More extreme downsizing stories hitting the main stream media. Be sure to cast your vote in the survey at the bottom of the linked article.
“A Calgary family is building a tiny new abode on wheels that holds roughly 300 square feet of living space.
Kirsten Shaw and Michael Hunt plan to pull up stakes in Calgary in the spring and drive with one son through the United States for a year.”
via Calgary family trades in spacious home for tiny house – Calgary – CBC News.
Great off-grid retirement story.
“Margy and Wayne Lutz were camping in Coastal British Columbia when they discovered their dream home: the float cabins of Powell Lake. They’re not houseboats, but “float cabins”, that is, they’re permanently anchored to shore.
The Lutz’s bought their retirement home in 2001 for 35,000 Canadian dollars (about $25,000 USD, at the time), what they considered worth the risk if their experiment in off-grid living didn’t workout.”
See more at Off-grid float cabin: retirement tiny dream home in BC wilderness – YouTube.
Laird lives up in the Yukon Territory, Whitehorse to be precise, and has just finished building his second tiny home. This design is called the Leaf House
Read more at Leaf House – a Tiny House in the Yukon | Tiny House Design.
Les Stroud, a.k.a Survivor Man, produced this documentary several years ago that records his personal adventure into setting up an off-the-grid homestead in Canada.
The property he buys is 150 acres and has some old farm buildings, one of which he trys to convert into a small 20′ by 20′ cabin before winter. He also sets up a tent cabin that he and his family use as a temporary shelter and also has some help building a small prefab cabin.
It seems that the main lesson learned from this experience is that proper planning and good timing can make a project like this much easier. Although I suspect there was just no avoiding some of the challenges they endured.
All of the segments are currently on YouTube but you can also buy the DVD form his website. Here’s the first part.
Visit YouTube to see the rest…
This tiny house is located on Powell Lake in coastal British Columbia. It’s just 400 square feet (20’x20′) and sits on a floating platform made up of giant logs.
This is a great story about a class of high school students in Canada designing and building tiny houses. Each student is coming up with a design. Three houses will be built. In the end two will be dismantled and recycled into future projects and one will be sold to raise money for the school. I’m certain this will be just the first of a series of articles on this wonderful school project.
I always like to hear about folks finding creative ways of solving housing needs. It’s not the beating the system part that interests me, although too often it seems like that is a requirement, which is really sad. Shouldn’t building codes be designed to protect folks… not limit or exclude folks? This article on Tiny House Blog describes one such work-around situation at Lake Ontario, Canada.
This is a great little vacation rental concept out of France that will soon be available in the US and Canada. It’s a self contained tiny house that can be transported to it’s final site in one piece and setup with just a little effort.
This is a 500 square foot modern prefab home built by PreForm in Canada. The builder takes extra care to use reclaimed, recycled, and FSC lumber to keep the homes green.
PreForm Prefab
Imagine Your Tiny House