Living in a small house

[dlskidmore]

We’re contemplating that our new land may not come with an inhabitable structure, but we don’t really want to put out the cash to build a dream home right now either. We’ve been considering small homes.

Some of you folks acquired land with old small farmhouses. Some of you are consciously aware of your house’s ecological footprint and made a decision to go small. Some of you may just spend so much time outside that you don’t much care how big the house is. Anyway, you folks are more likely to have experience with small house living than the tisking relatives.

I’m currently considering a house in the 1000 sq ft range, like this one. If I get real desperate I might go for a truely tiny home like this, but only as a temporary measure, as there is no room for dogs or children there.

What are the pros/cons of a small house? Any of you manage children of both genders sharing a room? Storage hints? Managing guests/holidays?

[lancek]

when we went to tenn and worked on a prodgect we put up a uritt large tent house like they use in asia! we made a wood floor and frame then used lumber tarps to seal the out side walls and metal for the roof! W e made four differant rooms added electrical and insuation and hard board for the walls all this inclueding plumbing cost us less than $5000.00 and we lived through ice storms hurricane and cold winter weather with out too much discomfert for three years!

[dlskidmore]

That kind of thing would make a great 3 season house here, but I can’t imagine when we hit sub-zero weather that the insulation would cut it.

What kind of insulation do you use on a tent house? You have no studs to hold batting, blow-in, or spray foam, nothing to nail foam to…

On the other hand, our 100 year old non-insulated house is so expensive to heat that we keep it 52-58 F in here, we’re used to cold.

[dominiquer60]

I have considered a yurt as well when I was looking at property. I know that some townships do not allow such things or even just “camping” on your own property, just something to check into. I know plenty of folks that started out in tents and then built something before it was the dead of winter too.

What ever you end up doing you could have a living structure and a close-by storage structure like a truck box or container. Some have lived in these as well, we had a roofer with a PO box in town, he live in a 16′ foot box truck and in the winter you would see the smoke from his wood stove coming out of the chimney as he drove into town from where ever he parked.

You will be able to make anything work as long as you all are happy to make what some feel is a sacrifice in quality of living. People have lived with little for centuries, there is no reason it cannot be done again.

Erika

[lancek]

We made stud walls with two by fours and put the batting insulation in this the inportant thing is to make sure you seal your floors to cealing and yes they tryed to give us problems with this situation but found out as long as we had the min. square footage per person and proper water and sewage then there was nothing they could do about us living in this! I would allso sudjest if you live in the north east to get a arcituectual enginer to sign off on your plans and that should give you enough ammo to get around the problem of local athoritys giving you trouble! We allso lived in sub zero temps and had no problem keeping temps in 60s!

[dlskidmore]

We can get by without a lot of what we have. A storage unit would be nice, an empty trailer or cargo container for all the junk we can’t part with yet, but we don’t really use 3 of the bedrooms in our home, or our living room, and half of the kitchen is storage rather than useful cooking space. We just need a bedroom, an office, a bathroom, and a kitchen, and enough space for the dog crates. We eat at our desks enough, we don’t even need a dining room or kitchen table. I’ve cooked huge multi-course meals in little apartment kitchens before I got my current big one. (Granted college students are more grateful for that sort of thing than in-laws, and don’t mind sitting on your floor to eat the nice meal.) A second bedroom and a second bath would give room for the family to expand a bit, which is one of the family goals to be helped by me working at home.

[Stable-Man]

The first plan looks doable, and is about the same dimensions of the upper two stories of my house. If you intend to have two kids and they turn out different genders I’d remove that sitting area and make it into another bedroom. I slept in a bedroom for 20 years of about 10×10. 4 people in 1000sf was common in the ’50s, it just might be a little tighter than one is used to.

[Robert MoonShadow]

Having lived (in the recent past) in a 9’x12′ prison cell w/ another inmate for 5 years, I’d say anything larger that affords any sense of privacy could seem a great blessing of the gods…I guess it’s all in the perspective, ayuh? My point being, w/ freedom & family to enjoy it with, almost anything can become a home, if you all truly desire it to be…without that desire, it’s just a house – no matter how many square feet it is.
Just my stray thought on the subject. 🙂

[near horse]

When we first lived on our place here in Idaho, we lived in a 700 sq ft 2 bdrm house (an old Montgomery Wards kit house I think) w/ 2 kids. Advantage – easy to heat quickly due to small size. Disadvantage – no “personal space” and storage is an issue. Guests – ha! Beter if they can stay in a hotel or rent a motorhome and camp in the yard. Good luck.

[dlskidmore]

@Stable-Man 20059 wrote:

The first plan looks doable, … remove that sitting area and make it into another bedroom.

There’s also that atrium, if designed for from the beginning, you could probably put a room there instead of the big open space that’s just annoying to heat. The atrium is cute and makes the place feel a bit bigger from downstairs…

There’s also our “modular building” plan, of designing an addition at the same time as the original floor plan. Design in a large social room and a master suite to be added later, and have the original master bedroom be a second children’s room. The hallway already touches the west wall, that seems the most doable. The addition’s ridge line would be perpendicular and come up over the existing roof. When the kids are toddlers it’s no big deal for them to bunk together. We’d have 5 years or so to save up for the addition after we felt stable enough for me to quit the day job and have kids.

Our original modular building plan has 4 stages, with the first being basically a studio, but the builder we talked to said to not even think of it if we held any debt on the place, it was way too unconventional a building to be approved for financing. (The idea is to reduce financing, but I don’t know if we can do away with it completely.)

A couple people mentioned yurts. Did you build your own or buy one? I looked at a vendor today, and found it way too easy to spend $40,000 in options on a 30′ Yurt. Looking around for DIY options, especially if I can end up with an existing woodlot I can harvest wood from.

[goodcompanion]

Any number of ways to approach this problem limited only by your imagination and maybe a few pesky zoning ordinances.

If you file for a building permit for your “real” house that allows you two years to occupy, maybe with possible extensions for extra years, many townships are pretty lenient on sub-standard residency while a building permit is valid. So this can allow you a fair while of living in imaginative housing while you plan and build properly.

People overwinter in yurts in climates colder than new york state. They are small and easy to heat. A double layer of canvas holds in more heat than you’d think.

I have also seen hi-end mobile houses. There are some youtube videos of these things around too. Just build a real well-built house with real insulated wood walls and a gable roof with a sleeping loft on a 16′ x 8′ utility trailer frame. Then when you build your real house you can sell it, rent it out, move your grandma into it, whatever. I was on the cusp of building one for interns and figured it would run about $3000 in materials. Two people could probably stand to live in one without killing each other if they got along real well going into the experience.

And second above comments about smaller bedrooms and houses in general in the not-too-recent past. I once lived in a house of 600 ft2, 20 x 30, two small bedrooms, little bath, small but functional kitchen and living room. Not too terrible to build such a thing and add onto it later, though multiple foundation excavations and pours are a pain and involve some wasted money and effort.

[lancek]

There agian that whats nice about the yurts [ I will spell it right now] but anyway we used 2×6 walls and 2×8 rafters wich you could cutt from your wood lot and the floor was 2x10s with simple poored pillers made with sacked cement as a foundation! Then we put sheet metal for our roof R30 insuation in the roof and r24 in walls and floor joists 1/4 inch hard board was use for the inside walls [easy to paint and inexpensive and 3/4 plywood for floor with carpet and vinal for kit. then we had rubberized lumber tarps to cover the side walls and a small ben franklin wood stove to heat and propane gas heater as back up. There agian we put $5000.00 into it and it lasted us two years untill we were done with the job and then we dismanteled it and sold it to a nighber for a artis loft

[dlskidmore]

I’ve been reading about yurts. I don’t think I’m committed enough to move into one though. I could definitely see building one for other purposes.

It could be a semi-permanent building for weekend and evening visits out to the property. A place to have a meal and relax after doing some chores.

Construction headquarters…

Round structures are rather ideal for animal handling, it could be a lambing shed made from local materials…

Office…

Kid’s play area…

Camping equipment…

[Does’ Leap]

My wife and I lived in a yurt year-round for five years. We were students in Maine for two years then moved the yurt on our current farm in Vermont while we built. It was a nice space (20 ft in diameter), plenty warm, and saved us $$ while we got on our feet.

George

[dlskidmore]

We have the mortgage free house in the city within easy driving distance of where we want to buy the farm. If we build our new house ourselves, it makes sense to live on site so it’s easy to manage working on it every day, but if we hire out building it seems like a lot of trouble to build a temporary structure and scale down our living.

I’m thinking of doing the wood framing myself, but having a contractor do the rest. Excavation, foundation, electric, and roofing at least I would hire out. I’m on the fence regarding plumbing, it may depend on building codes. The city where I now live requires a licence to do anything with plumbing. I could do siding, insulation, and drywall, but we’ll see how fast doing my own framing goes first.

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