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tiny houses

Tiny House Demo

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Here’s something kinda charming:

Neat, huh? I love his “tiny fireplace…but it’s a tiny house”! 🙂 And how about that scenery in those places where  he’s plopped the things?

Every  now and again Mary at Simply Forties will ruminate about these minuscule little gems and wonder…could a person actually live in one of them? Like…permanently?

Pour moi, I don’t know. I occupy a four-bedroom house. It’s a little loose for me, but at 1,680 square feet, it’s not so huge I want to get free of it. One of the bedrooms is devoted to storage—it holds a freezer that wouldn’t fit in the kitchen; the closet holds linens that won’t fit in the linen closet, some art and sewing supplies, during the summer the space heaters, and during the winter the fans. A wallful of old bookcases holds food staples that won’t fit in the kitchen pantry and shouldn’t be stored in 115-degree heat in the garage. Another bedroom holds my office, file storage, and office supplies; I spend most of my waking hours here, operating not one, not two, but three enterprises. The master bedroom is just another closet—none of these rooms is very large—but I can’t imagine doing without it.

I could, however, do without the bedroom that’s occupied by the television, since I hardly ever watch TV anymore. Last night I sat down to veg out while writing a post for another site and found the offerings so bad, with all four channels of NPR begging for money and just garbage on all the other stations, that it didn’t even suffice as background noise.

And I could live without two bathrooms. And the extra living room that is the “family room.” That would cut about 470 square feet off my present space, bringing the desired living space down to about 1,210 square feet.

The underwater downtown house is about 1,300 square feet, to my mind just about ideal for one person. The kitchen is large enough to function. The dining room is big enough to entertain friends. The living room will hold an overstuffed sofa and chair (nonnegotiables, in my book); one of the bedrooms has plenty of space for an office, one is roomy enough for a queen-sized bed or maybe even a king; and the little back room will do for extra storage or as a guest room or sitting room.

What bothers  me about Jay’s minidigs, besides the fact that you’d have to be pathologically tidy to live there, is the loft bedroom. It’s a firetrap. Get a fire started below you—propane is wildly flammable—and you’re dead. There’s no way in hell you’re gonna get out of there. Check out that teeny little window: cute, but a grown man couldn’t begin to fit through it. And if he did, where would be be? Over the top of a flaming porch?

HUH-uh. Don’t think we’ll be contemplating life by Walden Pond in that thing.

Now the one in Texas that Mary photographed looks more reasonable. The bedroom is on the ground floor (there doesn’t appear to be a second floor). With some exuberant downsizing, you could indeed fit inside that place. At least, one person could. Two might be a little tight. Personally, I’d like more kitchen space—I cook a lot, and I’m not seeing enough space there for someone who likes to cook and likes to eat.

It’s a perfect little guest house or vacation getaway. As Mary points out, to make it permanently livable it would be good to have a place for a washer and dryer (or a washer alone…you hardly need a dryer, at least in a warm climate). For the $45,000 Mary’s friend paid to install this on her lot, you might be able to get an ordinary manufactured home in a park model; Cavco is selling them for around $49,000. Clayton claims to build a three-bedroom mobile home for as little as 49 grand…but who knows what you really get for that.

For not very much more that $45,000, I suspect you could get enough space that you wouldn’t have to ponder whether you really could live in it. You’d need to buy a plot of land, of course…there’s the rub! But if you already have one, this would be an inexpensive way to build on it.

Tiny Houses of Yesteryear

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The other day I was cruising some of those sites plugging tiny houses and the occasional blog whose proprietor daydreamed wistfully of chucking all the junk and living in one of them. At some point in the course of this junket through the Internet—I don’t remember how—I stumbled upon this amazing site in the archives of Sears. Check it out, especially the voluminous collections of photos and floor plans.

As it develops, between 1908 and the start of World War II, Sears marketed houses built from kits. You could order up the plans and precut materials, and what you got was everything you needed to put a home together, right down to the nails, delivered to your site by freight train. Apparently it wasn’t hard to put one of the things together—a single skilled carpenter could do it.

These packages were made possible by the invention of drywall, which took the place of the much more work-intensive (and beautiful…) lath-and-plaster system, and enhanced by the invention of asphalt shingles, cheap to manufacture, easy to install, and fireproof. The prices today look astonishing. The Arlington (a.k.a. Modern Home No. 145), an elegant two-story model with indoor plumbing, cost $1,294 to $2,906.

Quite a few of the houses were bungalows. Meditating on these charming little structures, it occurred to me that some of them look suspiciously like my great-grandmother’s house in Berkeley. Could it be…?

Her house was built in 1922. Nothing like it appears in the 1921–1926 set, nor in the 1927–1932 collection. But in the last group of plans, 1933–1949, lo! What should appear but the Collingwood:

The exterior didn’t look at all like that. There was no dormer, the steps leading to the front door were different, and where the front porch is, my great-grandmother’s house had a small enclosed entry hall. But the floor plan is very similar, almost the same except for a couple of details:

The railroad-car layout is identical: the two bedrooms and bathroom stacked one behind the other on the right side of the house, and the living room opening through an archway into the dining room, which sat adjacent to the kitchen with its little eating nook at the far end and the back stoop off a little service porch. If the front porch were enclosed, the fireplace on the front wall instead of the side wall, and the living room and kitchen extended out as far as the “bay” in the dining room, it would the the same, identical floor plan!

The striking thing is how small this house is: only about 890 square feet. Some were much smaller; the Hathaway, for example, looks to have been about 410 square feet, when you add both floors together.

According to Zillow, my great-grandmother’s house, still standing on Hopkins Street in Berkeley and now valued at $733,500(!), has 1,265 square feet under roof. An average double-wide trailer is 1,700 square feet.

The house never seemed small to us: in fact, we regarded it as a normal sized home. My parents, in all their 38 years of wedded bliss, never lived in a house that had more than two bedrooms. People lived in larger houses, of course. But they were for larger families, people who had four, five, six kids. When my father moved them to a two-bedroom, two-bath house in Sun City, I recall my mother wondering why anyone would want a second bathroom to have to clean.

Today’s voguish “tiny” houses would have been cramped, even back in the day when people occupied lots less space. Tumbleweed is mounting 65- to 140-square-foot “tiny houses” on trailers. I couldn’t live in a 140-square-foot shed. But I would find many of the Sears floor plans quite comfortable. For one or two people, the Collingwood could certainly fill the bill.

Given the growing enthusiasm for small dwellings with small footprints, wouldn’t you think someone at Sears would think of reviving these kit houses?