Tiny House Design

If you’ve discovered our forum, TinyHouseForum.com, you may have seen these designs by Scott. I wanted to post them here because it was a very clever solution for someone wanting to build a house from concrete storm drain pipe. I’m not sure that’s what Scott had in mind but his solution seems like the perfect solution for a tiny concrete home. Scott uses Google SketchUp to created these drawings. Image credit to Scott.

I got an email from a reader named Betsy (Thanks Again Betsy!) the other day after she had read about my upcoming nine tiny free project. Along with her note she sent a link to a movie about a man named Dick Proenneke. You may already know his story but I’ll summarize it below for those, like me, who had never heard of him before. But first watch this short version of the movie Alone in the Wilderness (2005). It’s about 9 minutes.

In his 50’s Dick Proenneke decided to spend some of his retirement in the wilderness. He chose a place called Twin Lakes in Alaska and in 1968 built a log cabin using nothing but hand tools. It was about 11′ by 15′. It had glass windows, hand-made wood door hinges, and hand-made furniture including a desk, chairs, bunk, and tables. He even built a stone and mortar fireplace to make it through the cold Alaskan winters.

Initially he planned to stay only a year or so but ended up staying 30 years. From time to time he’d travel back to civilization to spend time with family but continued to call his remote cabin home. In 1995 at age 82 he decided that the -50 °F winters were just too much and decided to live out the rest of his life with his brother in California. Dick Proenneke died on April 28, 2003 and left his cabin to the park service who now maintains it as a historic site and popular visitor attraction.

He also documented his life in film, photography, and writings. When filming himself he’d place the camera in a secure spot while he performed the task he wanted to record. This meant he also captured clips of himself walking and canoeing to and from the camera.

I realize this post is a bit off topic, except for the cabin and lifestyle, but I thought I’d share it with you on this first weekend in November. It’s a really inspiring story and stories like these can really help when times seem like they are getting tough. Don’t you think?

• Download the free eBook (50 MB): More Readings From One Man’s Wilderness
• Buy the DVD at Amazon.com: Alone in the Wilderness
• More about Dick Proenneke on the Lake Clark National Park & Reserve website.

Photo credit to the Park Service.

Kent told me a while back about this day trip he was planning to take with Bill. Kent Griswold runs TinyHouseBlog.com and Bill Kastrinos owns Tortoise Shell Home, a tiny house company in Sonoma County, California. I must admit I am a bit jealous but happy to hear about the trip from Kent today by phone and now see the photos online. Kent got so many photos of the delivery he’ll post the story in a couple segments to cover the whole day.

The back story is that there is a group of people that live in the coastal mountain range west of the Silicon Valley just south of San Francisco. The area is extremely expensive to live in due to all the technology money. If you search the area using Zillow.com you’ll find few homes in the hills under a million dollars.

But these folks did something pretty smart. They got together and bought a piece of property with an existing large home and then bought 8 tiny houses from Bill. Much of this story has already been told by Bill at the Tiny House Society Yahoo Group and Kent will fill us in on the rest of the story in his next post on the trip. So I won’t go into too much detail now.

But the short version is… Bill has been building and delivering tiny houses to this community one at a time. The drive is usually a couple hours drive down highway 101 depending on traffic, although Kent shared with me that it was an all day affair and took them about five hours to get there. Yesterday’s trip was number 7 of 8 so Bill will make at least one more trip with one more house.

The folks that ordered these tiny houses value their privacy but I’m hoping they will share how they did it. This is a great example of a tiny house village actually being built right in the middle of an area tightly controlled by zoning rules. If we could learn how they did it, a lot of doors might open for a lot of people hoping to do the same thing. Photo credit Kent Griswold.