Tiny House Design

Bill Kastrinos at Tortoise Shell Home is looking for some help with naming this new design. The prototype for this new design is actually currently under construction. I helped out by drawing the illustration to make it easier to imaging how it will look when its complete. If you’d like to help name this new tortoise please visit Kent’s website, Tiny House Blog, and post your Tortoise Shell Home suggestion in the comments box.

Here are some photos Kent took the other day of the actual prototype under construction. As you can see this house is much longer than most tiny houses, about 26-feet, has a full bath, and even a little bedroom.

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.

This morning Kent Griswold posted a design concept on his Tiny House Blog. It’s a design that Bill Kastrinos of Tortoise Shell Homes is considering adding to the tiny houses he builds. The main difference with this newest model is it’s size, 32 feet long by 8 feet wide. I think the larger size will make a lot more sense for many people.  When I saw the simple design I saw a challenge. How can a box be turned into a house? Here’s my contribution… click to for a closer look.

It’s occupies the same foot print but looks a bit more like a little house and less like a trailer. The bedroom end is a full 8 feet wide. The living room section is narrower, 7 feet. The extra foot is used to break up the box visually and to provide a little space for a fold-up porch roof and fold-down porch deck.

While on the move the porch would be folded in and the trailer would still be less than 8 feet wide. When folded out it would make the house look less trailer-like and provide some exterior space. I’ve drawn the porch to be 48″ deep by I think you could go to 72″ easily.

The wheels created a bit of a challenge. There would need to be a cut-out for them in the porch floor. I placed a window above the wheels to give the home owner the easier way of hiding the wheels and hole by hanging a window box of similar camouflage below the window which would help disguise the wheels on the porch side of the house.

I have no idea how much cost the more complex roof would add. I also realize that the square footage is compromised slightly for a mostly aesthetic solution, but I think it’s worth it. I suspect aesthetics play an important role for most people when choosing to buy one house over another. This would actually explain why Jay Shafer’s designs are so popular; and as long as form follows function why can’t a home be utilitarian as well as attractive.

Anyway this was a fun little diversion. If anyone has any suggestions or comments please post them. It’s great to hear new ideas.

Bill & Sharon Kastrinos and Jay Shafer are on CNN today talking about their tiny houses. Bill and Sharon downsized from a 1,800-square-foot home and now live in a 154-square-foot Tortoise Shell home. Bill is a contractor and as the housing market imploded Bill & Sharon traded in their big house for a tiny one and started a tiny house construction company called Tortoise Shell Home. Jay Shafer is of course the founder of the well known Tumbleweed Tiny House Company.

See the video at CNN.com

Bill Kastrinos’s tiny Tortoise Shell Homes have my vote for the best tiny house value. Bill builds a solid tiny house on wheels from wood or steel. The design is a simple pitched or flat roof with a bathroom, kitchen, and sleeping loft. You can order a complete house or if you’re a do-it-yourselfer you can get the framed house on trailer ready for your finishing touch.

Pictured here is the Naked Galapagos which costs about $7,500. A complete Galapagos costs just over $20,000. In all my looking I can’t find anything that offers so much value for so little money. You could build a simple tiny house on a permanent foundation with lumber for less but if you want your tiny house to be mobile Bill’s Tortoise Shell Homes are a great deal.

The steel framing option reduces weight significantly and improves strength. Bill’s is also a professional builder turned tiny house builder so the quality of his work is top notch. His shop is in Rohnert Park, California just north of the San Francisco Bay Area in Sonoma County. Photo credit Tortoise Shell Homes.