Living In Tiny Homes

Whether you’re looking to declutter your home, or making big plans to move into a tiny space, this book offers inspiring insights into making the most out of the square footage you have, and turning any space into a beautiful, comfortable, and efficient home. Around the world people are choosing to live small—whether it’s downsizing from a large home or converting a van into a house on wheels. This gorgeous book looks at a variety of scenarios, taking readers across the globe and inside the doors of remarkable compact homes. Interior design expert Marion Hellweg combines her years of experience with that of inveterate style bloggers to offer practical and innovative advice on interior design; storage solutions; finding adaptable, multifunctional furniture; decluttering and organizing; and, more generally, leading a mindful, eco-conscious minimalist lifestyle. Filled with mood board-type layouts that offer hundreds of great ideas, this book does more than offer an architectural survey of tiny homes—it illustrates room-by-room real world examples of how people are adopting a sustainable lifestyle that minimizes things and maximizes quality of life. Inspiring as well as practical, this book is the first step toward imagining and creating your own small happy place.

Discover how smaller can be smarter with this look inside more than twenty-five tiny homes that maximize function and style. Bigger isn’t always better, which is why downsizing has become a growing trend. In this illustrated volume, Country Living showcases a coast-to-coast collection of sustainable dwellings, all ranging from 100 to 1,500 square feet. Take an inside tour of these impressive little abodes, like a converted 1840s schoolhouse in New York; a 22- x 24-foot kit barn in California wine country; a 1914 New Hampshire coastal row home; and a renovated 1950s Alabama lake house. With inspiring photographs, hundreds of decorating tips, smart finds, and storage solutions, Country Living Tiny Homes will help you implement minimalistic living no matter the size of your abode. These charming cottages, delightful she-sheds, functional farmhouses, and transformative trailers feature a clever use of space and prove that going small can be simple and fulfilling.

With “McMansions” increasingly giving way to “tiny” houses, the desire to downsize and be more ecologically and economically prudent is a concept many are beginning to embrace. Focusing on dwelling spaces all under 1,000 square feet, TINY HOUSES (Rizzoli, April 2009) by Mimi Zeiger aims to challenge readers to take a look at their own homes and consider how much space they actively use. Ranging from tree houses to floating houses, TINY HOUSES features an international collection of over thirty modular and prefab homes, each one embodying “microgreen living”, defined as the creation of tiny homes where people challenge themselves to live “greener” lives. By using a thoughtful application of green living principles, renewable resources for construction, and clever ingenuity, these homes exemplify sustainable living at its best.

In this indispensable manual for tiny house living, award-winning tiny home builder Chris Schapdick offers first-hand information to help tiny home aspirants realize their dream, with advice on design, construction, legalities of living in a tiny home, and how to deal with some of the inevitable challenges of living tiny.

Tiny House, Large Lifestyle! Tiny homes are popping up across America, captivating people with their novel approach not only to housing, but to life. Once considered little more than a charming oddity, the tiny house movement continues to gain momentum among those who thirst for a simpler, "greener," more meaningful life in the face of society's "more is better" mindset. This book explores the philosophies behind the tiny house lifestyle, helps you determine whether it's a good fit for you, and guides you through the transition to a smaller space. For inspiration, you'll meet tiny house pioneers and hear how they built their dwellings (and their lives) in unconventional, creative and purposeful ways. They'll invite you in, show you around their cozy abodes, and share lessons they learned along the way. Inside you'll find everything you need to design a tiny home of your own: • Worksheets and exercises to help you home in on your true needs, define personal goals, and develop a tiny house layout that's just right for you. • Practical strategies for cutting through clutter and paring down your possessions. • Guidance through the world of building codes and zoning laws. • Design tricks for making the most of every square foot, including multi-function features and ways to maximize vertical space. • Tours of 11 tiny houses and the unique story behind each. Tiny House Living is about distilling life down to that which you value most...freeing yourself from clutter, mortgages and home maintenance...and, in doing so, making more room in everyday life for the really important things, like relationships, passions and community. Whether you downsize to a 400-square-foot home or simply scale back the amount of stuff you have in your current home, this book shows you how to live well with less.

Dee Williams’s life changed in an instant, with a near-death experience in the aisle of her local grocery store. Diagnosed with a heart condition at age forty-one, she was all too suddenly reminded that life is short, time is precious, and she wanted to be spending hers with the people and things she truly loved. That included the beautiful sprawling house in the Pacific Northwest she had painstakingly restored—but, increasingly, it did not include the mortgage payments, constant repairs, and general time-suck of home ownership. A new sense of clarity began to take hold: Just what was all this stuff for? Multiple extra rooms, a kitchen stocked with rarely used appliances, were things that couldn’t compare with the financial freedom and the ultimate luxury—time—that would come with downsizing. Deciding to build an eighty-four-square-foot house—on her own, from the ground up—was just the beginning of building a new life. Williams can now list everything she owns on one sheet of paper, her monthly housekeeping bills amount to about eight dollars, and it takes her approximately ten minutes to clean the entire house. It’s left her with more time to spend with family and friends, and given her freedom to head out for adventure at a moment’s notice, or watch the clouds and sunset while drinking a beer on her (yes, tiny) front porch. The lessons Williams learned from her “aha” moment post-trauma apply to all of us, every day, regardless of whether or not we decide to discard all our worldly belongings. Part how-to, part personal memoir, The Big Tiny is an utterly seductive meditation on the benefits of slowing down, scaling back, and appreciating the truly important things in life.

More than 1,000 photos, along with stories and interviews follow the "tiny house" movement which is currently going on among people who have chosen to scale back in the 21st century. Original.