Frugal For Life

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Hong Kong’s oldest (Shek Kip Mei Estate) public housing estate was photographed by Michael Wolf. What was so special about this public housing area is that all the rooms were 100 square feet in size. Michael photographed 100 rooms to give you an idea of how people lived. Some rooms only housed one person, other 100 square foot rooms housed two people, both young and old alike lived in these rooms. (The buildings had been condemned in 2006 and were later torn down)

To give you an idea of how small these rooms really are, the average university dorm room is 12 feet by 19 feet or 228 square feet. These rooms are slightly less than half the size of those and many still had two people living in them… with no windows to make it appear bigger!

Some rooms are very sparse… and others are very cluttered. It isn’t the size that matters, it’s what and how much you put into it!

Of course you don’t have to live in a tiny room only. You can instead have a tiny room in it’s own itsy-bitsy tiny home.

Tiny Homes are considered to be under 500 square feet, however, a house that is considered small for a family of four might be humongous for a single person - so it isn’t always about a set size, but about being “right sized” in your home.

I grew up with my parents and another sibling in a houses that were around 1200-1500 square feet, some larger and some smaller. Either way, they were sizes that seemed fine to me and even looking back on them, I know that I could easily live in a much smaller home now. My current place which holds two humans and one puppy is just over 800 square feet. But that isn’t the smallest, my friend and I have lived in smaller places, one was a studio that was 350 square feet and another was a smidgen over 500 square feet. These were apartments and not houses, but it was still our living area, and we got through most of it just fine, except for the horrid heat.

Small or tiny home living will depend on your idea of comfortable. Some people find tiny home living to be friendlier to the environment, while others just want a literal ‘little place’ to call their own.

You can build yourself a yurt and it’s variations. There are a few resources that you can check out for Yurt living:

Yurt info - A good resource with many resources for places to buy building plans or have the yurt pre-made and brought out to you.
There is a Yurt Community on Yahoo Groups -This is a group for those who live in or have an interest in yurts….Some leeway will be given to connected topics, such as tipis, homesteading, wood heating, etc. The ONLY solicitation allowed will be for the buying, selling or trading of yurt-related products.
And there are some downsides to living in a yurt as well.
You can see how a yurt is put together in the states
And a Denver Post article on Yurt living within a community

Other non traditional dwellings are a cob cottage or a straw bale house

Now if you are more interested in the traditional box shaped house, there are resources for you as well. More people are familiar with Tumbleweed homes from the Oprah show a while back. But you don’t have to live in a 96 square foot home on wheels.

Tumbleweed Homes - The one that started it all and put tiny homes in the conscious of Americans.
TinyHomes.com has a list of plans you can buy from 288 sq.ft to over 1100 sq.ft and see some of the success stories as well.
The book and corresponding website, The Not So Big House- From the site: “Kids understand implicitly the pleasures of a cozy nook. Adults can learn something from our children as we go about designing our homes.”
Tiny homes aren’t a bad idea, considering some of the health hazards victims of Hurricane Katrina have had to endure. Lowe’s got in on the action with ‘Katrina’ cottages.
NPR even mentioned a few people who live in tiny homes, from Iowa City, IA to the Gulf coast (taped 5/15/06; 8 min long)
The average sized home in 1950 was just under 1000 square feet, now it averages about 2500 square feet. Wild huh? Speaking of the past, in 1946 a home was hollowed out from a 2100 year old redwood tree- ONE TREE, One home. And if you can’t get up to northern California to see it, check out a mini-tour courtesy of RV travel and Youtube

And for more on tiny homes, go to the Small House Society. They like you even if your house is a small 4000 square feet!
And finally, if you want regular updates on Tiny homes… regularly check out the Tiny House Blog

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