Tiny House Living

I was recently introduced to the folks at Maui Eco Build, a sustainable living company in Maui, Hawaii. They provide a variety of services including modular small home construction. I love this example of the houses they build.

Maui Eco Build website and facebook page

There are some easy to build, sustainable, and small structures coming out of the UK. They are built from structural insulated panels and you can see several of their designs on the sipsFORM website.

sipsFORM Sustainable Buildings

This is Nick Weston’s home in West Sussex. It’s an experiment in sustainable living, a cozy tree house, and the simple life of a modern hunter-gatherer. Read about Nick’s adventures on his blog at huntergathercook.typepad.com.

Nick Weston’s Treehouse

John Wells at The Field Lab has been making slow steady progress on his greenhouse. His home is a tiny 8′ by 16′ tiny house specially built to survive the extreme heat the southwestern Texas desert can deliver. His greenhouse will be made from shipping containers with a roof of welded steel trusses. He’s doing all the work himself including raising the giant handmade steel trusses into place. Be sure to watch this video on YouTube that shows how he lifts one of the trusses into place.

The Field Lab

It’s always exciting and inspiring to find someone else taking the leap into simple living. James and Kristen have begun to build custom designed tiny house on a trailer. Their blog contains many details on their research and the challenges they’ve been facing along the way.

The Great Escape

This should be exciting to watch unfold. It’s a design competition focused on visualizing the ideal sustainable village. Here’s a quote from their website:

This is a contest for the visions of an ideal sustainable village: a place where you  would want to live, study, work and experience the challenges and rewards of an  ecologically durable lifestyle. In other words: to define the future of living.

The entry deadline is 15th August 2009 at 12.00 GMT. Learn more on the CLEAR Village Foundation website.

Dee Williams has been living in her tiny Tumbleweed house since 2004. She built it in three months for $10,000. She has teamed up with builder KT Anderson and their are offering a tiny house construction workshop in Portland, Oregon on June 27, 2009. For more information see this post on Tiny House Design.

It seems that more and more home builders are recognizing that green is a good thing. Here’s an example of a tiny manufacured home designed and build for off-the-grid life. It even included rain water collection off the butterfly roof and photovoltaic panels. One of the more unique features is that this house can be set-up in one day.

Read more about PowerPod at Coming Unmoored

Here’s a cool idea for a tiny house community; a tiny underground house community. I’m particularly fond of tiny underground house concepts but we don’t see too many of them.

Save Mother Earth: Live In The Environment Friendly Earth House

I’ve been fun at Tiny House Design imagining habitable shed clusters. This week I drew a simple two shed design with rain water collection, solar panels, and a small 8′ by 8′ deck that provides some exterior living space. As usual I got a lot of great feedback from readers on the design and now I’m working on a two shed passive solar dog-trot house.