Tiny House Living

Owen Geiger recently posted this small cabin design on his Earthbag House Plans website.  It’s only 283 square feet and features a bathroom, kitchen, living space, and a sleeping loft. This may also be one of the designs to appear in Owen’s future coming house plans book.

Wilderness Earthbag Cabin

The folks at FreeGreen.com have launched a new website called Better House Plans and have included a tiny house section. Right now the selection is a little small but they are looking for house designers to contribute their plans and make them available through this centralized resource.

Better House Plans

This past week I updated the plans for the Tiny Solar Saltbox. This is a small 8′ by 12′ structure that can be expanded by building multiple units for larger footprints like 16′ by 12′ and 24′ by 12′. Pictured here is a 16′ by 12′ example.

Tiny Solar Saltbox

This past week I published a set of tiny house plans for tiny solar house. It’s a little 8′ by 12′ saltbox that can be built in multiple units so the owner builder can build a larger home (12×16, 12×24, 12×32, etc) from the same set of plans. The 40-page plans cost $9.99 and can be ordered online and downloaded to your computer.

Tiny Solar House Plans

One of my readers, Mark, sent me a link to this cool little house plan. It’s only 262 square feet and is a design being sold at a mainstream house plan website. It’s a great little design concept that looks a lot like a cross between a fire lookout tower and an old water tower. I’m still suffering from sticker shock at the price of the plans but still inspired by the design. Thanks again for sending this my way Mark!

Tiny Tower House

There are two tiny house plan sales going on right now I thought you might like to know about. The first are the plans for Jay Shafer’s smallest tiny house design, the XS-House. Jay lived in a house of this design for a year and if you’re extremely frugal I suspect it would work nicely for you too. For those needing a little more space than 65 square feet, Sheldon Designs is offering big discounts on all their plans.

• Tumbleweed XS-House Plans – $99
• Sheldon Designs – All House Plans 50% Off (use code THKYOU when you checkout)

Please note that some of these discounts are good for this weekend only.

I was so busy finishing up my first tiny house ebook last week I failed to publish Tiny House Living. Sorry about that. The ebook is a 65 page downloadable PDF that includes the plans ans assembly instructions for a panelized prefab building system a do-it-yourselfer could build with common building materials. It’s $27 and includes free updates.

Tiny Prefab – eBook & Plans

Kent at Tiny House Blog has been assembling a great resource page of tiny house plans. One of the newest additions is this Little Red Cabin which was featured in his Little House in a Landscape series.

Little Red Cabin Plans

I posted an update of the design for A House for Khayelitsha on Tiny House Design. It measures 16′ by 16′ (5 meters by 5 meters), has a sleeping loft, and simple passive solar design. The structure is made up of simple 2×4 and plywood panels.

I’m working to finish the plans quickly so that the house could be built, assuming it meets all their requirements. I’ll also publish the plans online in case anyone else wants to build this simple prefab solar house.

A House for Khayelitsha – Update

Kent Griswold has setup a website dedicated to the Sonoma Shanty. You can buy a kit or finished house from Stephen Marshall at Little House on the Trailer or the plans from Kent at Sonoma Shanty. Kent has posted several larger views of the plans themselves at Sonoma Shanty for those of you that want to get a closer look at the plans. Here is a recent testimony by Nick from Indiana who bought the plans:

I have to say I am rather impressed with the plans, the ability to mix ease of construction and functionality in this design is really pretty amazing. Example, using the 12/12 roof, provides simple construction and yields sufficient loft space. You’ve also eliminated the need for a birds mouth. These are all things a person new to construction would likely mess up. For those of us who have previously built such things, the elimination and simplification of these adds significant time savings, less room for error and waste, and ease of assembly. I am very satisfied with the plans.