I’m a little more anxious to see how your design for this turns out, as no matter which you choose to create, it will allow slightly more room for some of the conveniences you had to “squeeze” into your last interior design.

Your book sounds fascinating.

Sounds like it will be a very interesting book! but of course I wouldn’t want you to reveal your book via the online blog as I assume it is meant to assist with your financial independence.

On the other hand, I know several people now who have formulated books based on the input of the online community, with the blog leading the direction of the discussions. So, maybe a suggestion is to direct the blog to the tiny house design topics to be covered by your book. Throw out a teaser idea, solicit feedback and ideas. We all learn together. Your book is the refinement and weaving of those ideas into a contextual whole.

That way your ‘other stuff’ and the writing of the book are happening at the same time!

I think to do it justice I’d need to write the book around the actual construction too. The photos and actual work to make all the systems work on a mobile platform would really require a working model.

But I do have plans to tidy up the 3 existing plans to a level where someone would have enough information for the basic structure. But eventually I agree with you 100%… I’d love to take it all the way so there would be a single resource to empower someone to build a tiny mobile affordable green house.

The challenge in a tiny house that is also mobile, is to design the systems of a house in a way in which it is flexible, lightweight, least cost and fully integrated. What do I mean by that?

It’s one thing to design how it will look like on the outside so that it’s attractive and weathertight, quite another to make the inside floorplan livable and efficient and quite another to have the plumbing, wiring, utilities fit into it with efficiency and greatest utility. And yet, I think in any tiny or small house, the secret is to make all these things work together and essentially to design them together.

Large houses, to me, look like all these aspects were designed by different people so you end up with some ridiculous things ( oops, part of the window has to end up in the shower space so that the front of the house is symmetrical).

You know, architects pleasing themselves but not designing for humans.

I think if some time was spent thinking how to integrate everything, then some ideas would come out which can be reused in any design.

Seems a lot of what I find on the net are people’s showing off their finished product – but being curious me – and hoping to be able to reproduce the best ideas, I want to know the nuts and bolts. How did they do it? How did you handle hot water for the shower, where does the gray water go? How do you collect water from the roof? How do the walls go together? Did you nail that sill plate to the frame or bolt it? Where do you run the wiring? How is it weathertight to road spray? and so on..

Might even be fun to start designing from inside out. What do you want in a tiny house? What’s the best way to do that? Permaculture has this idea of zones that radiate outwards. The closest zones are for things you use every day, the farthest zones are for things rarely used or visited but necessary. A house designed this way may end up looking entirely different than any of the ‘traditional’ house looks.

You know those butterfly roofs are really cool but they seem like they ask to leak. I realize it would need some kind of metal flashing is all but it would eventually be a weak spot for leaking. But I agree it would make rain water collection super easy.

I’d vote for the pitched roof with the gables over the rest, though.

If you don’t mind my making a suggestion for a future possible design, I really like this design that I saw for the idea of self-sufficient/self-contained usage:

http://www.powerhouse-enterprises.com/ph_powerpods.html

A trailer-based home, as usual, but with that “butterfly” roof for water collection and solar positioning would be interesting.

What sayeth ye?