I buy organic and I go to the store more than once. I tend to wear a few items at a time. All others I still keep are just emotional attachment. Yes, not dealing with a condo assc is a big plus. More than that you are out in the nature. You can flop it down at a beautiful spot. A big house in a beautiful spot is invariably an eyesore. I am sure they will put a 2-burner stove if that’s your wish. There are models with a 3-person couch if that’s your priority. You can hook it up to local utility or go off grid completely or somewhere in between.
Nope. I’m with you 100%.
Huh???
@JoBlue, no, you are not.
@Joblue - oh, I’m sure you’re not! We just don’t want to pay to maintain space that, at most, would get used a couple of weeks per year. Our Ds will be living on the opposite coast after he graduates in June, but I can’t imagine his ever staying more than a week at a time with us even after he has a family of his own. I mean, his wife will have a family of her own they will spend time with, people only get so much vacation per year, not every vacation will be a trip to see us (they’ll have their own family vacations), etc. Once people are off a college schedule, there isn’t four weeks off at Christmas, a spring break, etc. I know many, MANY people who have kept their 4,000 sq ft homes for the very reason you state - they want all the family to be able to all stay together in one place when they are visiting. The reality has been (especially if they have more than one child and those adult children are married and working in different parts of the country) that everyone coordinating their schedules and all being together all at the same time has not played out as they expected/wanted. For those whose kids have stayed in town, they stay at their own homes. If Ds marries and has a large family, we plan to rent a house on the beach when they visit. Much cheaper in the long run than maintaining/insuring all the extra space we wouldn’t use, which is what we were doing. But, many MANY people disagree with what we are doing and think we’re crazy. Lol. As my friend says, “You do you, and I’ll do me.” 
I have no idea if this experiment will work or if it will be what we want long-term. We may hate it. If so, we’ll punt and do something different.
As we grew up we did not visit my parents ‘en masse’, we would visit on holidays for a day, etc. But, what my parents did to try to entice us to visit for large family gatherings was pay for big destination vacations. Who can resist the parents paying for a vacation to Hawaii and we would all stay in a big house? Pretty sure that the vacation costs (renting a big house) were less than them trying to maintain a 3 or 4 bedroom house. Those of us who had the means insisted on paying for our airfare anyway.
I think this means rotating through the same small number of outfits regularly. I get it. I “regularly” wear about 10% of my wardrobe day in and day out.
The money one saves on living small could be spent renting houses for families to come to for vacation get togethers (house near a beach, for example). This wasn’t quite the same, but for years my parents would rent in a nice vacation destination with a couple extra bedrooms (usually a condo, though) and have it overlap with everyone’s spring break. They would rent for a month. For years it was a condo about 30 minutes outside of Aspen. Then when they got too old to ski, it was in Cocoa Beach. We kids would come and go with our families most years as our schedules permitted. We’d pay our own transportation and tickets for most fun stuff like skiing. But sometimes my parents would pay for the whole group for something (like airboating in Florida through rivers and mangrove swamps). We’d buy some of the groceries, and usually eat in most of the time.
Exactly. This way, one can taylor it better as family grow through marriage and birth and interest evolves. Family visit and vacation in one. We are already doing that.
My parents did those lets all go somewhere (usually the beach) vacations. It was a lot of fun. Their retirement home was a place we hadn’t grown up, so it didn’t have the attraction of catching up with old friends that might be the case for others. (Though I think my kids’ friends are pretty much scattered all over the place now - though there’s a chunk of them in NYC.) When my grandparents downsized to a one bedroom apartment we’d get hotel rooms near them. It was not the end of the world.
Not really Tiny House material, but a sidebar from the above conversation: I love the idea of family reunion trips, but boy is it difficult to gather my own small immediate family let alone siblings & cousins (and hopefully future spouses and grandchildren). Everyone is so scattered, vacation time varied and limited, and flights expensive (and non-flexible). Few want to make a commitment until much closer to a gathering date, which makes it very difficult for those who must fly. Even my own siblings who have semi-committed to a yearly reunion find it tough to commit to a specific time/place. I really long for the “good old days” of extended family gatherings, but am finding them nearly impossible to coordinate.
@kjofkw - I hear ya’. I have a very small family, but mil is one of six. My Dh and his sister grew up driving 45 minutes every Sunday after church to his grandparents’ house/farm. Sunday afternoons were spent with all his cousins, aunts, uncles, and the grandparents. He has very fond memories of that, but now all the cousins (and their own children) are very scattered. While I know many students stay fairly close to home for college, I just think the population moves around a lot more than they did 50 or 60 years ago. Replicating that weekly, Sunday afternoon gathering is unlikely these days.
I don’t get the whole ‘plop it down anywhere’ idea. Would any sensible person call up their uncle and ask permission to drop something off that size and weight in the back 40 and expect it to be stable during the next rainstorm?
I watched one of the tiny house shows where they were dropping off the house in a city backyard. The ground was so soft the builders could hardly flee the installation fast enough. I would love to know what happened after the first heavy rain or when they started living in the TH and invited guests over.
As for the sleeping lofts, they look like fire traps to me.
I don’t get why tiny houses are considered to be a new thing. They are just mobile homes with wood siding added outside and wood paneling added inside.
Mobile homes are quite a bit larger, and a lot less pretentious.
Mobile homes are really not designed to be moved after they are located; in fact many trailer parks contractually disallow them to be moved - you can sell it but you can’t move it. They are designed to have permanent utility connections.
I think tiny homes are closer to “fancy camper” than mobile homes.
I have camped with composting outhouses. Much better than regular outhouses. One does ones business and then adds several scoops of bark mulch . The outhouses are on a hillside, and the park trucks come take the waste and bark away from the bottom as the several feet of mulch accumulate. I can’t imagine that in a small enclosure.
Stop, stop, stop. Many tiny homes have real toilets and real kitchen and real foundations. They are just small. The Katrina cottages were designed that way. Here’s one example: https://www.houseplans.com/plan/416-square-feet-1-bedrooms-1-bathroom-cottage-house-plans-0-garage-36518
Very cute. But it is the one closet that would kill me in that house.
I can totally live in that cottage - in the middle of my large ocean view chunk of land in HI. But no composting toilets, please. Septic system is OK.
I think you have to know yourself extremely well to commit to tiny house living, particularly if you are planning to drastically downsize. You have to ask yourself why exactly do you want to live in a tiny house? What qualifies as “tiny” in your book? What kinds of lifestyle changes are you willing to make in order to live permanently in a much smaller space? What are your minimum space needs? Will there be enough space to accommodate the stuff you’re unwilling to part with? If you have pets, what is the minimum amount of space they need? Are you going to live alone, or with one or more people? How well do you coexist with the people with whom you currently live? Would drastically reduced living space challenge that dynamic? Are you a person who likes to entertain guests? In what way, and for how long? Are you used to being able to retreat to a more private room in your current residence for some peace and quiet? After having watched a LOT of those tiny living types of shows, the thing I most often observe is people who don’t seem to have really thought through the decision to live so compactly.
I could never move into a truly tiny home, especially if I had to share that space with another person. God knows I love my H., but I’m a true introvert. I need my alone time (quite a bit of it, acually) in order to recharge and maintain a modicum of sanity. When H watches his crime dramas and other types of shows that disturb me, I like to retreat to another room where I’m unable to hear gunshots, squealing tires, and criminals behaving like criminals. I need someplace quiet to think, read, paint, or write. No way would a tiny house, or even one less than 1000 sft., accommodate that need. I’m also extremely sensitive to odors, so a space so limited as to preclude the ability to escape bathroom odors is a total deal breaker.