Tiny House

The next adventure was to get the thing to the piece of land that I’m allowed to put it. Since these things are acutally not that light, the crane from the transport company almost couldn’t lift it! During placement on the property, it even temporarily gave in and the whole thing plummeted (slowly but steadily) to the ground! That was eerie, but luckily nothing was damaged.

And now a few impressions… How it looked inside at first (with the stuff from the previous owner):

During transport:

Almost here:

And that’s how it looked when it was finally put in place:

The next steps now are to think of good ways to prettify the inside (so that it doesn’t look so cheap and to finalize the interior arrangement. I thought of using adobe for the walls to maybe get a better indoor climate, but I’m still undecided. Anyone have any tipps or good ideas for me?

The idea in the beginning was – and still is – to build a wooden tiny house on wheels out of only or mostly natural materials myself. This takes a lot of time and money – especially because I don’t have any idea of what I’m doing… After a lot of dreaming and thinking and planning, but not really getting anywhere, opportunity stared me in the face and I stared back a second and then jumped on it. Opportunity came in the form of an office container. It’s like these standard shipping containers (6 x 2,5 m) that is minimalistically insulated and mostly used as office on construction sites. That’s how it looked when I first laid eyes on my new home.

At first it seemed really far from what I was dreaming of, but now I see it as a perfect first step. I want to live small, but since I have no idea if I’ll still want it a year from now, I need to try it out. So I see this container as a perfect opportunity for me to test it out on a small budget and in an assessable timeframe. With this container I have a sound structure where I will still have to build in a water supply, a wooden stove, a “bathroom”, a kitchen and everything else I need in order to live in it. So it’s still a lot to build myself and learn by doing it, but I won’t need so much money and time to test out if I actually like living that small :-). Also it feels really good, to finally DO something after thinking and planning for more than a year.

The first question was, what kind of foundation I would use. Since I didn’t want to use concrete, the options I found were either to use thick wooden planks, old tires filled with gravel, a thing called foundation screw or – what I opted for – washed-out concrete boards. still concrete, but not integrated in the ground and easily removable. So I dug some holes, put gravel in and on top the washed-out concrete boards. That looked something like that:

Now that I tried it, I wouldn’t recommend using washed-out concrete boards for that endeavor, because they can break and if they do, they’re useless soon. I would guess that the best solution would probably have been the wooden planks. What’s your opinion? Anyone have experience with different forms of non-permanent foundations?