Posts Tagged tiny

Three Reasons You Won’t Be Happy In A Tiny House

By Ryan Mitchell on July 19, 2016 / Life Style / 10 Comments

When people dream about living in a tiny house, they idealize the life a fair bit. It’s something we all do, heck, I even do it even today. There are, of course, many reasons tiny houses aren’t the best, but I thought I’d share some thoughts on things that leave people unhappy in a tiny house so you can avoid them.

header-image

You started with the design, not with the function

There is a adage: form follows function. Many people fall in love with a specific house or set of plans, then try to make it work for them. This is backwards. The most successful houses start with what a person needs, then a design is spawn from that list of needs and functions. You need to play anthropologist, taking an objective eye when you look at your life and what your house needs to support.

You didn’t take the time to get in your own head

I see this all the time, people move into a tiny house very quickly without going through the deep self reflection and understanding required to make it work. The biggest thing that will make you settle into your tiny house for the long term isn’t the design, the size, the amenities, it’s your coming to terms with what makes you happy, with a departure from gratuitous consumption, and a break from status symbols.

It’s easy to say you don’t buy a lot of stuff or that you don’t need things; it’s an entirely different thing to be deprogrammed of consumer culture and when someone shuns you in a social situation that you can be okay with the fact your house isn’t large or that you only own a few things.

You think it is about the house

I say this time and time again, living in a tiny house and The Tiny Life has nothing to do with the house, it is a lifestyle that you adopt that will change your life. While tiny houses have a great aesthetic, they are appealing and cozy. When someone successfully lives in a tiny house long term it is not because of these facts.

A tiny houser is committed to making a change in their life to a magnitude that most people are willing to. If you live the tiny life, you could live in any size house because it’s not about the house, it’s the commitment to your priorities and to doing what needs to be done to live your best life.

Your Turn!

What things are you thinking about when it comes to making the leap?
What are you worried about moving to such a small space?

Determining The Needs Of Your Space

By Ryan Mitchell on July 4, 2016 / Life Style / 5 Comments

Tags: Design, house, layout, needs, tiny

Understanding what you do in your home and work is an important step to designing any space for the perfect place for you. The greatest thing about living The Tiny Life is that you get to design your space and your life from the ground up. Today we’re going to focus on our physical space and what need in a built environment that sets the stage for our best life.

Determining

In some cases understanding your needs will show you that all you need to do is tweak a few things in the space you’re already in. It may be the case that more drastic changes or starting from scratch may be required. You may also be looking towards building a new space anyway so it’s time to consider what that design will be. It’s important to understand that to live The Tiny Life, you don’t necessarily need to live in a tiny house and what you have right now may be adapted.

room-tracking The first step in understanding what your space needs to have in it, you need to understand how you actually use it already. We often have ideas of what we would do if… or if only I had ____ I do more of this one thing. It can be easy to fall into the trap of future planning so let’s focus on what you do right now.

To do this I use my Room Tracking method: to start, gather a bunch of pens and some post-it notes. Go around to each of your rooms in your house or apartment and close every door. Put a post-it note on the door and a pen on top of the door frame of each door. When you go into a room, write down what you are going into that room for and estimate how long it will take. On your front door (or your main door) put a post it note on it and write things down that you leave your house to do with time estimates. Do this for a week.

This will create a comprehensive list of what you actually do in your home, not just what you think you do in your home. You can even re-purpose this exercise for your work space. Take all the post-it notes and combine them into a list.

I put together this free worksheet to help, click here.

Once you’ve compiled a list of what you do and how long you do it, start estimating the amount of space you’ll need to do that one thing. You can even rank your activities by which you do the longest and ask yourself, “Are the things I spend the most time on the most important to me?” Just think about that.

What can you outsource?

With your list consider things that could happen outside the home. A gym membership is one example. Instead of having a home gym, would a gym work just as well or even better? Or if you haven’t stepped foot in your home gym in several months, do you even need it at all? For me I realized while I was effective at working from home, it was lonely; so I started working at a coworking space.

What things can you cut out all together?

I realized that I really didn’t read a book twice, so keeping books was often a waste of space. So, I replaced my bookshelf with a kindle. I did keep about 10 books that were more reference books, but the rest went.

What things can pull double duty?

Think about things that are on your list that can happen in a single area or what things are important enough to have a dedicated space. For me I knew I wanted a work space that was just for work, but my living room could serve as a place to read, to watch TV, to hang out with friends, and to setup a table for meals.

Whittling down the list

Consider the above questions and think critically about what you really do need. Avoid what you “hope” to do, but focus on what you actually do. With this you can come up with a solid list of activities that can help you design your space more effectively.

Your Turn!

What was your most important activity in your house?
What other tricks have you used to determine your true needs?

My Minimal Wardrobe

By Ryan Mitchell on April 9, 2015 / Life Style / 9 Comments

Tags: clothes, dressing, tiny, wardrobe

As of late there has been many articles about how Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama all keep a very minimal wardrobe; I was also glad to see a few articles about how women could achieve this too. A minimal wardrobe is, in my opinion, easier socially for men to achieve than women, but certainly possible and many do.

There are many reasons to have a minimal wardrobe, for me its about saving time and reducing decisions. Studies have been done that show the more decisions we make, the worse we become at making good judgements and the more it wears on us. So things like “what shirt should I wear today” can actually impact our abilities later to make the right call on critical decisions later in the day.

So here is my wardrobe:

This is almost everything for when I’m traveling, when I’m at home its identical, but instead of 7 days of clothes, I have a total of 1o days. The only thing not shown here is one jacket, a pair of dress socks, a button down shirt, and a pair of dress slacks. I dress up once a year, so I keep those items in a garment bag in a hard to reach storage space.

7 charcoal grey short sleeve shirts
7 white undershirts
7 pairs of socks
7 pairs of underwear
2 pairs of jeans, 2 pairs of shorts, 1 winter hat
1 blue long sleeve shirt
1 workout shirt, 1 pair basket ball shorts
1 shirt to sleep in, 1 pair of flannel sleep pants

This has been a really great setup for me because I can just reach into the specific drawer and without looking, grab what I need in a flash. The shirts I get are very comfortable, they are plain so they don’t have graphics or logos, and they aren’t too expensive. At worst they cost me $10 new, sometimes I can get them on sale for a little at $1.50 from Khols.

Other things to note are I have all the same socks. This means I don’t have to pair them during laundry, I know I can grab two socks and they’ll match. For shoes I have one pair of sneakers, one pair of hiking boots, and one pair of dress shoes.

I’ve also have washed these clothes individually with hot water and a “color catcher” sheet, this let me remove any dye that might bleed into the whites. So now when I do laundry, I can do it all in one batch. Once or twice a year I’ll run an all white batch and bleach it heavily to keep the whites, white.

When I am traveling, I use packing cubes which keeps things neater and makes it easier to find things. They’re really just square/rectangle mesh bags that you sort into them.

I travel a good bit of the year so having this translate to a easy pack is important. The plain shirts and jeans help me blend in a little bit better as a local versus an American tourist. The packing cubes I use are made by ebags. I’ve heard good things about Eagle Creek too. My suitcase is an Osprey Porter 65, which is suitcase that has pull out shoulder straps to become a backpack. I like it because instead of being top loading like a backpack, it opens up on the front panel so when you put it on the ground, it fully opens and things are very accessible. The backpack straps also tuck in so they are out of the way so that when in the airport, the straps don’t get caught in rollers etc.

5 Misconceptions About Tiny House People

By Ryan Mitchell on June 25, 2014 / Life Style / 10 Comments

Tags: houses, live, living, simple living, tiny

Having been working with Tiny Houses for years now, I have run into many instances where people have some perceptions of tiny house folks that couldn’t be further from the truth. Sometimes I feel like informing them of how it really is to live tiny, but other days, I just don’t have it in me to say anything. So today I thought I’d lay to rest some of the common misconceptions about tiny houses and the people who live in them.

Untitled design(1)

1. We hate stuff

While it is true we don’t like the gratuitous, debt accumulating, clutter creating consumption of stuff for consumption sake, we aren’t against things. In fact the things we own and take up space in our tiny houses, we really really like. We have decided to only have those things that make our lives richer, happier and in some cases easier.

2. We don’t have a lot of money or a job

I remember one conversation I had with a woman that came walking off the street to see my tiny house. After talking a while, I mentioned it had taken a while to build because I could only work on it when I wasn’t working. She looked at me with astonishment and said “oh you have a job” she then alluded that my job must not be well paying and I informed her I had a good job white collar job that paid very well. Her face was filled with a look of confusion.

The ironic thing is that most tiny house folks actually make more than the average American, are gainfully employed at good jobs. What is more, we keep most of what we make, meaning we often don’t have any debt and we have more saved up. Recently a report release by PEW showed that someone with no debt and $100 in the bank account has a higher net worth than most people in America.

3. We say no to big houses

For a long time I thought I was saying “no” to big houses, fancy cars, nice clothes, etc. but I realized one day that I wasn’t saying “no”, but in fact saying “yes”. I am saying “yes” to a life where I have no debt, where I have exactly what I need, to a job where I only have to work a few hours a week, and “yes” to travel, pursuit of passions, hobbies and interests.

So its not so much I’m rejecting bigger houses, but embracing the benefits of smaller living.

4. You can’t have a relationship or a family in a tiny house

Time and time again I get asked about families and relationships in a tiny house. There are plenty of examples of people who are couples and also plenty of examples of families who live in a tiny house. The truth is it’s possible, but its not for everyone. Don’t get caught up in “I have to be ____ number of square feet because that is what a tiny house is” Forget that notion, do what makes sense for you and those you live with. If I were to want to cohabitate with someone else, would I live in a tiny house with them? HELL NO! Would I get a bigger house than a tiny house, but small compared to most houses, most definitely. For some though, a tiny house as a couple is great. For some families, they might live in 800 square feet or maybe more; that’s okay too.

5. A tiny house isn’t a real house

Every time someone learns that I live in a tiny house that don’t know what they are I get all the same questions. Does it have a bathroom, a sink, a kitchen, a shower, a toilet, a bed, electricity, water, internet? The answer is yes, yes, and yes. My house has every creature comfort you could want and so do most tiny houses. Tiny houses have all the same systems that a traditional house has, it is built the same way (mostly) and uses most of the same materials. There are some things that I have chosen not to have like a dish washer and microwave, but that’s because I didn’t want them.

Design Ideas for a Kid’s Room in a Tiny Apartment

By Ryan Mitchell on January 14, 2014 / Website Stuff / 2 Comments

Tags: Apartment, Design, kids, tiny

When we imagine tiny living, our minds automatically conjure images of the traditional tiny house built on a trailer. However, for some, tiny living simply means choosing a smaller housing option, such as a small apartment. In this post, we’ve put together some really cool (and simple!) design ideas for a kid’s room in a tiny apartment – although these unique ideas can easily be applied to any small space, however you define tiny living!

It can be difficult to find apartments that are big enough for all of the stuff your child has and wants. Not only is there a constant stream of new clothes coming in and old clothes that no longer fit going out, children also typically have tons of toys, books and electronics. Of course, it’s even better if your child has a desk to do homework at and a comfy place to read or watch TV. Check out these design ideas for organizing everything your child wants and needs in a tiny apartment.

Find Space-Saving Furniture

You aren’t likely to find apartments with big bedrooms for your child. One of the first things to do when trying to design a child’s bedroom in a tiny apartment is to look at the furniture. There’s just no place for bulky, inefficient furniture. Check out places like Ikea and Target for functional, space-saving items – or check out the rest of this site for more unique ideas! Beds that have drawers built in underneath the mattress or at the foot of the bed can provide a lot of extra storage space without taking up any extra floor space.

Image Credit: http://www.wetwillieblog.com/

Go Up

Bunk beds are a great idea if you have more than one child sharing a room, and loft beds are the perfect choice for single children. Under the loft bed you can find designs that have a desk, dresser or even a seating area. You can also maximize floor space by buying taller furniture, rather than wide, low-to-the-ground options. Tall dressers hold quite a bit of stuff, as do shelves and bins for storing toys, books and clothes. See the image above for a beautiful example of how to maximize tiny spaces by building up instead of out!

Use the Walls

While many apartments for rent lack floor space, there’s most likely going to be plenty of wall space. Once you’ve built up and maximized all of the space in the room, start looking at the walls. A hook near the bedroom door is perfect for backpacks and jackets. Hooks in the closet can store hats, belts and scarfs. You can even find storage containers that attach right to the wall! These are perfect for storing toys, art supplies, school stuff and even diapers or baby wipes. The image below is a beautiful example of how to open up space by utilizing effective storage ideas – from the wall-mounted storage shelves to the drawers underneath the bed!

Image Credit: http://themaisonette.net

Customize

When you just can’t fit anything else in the room, it’s time to customize. This is a great idea, especially if your child can’t fit everything in his or her own room – or if they aren’t quite as excited as you are about living in a tiny apartment. Let your child personalize the room and have fun with it! It may be as simple as adding some pictures or painting the furniture. All that matters is your kid feels at home in your tiny apartment, and the best way to do that is by letting them help you decorate – they’ll love the idea of finding a funky chair or putting removable stars on the ceiling. Speaking of removable, you can also find large stickers that adhere to the wall and just peel off when it’s time to move out! This is a great option if your landlord does not allow you to paint the walls, or if you know your kid will want to redecorate again in a few months!

The most important thing to remember when you find a tiny apartment with even smaller rooms is not to throw out your dreams of living in a tiny home because you think your son or daughter won’t enjoy it. Remember, with a little bit of planning and organization, your child can still have a room that he or she will absolutely adore!