Tiny House 1: The Building Bug Bites Again

The little cabin I bought last May is too small to host guests. The only possible space that could have been used for that purpose is taken up by a seven-foot grand piano. You gotta have priorities.

After I moved in, I set up a big old-fashioned canvas tent on the deck to serve as a guest house. It had a double bed on a platform, a small table, and a couple of chairs. I had no visitors, but I slept in the tent myself on the warm nights. The problem with the tent is that it can’t stay up in the rainy season, and I had to put the tent and all its furniture away in October.

So I decided to build a tiny (8x14) guest house to serve as a more comfortable and permanent version of the tent. By making it under 120 square feet, and not installing any electrical or plumbing utilities, I could build it without a permit.

Even though the tiny house isn’t technically a habitable structure, there’s an electrical outlet, a water line, and a septic drain a few feet away. So the potential is there for building an outdoor bath facility and bringing an extension cord into the house.

The design of the tiny house is a scaled-down version of the one story section of the house that M. and I built in 2012; you can see pictures of that house here. It’s essentially a modernized post-and-beam structure, where the posts, beams, and rafters are made from conventional 2x lumber sandwiched together. When M. and I built that house, we were in our mid 50s and had a lot of energy. I’m almost 70, and working solo, so it’s a good thing this project is so much smaller.

Before the Christmas rainy spell, I built the foundation and the floor beams. There’s not much to see yet: