Gorgeous, Deliverable, Inexpensive Small Custom Homes

My dad has been a professional home builder for my entire life. One thing that I have learned is that space is secondary to design. There is so much wasted space in many (most?) big homes.

The other thing I've learned is that no matter how much you want a 4000 square foot house, NOBODY wants to heat it or clean it. The question is do you want a big house enough to deal with the headache of heating it and cleaning it.

I would like to buy a little one of these for our eldest- my stepson- to live in when he starts college in five years. (Room and board is $1000/mo, so a wee house would pay for itself awfully damned quick, and he'd have someplace to live during the summer.)

Really, a dual loft park model would fit the other four of us just fine, with a couple caveats:

-I'd want a summer kitchen under a pavillion or in a porch

-I'd want a big root cellar to function as a pantry

-I'd want a separate laundry/closet facility that included a shower. DH and I have talked about doing this and building/buying a large garden shed and outfitting it with a washer and dryer, a laundry sink and a composting toilet. We'd have to plumb it ourselves so that we could have some type of trap to easily drain pipes so that nothing froze since we wouldn't want to heat it constantly. It would be a family closet, too, with a bunch of garment racks and those plastic drawers, and a freestanding enclosed closet for dressy stuff. We could keep our shoes out there, and extra linens. If we were smart about it, we could also have lots of lines, to air dry things even in the winter, and just get by with one of those tiny 100v electric dryers. Since all the plumbing (including a sink) would be right there, adding a shower stall would be very easy. Then we could get away with one small closet in the house proper- just go out once a week and get your outfits ready to go.

While I'm dreaming, I also want an outdoor wood fired hot tub.

http://www.innermosthouse.com/photo.php?pageID=96&view=mobile

This is not just the most beautiful tiny house I've ever seen, it may be the most beautiful house I've ever seen, period.

Leta said:

http://www.innermosthouse.com/photo.php?pageID=96&view=mobile

This is not just the most beautiful tiny house I've ever seen, it may be the most beautiful house I've ever seen, period.

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I keep tiny houses bookmarked...and another good one is ApartmentTherapy. It deals with tiny houses also.

And here I thought you were a dessert dreamer!

Ya, wood fired hot tub. We had a big ol' hot tub when we lived in town. I practically lived in that thing for a year. After that it was just a little swimming pool for our then young grandson.

There have been many times we wished we had one now. But lately I'm thinking about a DIY steam room instead.

I love little houses. We have a really big house. I usually joke and say that DH and I don't like each other that much. I don't mind cleaning it so much, but heating it is a bear. Our next house will be much, much smaller, but not tiny.

Denim Deb said:

And here I thought you were a dessert dreamer!

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DD - was this directed at me? If so, I thought about that too! I'm in the desert dreaming of dessert!

Leta said:

http://www.innermosthouse.com/photo.php?pageID=96&view=mobile

This is not just the most beautiful tiny house I've ever seen, it may be the most beautiful house I've ever seen, period.

Click to expand...

This house is stunningly beautiful. The craftsmanship is amazing. I'd love to have a tiny house with this kind of style, but I'd need it to be a little bit bigger. This is just a little too small for me. It looks like it around 100 sf and I think I'd need at least twice that, but about 350 sf would be ideal for me. Of course everything depends on good design. You can have 100 sf that functions much better than 350 sf if the design is better.

Oh.........and I'd love to have it in this location! My goodness the surroundings of this house are beautiful.

It's like a tiny church or monastery. What a beautiful place to live a spiratual life in harmony with nature. But with my health issues, i would not be able to climb into the loft bed.

marianne, isn't your current big house still under construction? And you are already planning the next one? You must have some secret source of energy! We are just looking for our forever place, and that's exhausting.

moxie, I *love* Apartment Therapy! I wish is wasn't so very skewed toward urban living (just because I'm always on the lookout for country mouse ideas, nothing against the city) but they still have so many good ideas there.

sunsaver, this tiny house made me think of you, because there's a queen size murphy bed. You wouldn't have to climb into a loft at night. (Look at the last couple of photos.)

http://tinytexashouses.com/?portfolio=ellinger-house

The Innermost House (the beautiful monastic house in the woods) is 12'x12', so it's 144 sf plus the loft. The loft, including the closet space, looks to be about half the footprint of the house, so 72 sf, for a total of ~216 sf. They also have two small lean-to type sheds that hold some belongings. I think this would be workable for a single person or couple, but certainly not a family.

I think this "shotgun shack redux" would be great for our family with a few tweaks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y15dxUZN3s

We'd need to raise the roof so that we could have two lofts (one per each little kid), and as I said in a pp, I'd prefer to have laundry in a separate facility, and I'd need some sort of freestanding pantry. But I think this is a great example of how to put a family (albeit a small one) in 350 sf. I absolutely love how they just integrated the bathroom into the hallway- especially for three people, this is brilliant- one can be showering while one is on the potty and one is at the vanity getting ready. It's one bath, but by breaking it up it functions like three baths.

I've always liked shotgun houses- my dad's friend lived in a very small one (less than 700 sf) and there was not one single inch of wasted space. It had an attic, a basement, and a garage, so it was extremely spacious. He converted the attic into his son's room, and the main floor went porch-front door-living room-kitchen-bath/hallway/closet/drawers/stairs(up and down)-bedroom. The basement housed their laundry and utility rooms, and he finished off the rest of the basement into a sort of rec room- it had a wood stove and a computer station and an air hockey table. He put a shelf-type desk in their laundry room and that's where they kept hobby sort of stuff, including a sewing machine, which I always thought was pretty awesome (that a couple of guys had a sewing machine, I mean). There was a fireplace in the main floor living room, so between that and the basement woodstove, that was how they heated their house. Their furnace was only on if they were out of town. And this was in Southern Michigan, so it got pretty cold.

Then they had the garage, which was as big as the house- the garage attic was storage, they had a workshop in there and bikes and sports equipment, AND you could actually fit two cars in there!

They could have easily fit another person in that house, even though it was so small that it wouldn't have passed most modern building codes.

CheerioLounge said:

Denim Deb said:

And here I thought you were a dessert dreamer!

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DD - was this directed at me? If so, I thought about that too! I'm in the desert dreaming of dessert!

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Yeah, and I have no idea how it ended up here when this isn't where I posted it.