Absolute Beginners

Hold the phone, though. We're ploughing right ahead on the assumption that everybody knows what a tiny house is, and that may not be the case. Let's start there: what is a tiny house?

Quite simply, a tiny house is a really scaled down home. Technically, the term could be used to describe any diminutive house, but the tiny house we're referring to is built directly onto a trailer. This means you can move your home if you have to relocate. Tiny houses typically have a small bathroom, kitchen, living area, and a sleeping loft bedroom.

Living in tiny homes is fast becoming a movement, a reaction against McMansions, against consumerism, against mortgages. For a generation not expecting to ever be able to own homes, tiny houses provide a loophole—they are far less expensive to build than a conventional home, and their size necessitates a simpler lifestyle, as there isn't the physical space to pile up the possessions. In indirect ways, living in a tiny house gives the home-owner more time and freedom, and reduces their overall impact on the planet. And for those who choose to self-build, as we are doing, it represents the reacquisition of skills we seem to have lost as a population—building our own shelter. 

Here's a little infographic on the subject:  

Alternative housing had always piqued our interest. Hours had gone into researching Earthships, houseboats, cob and strawbale homes, and yurts. Tiny houses, though, seemed immediately like the best fit at this stage in our lives. From our urban apartment, we looked into a number of different houses that had been built by others the world over, on blogs, and video webseries, like Kirsten Dirsken's . These were some of our favourite abodes:

Lucy

The Tiny Project

Vina's Tiny House 

We had our sights set on buying plans from a local designer, not only to help support the local economy, but also because we didn't want to be having to make conversions from imperial to metric (what's up, America? Metric's so easy!)--at this point, we ran into Brett Sutherland's tiny house video tour. 

Not only was Brett local to us, his house was spectacular! The tiny house community seems to be really hooked on gabled roofs, which we found a bit claustrophobic. Here was a house that had its roof space opened right up, leaving ample breathing room in the living area, and plenty of sitting space in the loft. Brett had built the boat he had lived on prior to returning to land, so he had experience in smart design of small spaces. Not wanting to buy sight unseen, we contacted Brett to see if we could visit his house.

NANCY: I have to admit that I was a bit nervous that we'd get to his house and find it suffocatingly narrow. Upon entering the space, however, I fell in love. I was basically inside a boat. Having grown up on sailboats, I instantly felt like I was home. I was ecstatic. We bought the plans on the spot.

STEFF: What a lot of people don't realise about tiny houses, having only seen pictures of them, is that when you're inside the space, it feels plenty big enough. Also, we have a really mild climate in Auckland, and Brett's design allowed for a lot of cross breezes and indoor-outdoor living, as well as for easy catching of rainwater. It was the ideal plan for our build.

This brought us to our next question: how does one actually build a tiny house? To be honest, we had no idea. We had never built anything before. That's not entirely true; we tried to build a wall in New Jersey once, and we almost got divorced over it. But after some consultation with Warren, our extremely tolerant and endlessly valuable builder friend, we were advised to take everything one step at a time. We made a start: we ordered the trailer.

The trailer is the single most expensive component of the build, checking in at approximately $10k. Putting the deposit on our custom trailer, then, was the point where this tiny house whimsy started to become a reality. We chose to buy our trailer from Monoway, having heard good things about them. Their trailer was not only strong and nicely galvanised; they had also positioned the support bars so that our plywood flooring slotted perfectly into place (no trimming necessary, except around the wheel arches).

Also significant for us was moving out of our apartment. We had tried to work out a way to continue living in the city and building part-time, but that would involve a regular commute to our build site, in addition to continuing to pay rent.

NANCY: Having begun our build, I'm so glad that we made the decision to move out, if only because it makes funding the house so much less of a stress, not having the constant threat of rent hanging over our heads. Also, it's so nice to be able to finish a day's building and have a shower straight away. The commute into work is no fun, as Auckland traffic is steadily worsening, but it's a small sacrifice, when put in perspective.

STEFF: Living with family presents its challenges, but it's actually really nice to come home to an intergenerational household. Moving back in with family has immediately increased all of our support networks.

Our last step before trailer delivery was to do a massive shopping trip for the first stage of the build. We bought what came to look like a large heap of plywood, planks of framing timber, and a box of fixings. A few days later, our trailer arrived, and we began:

Levelling the trailer using cinder blocks and ground-treated timber.
The timber is there to spread the weight of the house;
it is ground-treated to prevent it from rotting in the wet conditions.

Creating a vapour barrier between the trailer and the plywood flooring

Destroying a perfectly good pair of scissors with bitumen

Drilling through ply and metal, countersinking, and driving tech screws to fix ply floor to trailer

Sanding off builders' bog, which we used to fill the countersink holes. Also, a bovine photobomb.

This week, during our ongoing process of downsizing belongings, we found this postcard that we sent ourselves from New York, in 2011. Our pertinent past selves just nailed it.

"Hey, Nancy and Steff! By the time you receive this, you'll be home!
Here's something you learned on this trip; don't forget it: so many people, at the end of your trip
brought attention to the fact that the trip was long, arduous, dangerous;
"how did you do it?!" they'd ask. Here's how: you just went ahead and did it.
Remember this for goals you might want to achieve in the future--just go ahead and do it!
Love, Nancy and Steff"

The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.