We have a big change happening at the Good Old Days Farm… we’re getting a new family member! No, I’m not pregnant… we’re getting a Grandmother! She arrives in 2 weeks.
The problem is that our Grandmother can’t live in the house with us. The combination of lack of space combined with energetic little boys make that a very bad plan. So we’re building her a house. We only have 2 weeks, so it will have to be a small house. A very small house. A tiny house! Our budget is $3,000. Yes, we plan to build a complete house for under $3,000. Like I said, it’s going to be tiny!
Monday and Tuesday of this week have been dedicated to gathering supplies. We’re trying to use as many recycled and salvaged materials as possible to keep the costs down.
We’ve been to the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store. We “hauled off” a man’s old fence for him.
We purchased materials from a retired commercial renovator who had accumlated an excess of materials. His wife was pretty happy to see us leaving with so much of his collection!
Have you seen these tiny homes? Some people are getting tired of being saddled with 2,000 or 4,000 square foot homes and equally large mortgages and are scaling back. Way back. These tiny homes are built using a utility trailer as the foundation. Our little house will be 8 feet x 17 feet. That’s only 136 square feet, but it will have everything Grandmother needs: a bedroom, a bathroom, a little kitchen and a little sitting area. It will even have a loft to add extra space, but we don’t want Grandma climbing up there so for now there will be no ladder to access it!
Papa the Farmer and I have been pouring over Tiny House websites. If you want to get an idea of what the end product will look like, you’ll find some tiny-house-eye-candy on these websites:
It’s not just Papa the Farmer and I who are excited! Tiny house fever is taking over the Good Old Days Farm! Even the littlest family members are catching the vision! Look what I found the other day:
That’s what a tiny house looks like when it’s built by a 5 year old, you know! Papa the Farmer said that the best picture was from his angle:
Oh, it’s hard to be a mommy-blogger sometimes!
Yesterday, the foundation-to-be arrived. Here’s Papa the Farmer signing the papers to make it official.
And here’s the big stack of bills that we handed over to pay for the trailer. ”You took a picture of the money?” asked Papa-the-Farmer. ”That’s so weird.”
Easy for him to call it weird. I’ve been saving up for years to buy a little vintage apache popup camper for the family. And there’s my apache fund, right there. It got spent on a trailer alright… just not the trailer I had in mind. But this will be better for Grandma than a little popup camper would have been.
We’ve picked a homesite… This spot will allow Grandmother to have her own privacy, but still be close enough to the house to be convenient. It happens to be the site of my herb garden… The herb garden that I was so excited about. The one that our farm helper told me was tilled up so well that weeds would never grow there. Turns out he was wrong.
Yesterday Papa the Farmer mowed down all those weeds that weren’t supposed to grow there. Now we are going to park a trailer over that herb garden and build a house over it. I won’t have to see it anymore. No more regrets, no more guilt!
And so the adventure begins. Today will be Day #1 of the construction process. What do you think? Can we really get a house mostly-built in less than 2 weeks? More importantly, can we really build and furnish a house for under $3,000? We’re sure going to give it a shot!
But perhaps the real question is… Could YOU live in a 136 square foot house? Tell me why or why not in the comments!
What a neat project for yall! I can not wait to see a real live Tiny Texas House!! I love that site
I lived in a caravan (it was 25 foot and did have a bathroom) for years and years when I was single and I loved it. We have a spacious home now and to be honest I just accumulate so much junk that I am contemplating downsizing our next home. And the cleaning, oh the cleaning … bring on a little home!
By the way, I wanted to say how lovely it is that you are having Grandma to live with you. We are hoping my 84 year old mum-in-law will come live with us soon too.
Wonderful! I’ve enjoyed all the posts so far on the tiny house.
My family of nine (plus our 120-pound dog) lives several months out of the year in a 230 square foot travel trailer. We’re selling our house this winter and then that will be our full-time residence, so, no, I couldn’t imagine having 136 square feet ALL TO MYSELF! Ha ha!
Way to take care of Grandma! I hope she loves it!
Hi Christy, I have always thought it would be fun to live in a travel trailer! Personally, I have my eye on those vintage apache pop ups! But that might not be quite big enough to fit a family of 9! oxo!
That so cracks me up!! We have had the tiny house fever for a long time now and hope to be able to start on it in about a year. How small can a family of 8 go??!! We will see!