Have you ever had an idea so exciting that you wanted to drop everything to work on it, but you wondered if it would be worth it in the end? Macy Miller is a young architectural designer who found an opportunity to make her professional and personal passions overlap. She literally dreamed up a very…Read more
By Dee Williams Last month, I flew to Japan to participate in a Tiny House Building Workshop hosted by my friend Yuichi, one of PAD’s former students and a master tree house builder. He worked for almost a year to bring students and teachers together for several weekends to teach the group how to engineer…Read more
By Billy Ulmer, author of the Life in a Tiny House ebook. A lot of people ask me what a tiny house is, but I think these questions are just as interesting: “What’s a ‘normal house?’ Where is it normal? And for how long has it been normal?” The main thing that makes a tiny house…Read more
Around eight hours from the lush, famously rainy city of Portland is the Alvord Desert. It’s the driest place in Oregon, popular for dramatic scenery and for the small hot spring that’s been developed into a natural hot tub. As I pulled into the parking lot of the Alvord Hot Springs, I immediately noticed a…Read more
By Billy Ulmer, author of the Life in a Tiny House ebook. Do you wonder if you should move into a tiny home? Choosing where to live is a big deal, and feels like an even bigger one when what you want to do isn’t a common or popular choice. But while it’s hard to…Read more
This is a guest post from Billy Ulmer, author of the Life in a Tiny House ebook. What can a tiny house enthusiast learn from a book written for a business audience? If you ask me: plenty. Before I started interviewing tiny house owners, I was reading books on anthropology, business, philosophy, urban planning, career…Read more
While tiny houses are getting more and more coverage in the media, it’s still difficult to find an opportunity to go inside and tour one. This is a shame, because like any space, you’ve got to be inside it to really know what it’s like. A picture is worth a thousand words, but an experience is…Read more
By Dee Williams It’s hard to choose a tiny house builder. Tiny houses on wheels aren’t just miniature versions of normal houses. They shouldn’t be built like a shed, barn, or a “normal house”, they need to be able to handle their specialized circumstances. So even someone who has worked in construction for the past 30…Read more
By Dee Williams I’ve been dreaming about a possible downsize for a while… and especially since I busted my butt falling out of my loft a few years ago. Limping around for six months with my sacrum slowly knitting itself back together, I started wondering what it would be like to live in a smaller…Read more
Many tiny house enthusiasts want to get off the grid, and design their homes to run on solar power and catch rainwater. Living off the grid in a rural area has a special romance to it – be independent, financially free, and escape the rat race! It’s natural to romanticize the idea of getting away…Read more
Is it the size of your house that matters, or the community it makes you a part of? Communities give us places to work and play, they are the friends and family who give us purpose and support. We might think of home as what’s contained within our walls, but what’s outside of them can…Read more
This post is by Billy Ulmer, author of the Life in a Tiny House ebook. One of the biggest barriers to living in a tiny house is that it can be challenging to find a stable place to put it. Many tiny homes, especially those on wheels, operate in a legal gray area because the…Read more
This post is by Billy Ulmer, author of the Life in a Tiny House ebook. What are your priorities? It’s surprisingly hard to be clear about that, after a lifetime of having products and whole lifestyles advertised at us. That’s part of why tiny houses can be so polarizing: they represent a growing shift away…Read more
By Dee Williams I’m home in Olympia now, back from my six week book tour for The Big Tiny. I was absolutely wowed by the whole experience, and I want to share short vignettes of some of my most memorable tour stops over the next couple weeks. The tour took me through so many amazing…Read more
Will a tiny house make you happy? Not that life in a tiny house would fix every little problem, but surely with more money in your pocket or more time on your hands, life would feel a little easier…wouldn’t it? Many people feel a tiny home would help them live a simpler life, one where…Read more