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Small World: The Tiny House Trend

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Re: Small World: The Tiny House Trend

#221

Post by crooked-v »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #176
Bjorkbat wrote: post #142

I really wish there was more diversity in offerings when it came to manufactured/trailer homes. To clarify, I'm not talking about RVs. I like tiny houses, but really only in the sense that I'm fascinated by unusually small things. Otherwise I think they're actually kind of ridiculous if your motives are to downsize and not pay $300,000+ on a house Trailer homes are pretty incredible when you think about it. They're t…

The upscale trailer homes are branded as "manufactured homes" and come in modules that piece together in more appealing ways than a double-wide.

I really wish a company would make modular homes that are actually modular, in that you could start with a 'tiny home' module, then a few years down the line add a 'bedroom and master bath' module and turn the original bedroom into a child's space, and so on. The end result might be at a premium over getting a big house all at once, but in the meantime you'd get the benefit of being able to invest most of your money instead of sinking it into a mortgage.

Re: Small World: The Tiny House Trend

#222

Post by danvoell »

boxcardavin wrote: post #122

I've lived in a ~250sqft 1940's era wood train car for the past 9 years, with my wife and now a newborn. It is doable if you enjoy the constraints and how it affects your decision making. I live about 5 miles from Seattle in a very rich neighborhood (a few blocks from the Paul Allen estate) on a large piece of land that is set aside as a reserve, while most of my neighbors have 5000sqft houses. As long as you have am…

I'm going to guess eclectic and rich otherwise you probably wouldn't bring it up. I like the fact that how you live is reflected in your HN username.

Re: Small World: The Tiny House Trend

#223

Post by ryandrake »

icebraining wrote: post #200
ryandrake wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same unsettling feeling as you. The conspiracy theorist in me is definitely on high alert and sees it as an attempt at conditioning this generation towards accepting a lower quality of life than their parents had. If we can be made to actually believe we want to live in tiny cramped homes and apartments, then when it comes to pass we won’t get out the pitchforks and torches and riot. Eating bread and plain…

Curious, I'd say many of us younger folks see it in reverse: our parents got roped in the propaganda of "consume now and pay later, you'll certainly be earning more", and then the lie was exposed, and they're left unemployable and with a crippling mortgage. Under this perspective, by giving up on superfluous crap, we're just keeping our eyes wide open, because we're fully aware that we'll get fucked sooner or later.…

Yea, there are pros and cons to bigger and smaller homes. It’s just that the marketing of the Tiny House “Movement” and the constant pushing for us to be happy with small apartments instead of houses reminds me of Huxley. “Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard.”

Re: Small World: The Tiny House Trend

#224

Post by notJim »

driverdan wrote: post #114
systemtest wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like having a separate bedroom. It has nice carpeting, a big bed, a clothing closet and blinds that make the room pitch black. The walls are isolated for heat and noise and the only window is facing the garden, not the busy street on the other side. No electronics to distract me, nothing to look at. The temperature is lower than the rest of the house (on purpose). It's really magical for me to sleep there and I hav…

Why would you need a large home for that? You can have a small home with multiple rooms.

But that's a small home, not a tiny home. But even small homes (if they exist at all) cost at least 500k in many cities.

Re: Small World: The Tiny House Trend

#225

Post by crooked-v »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #28
organsnyder wrote: post #18

I can understand the benefits of building tiny houses in spaces that wouldn't accommodate larger buildings (such as as accessory dwelling units [ADUs] in traditional single-family neighborhoods). But I don't understand the benefits of building clusters of them: why not build a standard apartment building instead? Construction costs will be cheaper, and shared walls reduce heating/cooling costs.

Shared walls often mean you know when your neighbours are in, when they're watching TV, when they argue and what they're arguing about, when the dog is barking or the toddler having a tantrum, and even when they're walking to the other room. Even insulation benefits can't be relied on as shared walls are often uninsulated and overall insulation in apartment blocks often bare minimum to code rather than adequate. Last…

My building is circa 1900 and all-wood construction and doesn't have any of those problems, aside from being able to tell when an immediate neighbor is running a washing machine on high (the wood floorboards are all nailed to the same long joists and carry the vibrations across).

Re: Small World: The Tiny House Trend

#226

Post by war1025 »

CalRobert wrote: post #164
war1025 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Currently live in a 62 sqm (667 sqft) 2 bed flat with my wife and 18 mo. old daughter. Friends think of the place as huge. We just bought a 52 square meter house, but we did it cash - no mortgage (just took the deposit we'd saved for a city home and looked outside the city instead). That's worth more to me than a lot of space. Though I might be cheating because there are some outbuildings which can hold washer/dryer…

We also paid all cash for our place. Looking at what our bills are currently, and adding a mortgage to it, I think we'd be living much closer to paycheck-to-paycheck if we had that over our heads. Very happy that we lived frugally for several years and were able to build up enough savings to pay for our place outright.

The key in our situation is we went for a townhouse, which for whatever reason seems to knock 30-50% off the asking price. I guess people really don't like stairs and living immediately next to people.

Re: Small World: The Tiny House Trend

#227

Post by zdragnar »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #185
stcredzero wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trailer homes are pretty incredible when you think about it. They're the closest we've come yet to building houses on an assembly line in a factory. People are already building house components on an assembly line in a factory. By components, I mean entire rooms and sections of houses. I wish some brave soul would undertake the task of creating, I don't know, the VW bug of trailer homes. Doesn't have to be a luxury t…

People are already building house components on an assembly line in a factory. By components, I mean entire rooms and sections of houses. As in prefabs? Of course. But trailer/manufactured homes take it further. It's one single unit. If "the VW Bug of" means a willingness of the manufacturer to modify the traditional chassis and body layout to better accomplish design goals, then GMC did build something along the lin…

Modular homes are virtually indistinguishable from ground-up-stick-built homes, and are most definitely not prefabs.

https://www.wausauhomes.com/ and http://www.wisconsinhomesinc.com/ are a pretty good example of what you can do. Either they typically ship in 3-6 sections and are stitched together on-site by your framers, electricians and plumbers, or they ship wall and roof segments that take 2-5 days to stitch together. From that point on, it's the same process as your standard custom home, excepting that the frame was built in an environmentally controlled environment.

Edit: they're definitely not what you are referring to by "cheap" though. You'll probably save a bit of money over totally custom, but not along the lines of a tiny home either.

Re: Small World: The Tiny House Trend

#228

Post by everdrive »

ryandrake wrote: post #140
tjr225 wrote: post #12

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.

I have the same unsettling feeling as you. The conspiracy theorist in me is definitely on high alert and sees it as an attempt at conditioning this generation towards accepting a lower quality of life than their parents had. If we can be made to actually believe we want to live in tiny cramped homes and apartments, then when it comes to pass we won’t get out the pitchforks and torches and riot. Eating bread and plain…

It just depends on which generation. Remember the 1960s were an aberration, not the norm. A lot of people grew up 13 to a 1000-sq-foot rowhome in Baltimore closer to 1900. I'm not in any way suggesting this desirable, just that the idea that you'd have a huge 4000k home is fairly modern, and probably not sustainable.

Re: Small World: The Tiny House Trend

#229

Post by seanmcdirmid »

systemtest wrote: post #80

The problem in the Netherlands is that land is expensive. A 40 square meter tiny house in Almere was for sale at €200.000, while a nearby 3 bedroom family house was for sale at €220.000. They both had a garden but the family house was a row home. They both used about the same amount of land. Houses are cheap enough that the price difference between a tiny house and a regular house is negligible when you add the price…

American apartments often don’t share heat very well, each unit is heavily insulated from each other and it’s not using piped hot water from a central heating plant like in Europe and Asia. Still probably a bit more efficient overall.

Re: Small World: The Tiny House Trend

#230

Post by ChuckMcM »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #142

I really wish there was more diversity in offerings when it came to manufactured/trailer homes. To clarify, I'm not talking about RVs. I like tiny houses, but really only in the sense that I'm fascinated by unusually small things. Otherwise I think they're actually kind of ridiculous if your motives are to downsize and not pay $300,000+ on a house Trailer homes are pretty incredible when you think about it. They're t…

On one end of the spectrum is Blu Homes (https://www.bluhomes.com/) which builds pre-fabricated homes that aren't quite so boxy as mobile homes. We looked at investing in them when they started up and perhaps getting one of their smaller units for a piece of land up in the Sierra foothills[1].

Shipping container homes are also a sort of niche thing at the moment. Realistically though it isn't the walls that cost the money on a house, its all the stuff that goes in the walls :-) (wiring, pipes, insulation, Etc.)

From an extreme perspective you have the Broad Group in China who was building pre-fab skyscrapers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_City_(Changsha)) that would house a thousand families.

[1] I ended up doing neither for different reasons but I know a couple who bought one and they really enjoy it.

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