giving up the lifestyle, and it seems hard to come by people who have been doing it for a long time. Not impossible, because nothing is impossible, but not easy. It makes journalists swoon, but I don't see it as something that has a lot of future to it. Seems like something that sounds a lot…
Ask anyone who grew up in a decrepit mobile home park or a rotting old farmhouse in rural poverty or tiny crumbling 60+ year old housing in impoverished urban areas about the appeal of “tiny house”. I did and I find the entire concept confounding.
2. For sure, 150sqft is unreasonably small, even if it's a very luxurious 150sqft. But that's a strawman. If all of the sensationalism around this extreme end of the spectrum inspires Joe Public to reconsider his American dream of owning a 2600sqft home, and maybe opt for 700sqft instead, then that's a massive win both on the sustainability and on the household debt fronts. We should be celebrating, celebrating, celebrating anyone stretching the Overton window on this topic.
A tiny house doesn't mean only a small space: tiny house = tiny house + large yard - maintenance - mortgage - noise I'm actually planning to build one, 36m2/400sf in a 2 acres property. Regardless, I will have plenty of space: outdoors.
The Tiny Home trend and the "Van Life" trend are slightly unsettling to me - I wonder which forces are at play who intend to convince us that lowering our standards of living is cool? No judgement from me if you do choose to do these things, though. I do see the appeal. Maybe there is no conspiracy, maybe it is a coping mechanism. Edited "deeply" to "slightly" upon further reflection.
Why is living in a smaller home a lower standard of living? Wasted space is a higher standard?
The Tiny Home trend and the "Van Life" trend are slightly unsettling to me - I wonder which forces are at play who intend to convince us that lowering our standards of living is cool? No judgement from me if you do choose to do these things, though. I do see the appeal. Maybe there is no conspiracy, maybe it is a coping mechanism. Edited "deeply" to "slightly" upon further reflection.
It's interesting how your view of these trends is exactly the opposite of mine. To me, tiny homes and "van life" are about raising our standards of living. To me, living in a van with the freedom to go wherever you want, whenever you want, sounds amazing. If you lived in the midwest in your van last week, you could have simply driven away from the polar vortex. I hate the idea of living in a large house. I don't want…
During the day I'd run my company. Cell service is so great now that I could be tethered to my phone doing video calls while camping out on BLM land.
Then in the evening I'd go do an outdoor adventure, usually a short one. And then I'd devote my weekends to being active, like a two day backpacking trip.
The result was that I felt like I was using my full self for the first time. I'd be completely exhausted mentally by Friday and physically by Sunday.
For these quoted build costs, you could do a pretty highly upgraded singlewide, and it would age better than any of these and can actually be permanently installed onto a foundation.
Tiny house retention seems to be fairly poor. Search a bit for "give up tiny house" or something and you'll get a lot of people giving up the lifestyle, and it seems hard to come by people who have been doing it for a long time. Not impossible, because nothing is impossible, but not easy. It makes journalists swoon, but I don't see it as something that has a lot of future to it. Seems like something that sounds a lot…
I lived in a 600sqft studio apartment for ~5 years with my wife. For the last year of it with our oldest daughter. I found that size of house to be pretty great. Then we found out we were having twins. Now we live in a 1200sqft townhouse, which is also pretty nice. It seems plenty big for what we need. The thing that always amuses me is that all our relatives are wondering when we'll move into a "real" house. Apparen…
Folks who grew up in the country with wide open spaces feel claustrophobic in small spaces.
City people are happy with 400-600 sqft/person. It's an exercise in minimalism and frugality.
Houses are cheap enough that the price difference between a tiny house and a regular house is negligible when you add the price of land onto it. And the fact that a tiny house sometimes needs more land because it's detached.
Also, if you really care about the environment and population, live in an apartment building. It is better for the environment, because you share each others heating. You can have scale advantages when you do solar on the shared roof. You don't use as much land because you can go up in the air, which means more people can live in a popular area.