Tiny House Design

This past weekend Yahoo ran a video story with Jay Shafer from the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company which introduced thousands of people to the world of tiny houses. Just to put this in perspective, over 100,000 people visited Tiny House Design over a three day period and I fielded over 100 questions.

One of the most common questions from new readers centered around how to build a tiny house. The other most common question was how much does a tiny house cost, but both questions are tied together so I’ll answer both in this post.

The following is an overview of what you’d need to do to build a tiny house for yourself. To do this topic justice I’d have to write hundreds of pages, but I think this outline should give you a good idea of what’s involved. I think you’ll also see that it is a project within reach of many do-it-yourselfers.

Below: Working on my Tiny Free House.

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One of my long time readers, Malcolm White, has launched a blog that focuses entirely on do-it-yourself prefab topics. He was also especially helpful to me by providing valuable feedback and input on my ebook, Tiny Prefab.

Most tiny prefab homes are sold as kits but there is a growing interest in do-it-yourself fabrication from people who want to build their own tiny houses, home offices, and cabins. Prefabrication is attractive because it breaks up the construction progress into small manageable projects, for example individual 4′ by 8′ wall panels are easier to tackle especially if you have limited time to work. Individual panels can then be stored temporarily until the full set is complete and ready for assembly.

Since the first of the year Malcolm has ramped up his writing and there’s a growing wealth of knowledge growing at DIY-Prefab.com. If building your own prefab structure is a dream of yours, I highly recommend that you bookmark Malcolm’s blog and add his RSS feed to your RSS Reader.

Some of the recent topics are:

• Why DIY pre-fabrication?
• Modularity and how it applies to pre-fabrication…
• Design hierarchy based on function and longevity
• Global design considerations
• Material handling and parts lists
• Repeatability – reusable jigs and fixtures
• General-purpose layout table
• More layout table details
• Markings on your layout table
• Brackets on your layout table
• Storage
• Shipping and handling
• Assembly – panel expansion
• Panel junctions and corners

Photo credit Malcolm A. White.

Last night I put the finishing touches on a 65 page house plan ebook. It’s called Tiny Prefab, A Do-It-Yourself Prefab Building System and contains the plans and instructions for creating tiny prefab structures that are easy to build from common building materials. The book is a bit of a hybrid between a set of plans and instructions for building and assembling a panelized prefab tiny house. A wide variety of sizes of buildings can be built but the roof plans in the ebook are designed for an 8-foot deep tiny house. The smallest size building is 8’ by 8’.  If more space is desired it’s length can be increased by increments of 4 feet so if you want a structure that us 8′ by 20′ this DIY prefab system will work fine. Below are small screen shots of all the pages in the ebook so you can get a good idea of what is included before you buy. Just click the thumbnails to see more.

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