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So, as I ponder tiny house plans, it seems to me that building a thing on wheels is excessive– it would require a ton of compromises to make it fit properly, including expensive ones to make it portable, and of course the wheeled base is an expensive proposition as well, and the thing is I’m just not going to tow this anywhere. But I also don’t want to fix the foundations in place only to have, say, the stream change course, or the plans for how things are laid out at the farm to change. So the compromise seems that I ought to build whatever structure this is on skids. Then it’s sturdy enough to be moved, could be just dragged with a tractor or winched up onto a trailer and moved a greater distance, and turning it to change the orientation in case, say, another building was built nearby, or a footbridge across the creek or something, would be trivially easy and take a work crew of three or four people like, an hour or so. Really. So that’s absolutely the way to go.
The other dilemma I’m pondering is that, well, my purpose for the thing is that I just need a guest bedroom of my own. So I don’t need it to have a kitchen in it; I eat my meals with my sister’s family. And I don’t need it to have a bathroom in it. There’s an outhouse shed with a composting toilet in it (the Lovable Loo type, though we didn’t buy anything– it’s a shelf with a toilet seat, and then under it, a series of buckets, which are then emptied into a dedicated compost heap, and next to the shelf is a bucket full of sawdust that you chuck in once you’ve done your business, and it’s super low tech and doesn’t smell too bad (and if you judiciously apply woodstove ashes then it just smells of woodstove ashes), and since there’s 100 acres of woods on the property, you just build your compost heap somewhere in the woods not near the creek and not near any vegetable garden beds and you’re golden), so it doesn’t need a bathroom either. BUT. Again, if things change, if the population on the farm shifts, if we want to do something else, it seems like maybe it’d be more versatile if the little cabin has space for those things.
But the other thought is, well, it’d always be possible to build an additional lean-to kind of area, or assume the little cabin will have an outhouse associated with it wherever it goes.
Now, I’d absolutely love to have at least a handwashing sink, somehow. I’d been trying to figure one out for the yurt– and actually, the woodstove had a hot water tank, and I’d used it somewhat for that purpose, though the layout wasn’t ideal and I hadn’t worked out a good basin or method for discarding the water. I’d had nebulous plans to get new rafters so the yurt could be expanded slightly, and if I did, there’d absolutely have been some kind of sink structure with it, even if it only drained out the wall into a bucket I then had to empty periodically.
But it doesn’t seem so farfetched to have whatever structure I build incorporate at least a sink and counter.
I wish I had measurements of the site. I know about how big it is; the yurt platform was about 18 feet in diameter, and there was an awkward unusable space to the east of the yurt that was approximately equal in size. So, likely, without any cutting of trees or significant leveling of the site or even removal of brush piles, I have about 20x40 to play with. If I can convince them to move derelict tractor equipment, there’s another 40x40 feet at least.
So my gradually-crystallizing plans are that I want a tiny house for me featuring a living room area spacious enough for a kitchen counter and sink*, a couch that could double as a guest-bed (Farmkid has specifically requested a guest bed), room for the wood stove, and preferably a desk; the bedroom area could be on the same floor or in a loft, and the absolute ideal would be for there to be room for two little bedrooms so I could put Farmkid in one when she visits so that I wouldn’t have to go to bed at the same time as her. (A very tentative thought is that my nephew, who is 12 and fascinated by tiny houses, may also want to stay there, depending how often he visits the farm, hence my serious consideration of it.)
(* the sink: There’s a chance I could get potable water run across from the greenhouse to the tiny house site, so there could be running water, but no sceptic system, so there’d have to be a gray water disposal plan, which for such small use could easily just be a pit backfilled with gravel with wood chips over the top. But even if I don’t, the idea of just bringing over buckets of water periodically and putting them into a tank would be fine. They had these great ones in Kyrgyzstan, little self-contained cabinets: the top had a mirror and behind it a cabinet with a tank in it, then there was a regular sink with a tap handle, and then there was a regular sink basin, and underneath it was another cabinet that contained the waste bucket, and once in a while you’d go dump the lower bucket and refill the upper one and it was all very civilized and convenient. I could just get or make one of those and it’d be fine. I could even upgrade it by having the lower bucket just be a flexible drain hose that goes directly out into a gray water sump.)
The tentative plans for the second structure on the site are kind of… well, I’m not sure, BIL might still think that my guest room could just be part of whatever the sugar shack structure is, which is not at all farfetched, I just haven’t really thought of that very much.
Ah well. I’ll take measurements at Thanksgiving and discuss it then.
So, as I ponder tiny house plans, it seems to me that building a thing on wheels is excessive– it would require a ton of compromises to make it fit properly, including expensive ones to make it portable, and of course the wheeled base is an expensive proposition as well, and the thing is I’m just not going to tow this anywhere. But I also don’t want to fix the foundations in place only to have, say, the stream change course, or the plans for how things are laid out at the farm to change. So the compromise seems that I ought to build whatever structure this is on skids. Then it’s sturdy enough to be moved, could be just dragged with a tractor or winched up onto a trailer and moved a greater distance, and turning it to change the orientation in case, say, another building was built nearby, or a footbridge across the creek or something, would be trivially easy and take a work crew of three or four people like, an hour or so. Really. So that’s absolutely the way to go.
The other dilemma I’m pondering is that, well, my purpose for the thing is that I just need a guest bedroom of my own. So I don’t need it to have a kitchen in it; I eat my meals with my sister’s family. And I don’t need it to have a bathroom in it. There’s an outhouse shed with a composting toilet in it (the Lovable Loo type, though we didn’t buy anything– it’s a shelf with a toilet seat, and then under it, a series of buckets, which are then emptied into a dedicated compost heap, and next to the shelf is a bucket full of sawdust that you chuck in once you’ve done your business, and it’s super low tech and doesn’t smell too bad (and if you judiciously apply woodstove ashes then it just smells of woodstove ashes), and since there’s 100 acres of woods on the property, you just build your compost heap somewhere in the woods not near the creek and not near any vegetable garden beds and you’re golden), so it doesn’t need a bathroom either. BUT. Again, if things change, if the population on the farm shifts, if we want to do something else, it seems like maybe it’d be more versatile if the little cabin has space for those things.
But the other thought is, well, it’d always be possible to build an additional lean-to kind of area, or assume the little cabin will have an outhouse associated with it wherever it goes.
Now, I’d absolutely love to have at least a handwashing sink, somehow. I’d been trying to figure one out for the yurt– and actually, the woodstove had a hot water tank, and I’d used it somewhat for that purpose, though the layout wasn’t ideal and I hadn’t worked out a good basin or method for discarding the water. I’d had nebulous plans to get new rafters so the yurt could be expanded slightly, and if I did, there’d absolutely have been some kind of sink structure with it, even if it only drained out the wall into a bucket I then had to empty periodically.
But it doesn’t seem so farfetched to have whatever structure I build incorporate at least a sink and counter.
I wish I had measurements of the site. I know about how big it is; the yurt platform was about 18 feet in diameter, and there was an awkward unusable space to the east of the yurt that was approximately equal in size. So, likely, without any cutting of trees or significant leveling of the site or even removal of brush piles, I have about 20x40 to play with. If I can convince them to move derelict tractor equipment, there’s another 40x40 feet at least.
So my gradually-crystallizing plans are that I want a tiny house for me featuring a living room area spacious enough for a kitchen counter and sink*, a couch that could double as a guest-bed (Farmkid has specifically requested a guest bed), room for the wood stove, and preferably a desk; the bedroom area could be on the same floor or in a loft, and the absolute ideal would be for there to be room for two little bedrooms so I could put Farmkid in one when she visits so that I wouldn’t have to go to bed at the same time as her. (A very tentative thought is that my nephew, who is 12 and fascinated by tiny houses, may also want to stay there, depending how often he visits the farm, hence my serious consideration of it.)
(* the sink: There’s a chance I could get potable water run across from the greenhouse to the tiny house site, so there could be running water, but no sceptic system, so there’d have to be a gray water disposal plan, which for such small use could easily just be a pit backfilled with gravel with wood chips over the top. But even if I don’t, the idea of just bringing over buckets of water periodically and putting them into a tank would be fine. They had these great ones in Kyrgyzstan, little self-contained cabinets: the top had a mirror and behind it a cabinet with a tank in it, then there was a regular sink with a tap handle, and then there was a regular sink basin, and underneath it was another cabinet that contained the waste bucket, and once in a while you’d go dump the lower bucket and refill the upper one and it was all very civilized and convenient. I could just get or make one of those and it’d be fine. I could even upgrade it by having the lower bucket just be a flexible drain hose that goes directly out into a gray water sump.)
The tentative plans for the second structure on the site are kind of… well, I’m not sure, BIL might still think that my guest room could just be part of whatever the sugar shack structure is, which is not at all farfetched, I just haven’t really thought of that very much.
Ah well. I’ll take measurements at Thanksgiving and discuss it then.
