I have a lot of issues with the people on Tiny House Hunters. I’m not even that against living in Tiny Houses! Lots of people feel too entitled to too much space on this crowded planet of ours. But something about the ~consciousness~ of it all irks me. Or maybe it’s because they are living in glorified trailers but seem like they would judge people who live in trailers. Or maybe it’s because I grew up in what would be classified as a Tiny Apartment not because of cutesy eco-living, but because that’s what my dad could afford. Or maybe it’s that sometimes their tiny houses are not even that tiny, they’re like 650 sq. feet and that’s totally reasonable!
ORRRR it’s because I’ve watched too many episodes and have concluded that nobody in Tiny Houses can have sex.
Alice, how do you have sex in there? If you put a futon down that’s still at least another three inches you lose, and then what? What possible position could work here?
I understand the comfort and security of a crib is very enticing, but c’mon. This is like trying to have sex in a birdcage.
Nice try, sir, but you cannot fit up there and neither can any sexual partner. Good luck finding space for floor boning.
Okay imagine this. Imagine you’re having sex up there and you hit your head, because you 100% will. And then in that still-horned-up, banged-head stupor you have to CLIMB DOWN A LADDER LIKE YOU’RE ESCAPING A DANG FIRE to attend to your wounds.
Let’s run down what kind of sex you could reasonably have in a space like this. I think the only one is spooning, right? Because anything where you’re sitting up, on your knees, or standing is absolutely out, and even with missionary you need to have a little space to move around, which you obviously do not have. So if you like spooning, get a tiny house. Or I guess have sex outside.
You try something a little rougher one night and that is straight up gonna fall down.
Why are you being such a square, Jaya? Why do they have to have sex in a bed? Okay hot shot, let’s take a look at where else is possible. There is no kitchen counter space, so not there. It’s possible on that bench, if one person can comfortably reach the floor with their feet, or if their height lines up right so one of them can be bending over. And maybe on the floor? Maybe if it’s wide enough? But it’s probably not and sometimes you do not want to have sex on the floor where feet have been all day, you want some nice cushioning underneath you.
Also oh my god all the families with kids who live like this. What if your kids turn into horny teens and all of you are het up all the time in your quaint loft space???
I have never been interested in tiny houses. Like, if you are concerned about the space you occupy in the world and your carbon footprint or whatever JUST GET AN APARTMENT. or even better, communal living. But, oh yeah, we need to own our space because capitalism.
So I have never thought about this, but it is true. Anyone who has ever lived in a dorm knows that you are not going to have great sex in a loft space. It’s scientifically impossible.
Personally, I’m a little more of a “I need to own my own space because I don’t want to hear tiny yappy dogs, people who like to scream at and also maybe hit each other all the time, large bouncy poorly-trained dog and its beleaguered owners, or poorly-sung Adele at all hours of the day and night,” but I guess I’ve just had worse apartment neighbors than you.
(All of those were neighbors of ours in our last apartment, and I had to sleep with earplugs in 90% of the time. It did Bad Things to my sanity.)
Oh, I didn’t mean that people who buy houses are bad people who don’t care about the earth. But that self-righteous, “I will buy a tiny house because it is the only conscious way to LIVE!” is not accurate. There are a lot of ways to live conscientiously, which are not trendy.
It’s just, admit that you want a Tiny House because you saw some cool pictures on a buzzfeed article, not because you are willing to SACRIFICE for the EARTH like a goddamn HERO OF THE PEOPLE, you know?
I like the idea of a tiny house, but (a) not one of the ones with a tiny loft that has no head room, because I don’t want to have to literally crawl into and out of bed, and (b) actually an apartment would suit me better, I like the idea of having a tiny house in a quaintly rural location but in reality I would rather have good transit and no grass to mow or snow to shovel.
Yeah, I realized recently that even if I won the lottery, I probably wouldn’t buy a house. Because I don’t want to have to call 400 people when the water heater break, I just want to call my landlord and then go about my day.
There are some downsides to renting (the obnoxious neighbors mentioned above) but my cost/benefit analysis is living in the city means living really close to people and I just suck it up for all the things I love about the city.
I am also a very heavy sleeper, which is relevant to this conversation.
There are two kinds of apartment buildings: wood frame lowrises, which tend to let you hear your neighbours, and concrete highrises, which are much better about stopping sound from travelling.
I moved from a concrete highrise to a wood frame lowrise, and it’s not too bad, but next time I move I’ll be looking for a place in a concrete highrise.
I’m actually not opposed to having to fix some things myself, so I may look for a condo. Currently I live in a small coop, which means that when the water heater breaks we have to discuss who is going to deal with it and then that person has to call 400 people. There are upsides to the coop thing, but I think I would rather have a clean division between stuff for me to deal with and stuff for a condo board that I ignore to deal with.
That sounds like hell. My water heater was broken last week (actually twice this year) and i called the plumber and it was done. If I had to debate and discuss with an entire group of people I would DIE.
It’s mostly not terrible for small things like the water heater. Just don’t ask how long we’ve been debating getting new windows.
that is not a well-run co-op! in my co-op if something breaks they call the maintenance service provider and they fix it. there are 2 general meetings a year and the one with the budget usually has some debate but after a couple of hours every one is tired and we just vote on it and hopefully it passes. If not, it’s back to the drawing board for the Board and the financial committee (that said, I’ve been the Board and that had some long-ass meetings.)
It’s actually more a size issue than a how-well-run-is-it issue, I think. We only have six units, so the board is half the people in the building and we definitely couldn’t put together a separate committee for finances.
All of our meetings are general meetings, because it would be kind of ridiculous for them not to be. But they usually aren’t too long.
Oh yeah, that sounds too small. Got to have enough people that you never have a totally split vote, at least!
I really want to put solar panels on the roof. I rent, and my landlord is in no way going to spring for solar panels on the roof (he still hasn’t found a sufficiently inexpensive roofer to replace our old worn-out shingles, which are too fragile for the handyman to install gutter guards).
I think apartment living with a responsive landlord would be my favorite, but I’ve had bad luck with landlords/management companies (I don’t care how hard it is to find a handyperson in Seattle right now, leaving me with a 3-foot-wide, floor-to-ceiling hole in my bedroom wall for TEN DAYS because you’ve never managed to fully fix the upstairs plumbing and it leaks into my apartment is unacceptable), so I’m leaning hard toward owning right now.
Ooof. I understand that. I have had issues with my landlord being unresponsive about some things and I get really aggressive and pester them and I HATE IT. I don’t want to be a pestering jerk. I just want you to fix my bedroom wall!
Right? I’m not trying to be an asshole, but the compost bins are overflowing and you haven’t responded to my maintenance request to get that dealt with, so what am I supposed to do?
It took a month for my landlord to make it so my shower head worked after I moved in. I was ready to stab him. Of course, “fixing it” just resulted in a potential space for moisture to get in behind the wall of the shower/tub, so I gave up on getting him to actually fix things. Haven’t *seen* any mold yet, buuuuuuut…. I’m gone forever after next week, so whatever.
Ugh, landlords that don’t respond. >.<
I feel your pain, fellow Seattleite. I have a pretty good landlord by Seattle standards, and I still have to work around stuff he won’t fix like a cracked window and pipes that clog all the time. The Seattle real estate market is bonkers, but the rental market is even more bonkers.
And the tiny house people are making it worse, by claiming that their small houses on giant lots are saving the earth when someone could easily put dozens of low-carbon-footprint living spaces on the same lot. And don’t even get me started on the people trying to save the “character” of neighborhoods by preventing newer, denser family-friendly housing from being built there forever.
Yeah, I have issues with the idea that new construction in a place where they’ll have to drive everywhere is going to be more environmentally friendly than an existing apartment that’s near transit. I mean, I guess they’re ahead of people building 4,000 sq ft rural “zero carbon” houses, but not by as huge a margin as they think.
And the handwringing over apodments, like, if you’re so concerned about people (and we all know you mean “those people,” don’t even front) being “forced” into “slums,” maybe support MORE affordable housing, not less? (I know the apodments people have been a bit shady, but the NIMBY responses are so stupid)
And forget family-friendliness – of the hundreds (thousands?) of new apartments that have been built in my neighborhood just since I moved there six years ago, I don’t think there’s a single one that has more than two bedrooms, and the the two-bedroom ones that are available are $3,000+ a month (in the fancy “sustainable” development, they’re $4,000+, which doesn’t fit any real definition of sustainability).
Portland is catching up to the other major cities on the west coast for housing costs, while having stagnant wages. It sucks ass.
I currently live in a shithole of an apartment (and share it) because it’s so cheap and close-in. Our apartment manager is so terrible at getting things fixed that we often just do it ourselves or work around it. The person who owns our complex (and a good portion of the cheap-but-shitty apartment complexes around town) is starting to slowly sell them, so I know it’s only a matter of time before the place is sold out from under me–and I’m likely just going to stay here until it happens.
I have never ever lived in a place with a responsive landlord. I’m always pestering them two weeks after the initial request, and when they finally get back to me they’re always sighing and insinuating that I probably caused whatever problem is happening with their overpriced shithole property.
I look forward to the day when I can buy my own place, rip out the cabinets or whatever if I feel like it, and be as loud and terrible as I want without my neighbors getting in a huff.
The trick is to live in a group house where one of the people IS your landlord.
I did that once and I’m never doing it again. Roommate situations are one thing; feeling like you’re someone’s house guest forever is something else.
Yeah, I would love to own somewhere if it meant not having to deal with the estate agent responsible for my flat (who isn’t even that bad, it’s just an extra layer of hassle). No, I don’t care that you’d be perfectly comfortable having your preferred plumber do work in *your* home; he patronises me and grabbed my wrist unexpectedly one time and I do not want him here. Yes, it is, in fact, in the tenancy agreement and English law that you cannot let tradespeople into the flat without telling us in advance; we shouldn’t have to come home to a flood on the floor to discover someone’s been in without our knowledge and failed to fix the radiators.
Aha, your landlord clearly hires the same lowest bid repair people that mine does.
“Yeah, I realized recently that even if I won the lottery, I probably wouldn’t buy a house. Because I don’t want to have to call 400 people when the water heater break, I just want to call my landlord and then go about my day.”
I feel the same way. Which immediately makes me think that someone could probably make a decent living being a freelance “landlord”. So here’s the idea: Your shit breaks, you call the pretend-landlord, who calls whatever repair business they have on tap, and arrange for the repair person to go out, and if necessary, be at their house for repairs so they don’t have to wait at home. Also handy if the cable goes out and someone has to be home for the cable guy, that sort of thing.
You take a fee for doing the people-wrangling part, and probably charge extra if they need you to meet the repair person for them. But, if anyone has been looking for a side hustle and can figure out a way to make that work, best of luck to you! (or if this job exists, please tell me what it is, because it seems like a person with good organizational skills could probably be pretty good at it.)
It’s called being a super! We have a live-in super and she’s awesome. You can have a super in owned or rented, though if owned, anything big is going to have to go to the board.
right! thank you, i knew there was a name for it! So, basically, I’m imagining a freelance super, for homeowners and condo boards.
Agreed with the caveat that we need to do something about the people in apartments/communal living who are super-noisy at 1 AM*, or throw their trash all over the place, or whatnot.
I like the idea of communal living, but I also feel like there’s always That Guy, y’know?
* Or conversely freak out about some noise at 10 PM on a Saturday. Sigh.
The most freeing thing for me was to stop caring about noise in my apartment. I would be terrified to walk across my floors because they are old wood floors and my downstairs neighbor will hear me! I would watch tv with subtitles on, because the music would occasionally swell and I didn’t want my neighbors to be disturbed.
I’m not a monster, but I realize we live in the same building. I will hear my downstairs neighbor talking to her boyfriend and his grumbly, low-pitch voice. They will hear my dog walking across the floor. We will all live.
I’m totally on the side of being considerate, but I also recognize that it’s silly to expect us all to have apartments that give us the illusion that we live in this building alone. At late/early hours, don’t make loud noises and attempt to make no noise at all. I guess I’m saying, don’t feel like Mrs. Rochester. You are allowed to let people know you live in the attic.
Oh, word.
I’m usually, like, try not to scream but if it’s before 11 PM and after 8 AM, we can all just deal. Even a once-every-month-or-so Loud Weekend Party is a fact of life.
I had a friend whose downstairs neighbor would freak the fuck out about any noise whatsoever after the sun went down, and it was a whole thing. Conversely, the chick downstairs from me in my last apartment was prone to having very loud, very protracted sex* for two hours at 3 AM on a weeknight, and playing Katie Perry super-loud in a failed attempt to cover it up. After a knock on the door and a talk with the landlord availed nothing, I just started calling the cops every time I heard music after midnight from that apartment, because fuck you, lady, you have forfeited any benefit of the doubt.
* And, er, very…”theatrical”, from what I could tell.
Oh, honey. Have sex that is as loud and as performative as you want. But the minute you blast Katy Perry to cover it up, I will bring the law down on you.
The other week I woke up at 3am to hear my neighbour, directly on the other side of our wood-framed wall, having the *quietest possible sex*, it was kind of charming. Just some rhythmic bed squeaking and the occasional muffled moan. When they were done I was actually kind of like, good job dude, I hope you and your partner had a great time.
I don’t understand why homes have never been built with this problem in mind. Like, ever. People have never wanted to hear each other have sex, babies scream, etc. But it seems like wall thickness and sound insulation are never really considered.
In my experience, older (pre-WWII) buildings tend to have thicker walls and are a lot less noisy than shoddy newer construction. (Which seems to be made out of particle board).
I have the miserable luck of being a very light sleeper, and having to day-sleep due to working nights. And I live in an apartment with no sound protection, and roommates, and the kitchen is under my bedroom.
I have a white noise machine, a fan, and earplugs.
I feel like I’ve been waiting all my life for a piece that’s just Jaya yelling about Tiny House Hunters’ sex lives (or lack thereof).
SERIOUSLY. I remember there was one episode where it was a couple and their teenage daughter moving into a tiny house and they were talking about being empty nesters soon and having their privacy in their tiny house and she was like I WILL BE LIVING HERE FOR TWO MORE YEARS AND MY ROOM IS RIGHT NEXT TO YOURS PLEASE STOP.
That poor, poor girl. I really hope she had a bff whose parents let her sleep over all the time.
I was just going to bring them up! (unless there are multiple tiny house couples with teen daughters). I think I remember they realized ON THE SHOW that their tiny loft bed was right across from their daughter’s tiny loft bed and were slightly horrified but not enough to consider not buying a tiny house?
Is that the one where they chose to move to a tiny house partly because the husband was a hoarder? Because that’s the one I’m referring to.
That “solution” does not match the problem. “Oh, Person has too much stuff! If we all move into a much smaller space, surely he’ll stop bringing all that stuff home! It will immediately fix his issues!” Nope, you’re gonna have a tiny house FULL OF STUFF.
Right? My MIL loves the idea of a microapartment and thinks it will solve her bulk-purchase issues . This is the woman who goes to Costco and buys three brooms at a time because AVAILABLE, and buys the two-quart ketchup because she might, possibly, if she’s in town, have one bbq over the summer. I’m all, you don’t need a microapartment; just stop going to Costco.
Or she could keep buying them and just donate them to her local food bank or something when she’s done. I know someone who had a buying stuff problem like that, and she realized the buying stuff and getting a deal part was what she liked, so she just started buying stuff and then taking it directly to goodwill or the food bank or the women’s community.
Well, that I can get behind! Way to make your compulsive behavior work for you.
Mayyybe, I might be getting them mixed up with the couple who were in some sort of theater troupe and needed space in their house to store like, an entire rack of costumes and didn’t understand that this might be incompatible with the whole “tiny house” thing. I remember them also having a teen kid who clearly wanted to get out of there ASAP.
My partner isn’t a hoarder, but he has lots of stuff, including many fabulous musical instruments, and is messy. When he was flat-hunting he was trying to explain to me that tiny kitchens are easier to keep clean. My response was NO THAT IS NOT A PROPER KITCHEN I VETO. Thankfully we found a nice-sized flat in my block, two floors up from mine. The kitchen could do with being a bit bigger, and more to the point having better storage, but it’s an actual kitchen at least.
The couple on Tiny House Hunters that moved from LA to upstate NY because “everyone has their own space in this house & that’s bad we never see the kids whaaaa”:
a) Congrats! Your eldest two will now find every excuse to never be in the house or around you ever – or maybe they’ll move in with Grandma
b) When they started talking about using the “3 ft of attic height” as a bedroom for the kids I wanted to call CPS
Seriously, fuck those people
My sister had to stop watching one episode where the couple was seriously considering letting the baby “sleep on the floor” since there weren’t enough beds for their three kids.
Instead they bought the house with two 8 foot lofts and no railings for their three children under the age of 8 to sleep in.
People who have kids to have kids but fail to acknowledge that kids are people in their own right with wants and needs can fuck right off.
I just….your children will grow. You understand that, right? Your child will not be a toddler size forever. Assuming your children don’t roll out of bed an die first, they will become teenagers. Teenagers who probably will be too large for sharing that sleeping space.
YUP. I stopped being able to watch this show and laugh after an episode with the family of 4, two of whom were small children (5 or 7 years?). They purchased a modified shipping container, the kids I think ended up sleeping in a loft together while the parents slept in the hallway. Those kids are going to GROW, people.
Also, I just realized, these kids are going to grow and learn about masturbation. If your house doesn’t have walls, you are condemning your kids to an adolescence without masturbation. Or worse, furtive masturbation in, basically, the same room you share with them.
Why I don’t have a Mini Cooper, my son’s father is six foot two, so until he is fully launched (around what, age 25 these days?) its a no go.
Oh man, the two loft setup. I’m always yelling about those when I watch Tiny House Nation. Because they never put in walls or any kind of dividers, and in so many of these families, it’s the parents in one loft and teenagers in the other. Even putting aside the how do you have sex without the kid(s) seeing/hearing issue, what about the need for privacy when getting dressed? For both parents and kids?
That one was seriously irresponsible. They had like four kids! I don’t know that it’s actually abusive or anything, but certainly a total lack of good boundaries and no recognition that children are, you know, their own people.
It’s definitely a huuuuuuge red flag. Erasing privacy and literal barriers in an effort to enforce familial closeness implies A LOT about that dynamic, and none of it is remotely healthy or good.
I remember this episode! Those people were the most ridiculous and I felt so, so bad for the kids. Having to be on top of every member of your family at all times doesn’t make you happy that you’re having family time, it makes you want to get the hell away from them whenever possible. Let them have their own space but institute family game night or something. You’ll still save a ton of money going from a huge house in CA to a more modest but not tiny house in Corning.
I mean, if you want your kids to fantasize, constantly, about poisoning you and buying a bigger place with the insurance money….
I’m from upstate NY, and it’s not like houses *anywhere* here are that expensive!! I’m sure you could get a regular-sized house in Corning for whatever they paid for their tiny one (if not two!)
brb planning move to Corning
It’s a very nice town! I just visited for the first time last year.
It has its economic challenges, but the glass museum is terrific and the downtown area is on the resurgence & very walkable. I went to a first-rate restaurant there.
I’m also from upstate NY, which is part of why I was doing so much yelling at the TV. That’s one of the best things about upstate NY, reasonable housing costs! They actually wound up getting a real house that just happens to be very small (1 bd, 1 ba) that would be perfectly fine for a couple without kids but is just silly for their family.
Is that actually legal? I know in our last apartment we had the best next-door neighbors who wound up getting evicted for exceeding the legal occupancy limit. I think it was around 8 in a 1.5br apartment which is crazy for introvert-me to imagine but they were quiet as mice and I missed them when they left.
Certainly better than couple downstairs that got into screaming matches at 3 in the morning.
I watched this one with my son (almost 10 and over 5 ft tall). He said, “Mom, if you ever try to do this to me, I will run away.” We spent the whole episode making fun of the couple, but feeling terrible for their children. Like, why didn’t they just downsize to a reasonable house?? It’s not like the only two options are 4,000 sf or 600 sf. There are a lot of numbers in between those two!
I just…and the realtor kept saying “Well, I would never do this myself.” “I can’t imagine doing this.” “Normally, I would NEVER show a family of 6 a house this small…” Like, you can tell something is up, lady, follow your instincts!
I watched this episode with my mother and within the first few minutes she was like “run away, take your sister, does grandma have space?” (note: my mother came from a family of 9 and ran away from home so she can relate)
Have you seen the one with the couple who had FOUR CHILDREN. FOOOOOUUUUURRRRR CHIIILLLLLDDDREEEEEENNN, and were looking to live in no more than 650 sqft.
I’m sorry, but like.
Your daughters will be teenagers soon, and your son will also be a teenager eventually and for the love of god don’t make them all sleep in the same room!
OH YES
I WAS LIVETWEETING MY HORROR ABOUT THAT ONE
their older daughters were SO. PISSED. OFF.
I felt just turrible for those poor girls. One of them was like, 14, which is just before the time in your life when it is s o i m p o r t a n t to have your own space I just couldn’t.
There was one with a family that had 3 under-10 boys and a teenage girl. They looked at 2 tiny houses and an RV and TOOK THE RV so the boys all shared one bunk “room” and the TEENAGE GIRL literally had a SHELF she slept/lived on. WHAT. THE. EFF.
I gasped aloud. What is WRONG with people?
I found out that they have a blog, thanks to gcf’s comment downthread! They posted in the comments of the “this can only end in murder-suicide” post: http://tinyhousefor6.com/
That looks like a perfectly nicely-sized house! For three people who have very little stuff. Those “lofts” are terrifying. And it’s six people plus “the dogs”, however many of those there are. The one photographed looked big.
I think my 3kg cat has more space devoted to her than one of their daughters.
And there I was worrying about the landlord for next door cramming five people into a one-bedroom flat, including a baby and only for a year. Actually, that’s still worrying, and he’s an absentee landlord who has let a leak in the bathroom cause huge damage to the communal stairwell.
They did a great job with that house but what in the world did they do with all their stuff? You don’t get to 4 kids and the years that, one assumes, that requires without acquiring SOMETHING and I can count on one hand the number of things in the pictures that aren’t new from IKEA or Target. Where’s their teenagers’ favorite childhood stuffed animal or things for their hobby? Where do you keep sporting equipment and photo albums? How about the mouse ears from that trip to WDW or grandma’s nightstand or the boxes of Christmas [or alternative holiday] decorations or the quilt that one relative made or, really, any of those bits that accumulate and are meaningful? I get the urge to live simple – right now I’m staring at my sewing corner and there’s twice as much as it can store and four times as much as I need) but there’s something jarring about a home that looks like the people only materialized last year.
Maybe they want to have a VC Andrews themed reality show in a few years.
I don’t mind apartment living and right at the moment have a fairly good-sized house (900 sf), but tiny house living makes my skin start to crawl right off my body. It’s in the same category as capsule hotels: yes, of course you can, but why would you want to?
Strangely, I’m not at all claustrophobic. MRIs don’t bother me a bit, elevators are ho-hum. It’s just the idea of not being able to sit up straight in bed, ever, that gets me.
I sort of like the idea of capsule hotels, like in an airport, because I just want to sleep and love enclosed spaces, but not for longer than that.
Seriously, I have been really wanting, in some vague way, to start a business that provides capsule hotels in an airport, because, okay, I got here 3 freaking hours early to get through security, which took me like 15 minutes and now i have over two hours of time to kill and it’s 5am, I’m exhausted, and I can’t nod off because I must be aware of my bag at all times. Can I seriously just check into a capsule for a few hours so I don’t have to worry about my bag getting stolen or me drooling all over myself while I’m trying to half nap sitting upright?
I am a frequent airport lingerer and have wished many times that these existed, so like get on with that business plan already.
They have one in Amsterdam! http://www.yotel.com/en/hotels/amsterdam-schiphol… I’ve never stayed in it because Schiphol is fortunately my ‘home’ airport these days, but you can get a capsule by the hour and it’s airside.
Or: I have a 10-hour layover after an endless endless endless flight, before the last leg of my trip. PLEASE GOD LET ME SLEEP IN A LITTLE DARK SILENT POD WHILE SOMEONE WATCHES MY BAG PLEASE
Every time I see those tiny loft beds, even more than the sex thing, I think “that would be agony on a hot day,” because there’s just no air circulation!
And how do you make the bed?!
Two things: correct on “you want the living space of a trailer but would judge people who live in trailers” and also correct on thinking that crawling into a tiny capsule bed every night seems like a recipe for truly uninteresting sex. What, you NEVER need to be upright or at least not lying down???
More to the point I feel like this movement requires the same heaping dose of privilege as people who are like “just pare down your wardrobe, you only need 6 pieces of clothing!” Thanks, but I do need more clothing than that and as a woman on this world I get judged on what I wear and how I present myself, so sue me for wanting to do so in a manner that pleases me. Which requires more than 6 pieces of clothing and a hairbrush. I need snow boots and a parka! I need scarves and gloves! I need an umbrella and more than 2 plates!
I am working on paring down my stuff, though not to extreme levels, and when I am uncertain about whether to keep something I often remind myself that I can replace it if I have to. I haven’t yet gotten to anything I couldn’t afford to replace, but if I do I’m sure I’ll be much more hesitant to let go of it. It’s maddening that some people think everyone can take an “I can replace it” attitude to everything.
Also, I need enough dishes that I could invite people for dinner without buying paper plates. Having only two plates might reduce my dirty dish pile, but the cost would be too great.
I heard of something a while back that people called the “20 minutes/$20 rule” – basically if you can replace it in under 20 minutes for under $20, get rid of it. The likelihood that you’ll need it (esp if it’s a cord or something you’ve been carting around but can’t remember what it belongs to) is slim enough that it’s worth the risk to get rid of.
Oh I like this idea. The Kondo stuff fills me with IMMEDIATE VISCERAL HATE as someone who is a. a bit of a packrat, b. sentimental, c. fat and therefore clothing shopping is A Challenge. So yeah, “replaceability” is a major major factor for me.
Yeah I mean as soon as I read an interview with her where she talked about trying to use a ruler as a screwdriver because she threw away her non-joy-sparking actual screwdriver, I have been extremely unable to put up with any Kondo stuff.
Oh NO. I haven’t seen this but I get my packrat from several generations of Carpenters Who Keep Everything Because You Never Know When You Might Need It so this made my eye twitch, like, aggressively.
Okay I get it, but in the context of the book this is more of a chance for her to point out that she herself took it to extremes when she was first working out her whole stance on possessions! She says in the book essentially that she hadn’t yet learned to feel joy in screwdrivers, but now she knows how to feel joy in things that are useful, etc.
Unfortunately, a fair number of people who complain about the book seem to have the advice on what to do confused with the examples of her mistakes that you should learn from. I saw one review saying that the book was terrible because she advises you to throw away other people’s stuff without asking them, when actually she goes to some lengths to make clear that you should *not* do that.
(Of course it’s fine for people to dislike the book if it’s not for them, I just get a bit annoyed when the reasons people give for disliking it are factually incorrect.)
Yeah, I was one of those people until I read the dang thing. Fact is, what “sparks joy” for me is still gonna mean I have a fuck-ton more stuff than some people, because yes, I have a lot of clothes, but most of them do actively make me happy. I like having lots of options and lots of pretty clothes!
This was my favorite part of the book–her admissions of how she is COMPLETELY INSANE in her quest for tidiness. I want there to be a sitcom about a nice, normal Japanese family with one daughter who obsessively tidies up with a different method every week and how they cope with a combination of love and exasperation.
WOULD. WATCH.
My mother did this for me, helpfully, several times during my childhood, then asked me to help do it to my brother, which is probably part of the reason I’m such a pack rat.
My parents never did this to me when I was a kid, but my mom threatened it pretty frequently. I’m working on the packrat tendencies.
Like Kelsey I am filled with immediate visceral hate for that Kondo crap but I had not heard about this and now I’m just even more filled with hate. JFC.
Wait, how does a screwdriver not bring you joy? It’s history and physics and potential in a tiny package! And you can get ones with interchangable tips so it’s like the legos of tools and there’s the different grips and lengths and colors… and I might have a slight tool problem at my house but shutup, I totally need them all and EVERY ONE brings me joy. Even the rusted one from college. *hugs tools*
My husband has an ugly 3-drawer plastic storage thing in our bedroom and I’m pretty sure this applies to everything in it. But we can’t get rid of it because he needs time to sit and go through it to “make sure.” Which he never has, just as I never have time to sort my piles of important papers. I would never actually throw his stuff away without asking, but I am sometimes tempted.
I mean, your dirty dish pile would be smaller, but you would also be dealing with it C O N S T A N T L Y unless you were also reusing plates without washing them.
I can see some advantage in not being able to leave it too long and let it pile up too much, but it’s less “reducing dish-washing” and “spreading dish-washing out more evenly”. Like, do you want to leave it a few days and wash ten plates at once, or do you want to wash two plates every day?
Dealing with this even now, in fact. Back when I washed dishes by hand, I went down to two mugs, feeling, rightly, that it would pressure me to wash dishes quickly rather than letting them sit around in the sink for two days like the Amazing Disgusto.
And now I have an apartment with a dishwasher, hooray! Except I also live alone, so usually it takes way more time to fill the dishwasher than it does to use both mugs, and I don’t want to run the dishwasher just for them because it’ll make the Lorax cry, so…gotta get another mug.
I actually read an article about this somewhere that was like “those people who are all WE ONLY NEED FIVE POSSESSIONS TO SURVIVE are people who can always go out and re-buy things and so never need to save anything.” But at the same time I also kind of feel sorry for them. Like, a lot of the THINGS in my life are hand-me-downs from relatives and I don’t WANT to get rid of any of them!
Yes! My things “spark joy” to borrow from Marie Kondo. When my parents die I will have the chest that my great-grandfather built himself and brought on a steamship to America. That’s a thing. But I would never get rid of it just because it’s taking up space! Yes we should strive to consume less, but “throwing away everything you own and replacing what you need periodically” isn’t a solution to that!!!!
Also, when you throw things away? They don’t go into some kind of alternate dimension. THEY GO INTO LANDFILLS. Yes, obviously people donate stuff but I hate the smugness that comes with “we chucked it all and live like monks!” Right into the faces of third world country that have developed entire economies and communities around housing your garbage.
Sometimes the possessions go to goodwill, though. Where I can obtain them cheaply. This is how I get most things.
A chest is never useless – a chest holds other things. If you’re going to have things at all, you need things to put those things in.
caveat: I am not a minimalist. I like things.
Yeah, there is a difference in being anti-consumerist and rejecting material things. Being anti-consumerist doesn’t mean you don’t have stuff, it means you engage in sharing, reusing, and bartering economies. Which means you keep sentimental heirlooms and you have, say, a large wardrobe which a local person made for you in exchange for hours worked in a community garden or a wardrobe which changes often due to clothing swaps or whatever.
Rejecting material things can (it doesn’t have to) actually mean participating in disposable economies which isn’t necessarily better for your local economy/community.
Those people do not live in New England.
I’m pretty pare-down-y myself, in that I try to go through and purge every six months to a year, but still. Yes, we should all think about whether we actually use a thing and how much (or, ideally, think about whether we will do so before we buy it) but people use stuff.
I think small house living can be appealing at first for the novelty, but get more than one or two people up in there and it quickly becomes a nightmare.
Source: live in a 900 sq foot apartment with two adults, two kids, a dog, and a cat, and I want to throw myself off the balcony sometimes.
This. I own a house of roughly that size that I share with my also-works-from-home partner and our four, um, exuberant cats. I could absolutely live tiny if it was just me and maybe one cat that could safely go outside. But I could never share a tiny house. Just living in a dorm in college made my anxiety almost unbearable.
Yeah, this is a recipe for not only murder, but continual murder because I’d have to keep remarrying to have a spouse on hand to murder when I regularly hit my breaking point.
We made it four years in 1000 sq foot house, and another 4 in 1000 sq ft apartment with two adults, one child, and four cats. I salute you!
I live in a 130 sq feet apartment (the kitchen and bathroom are communal, so it’s just my bed, desk/dining table and two closets). Two years ago I had my then-boyfriend stay over for a week, and after three days I had developed a deep and intense hatred for him.
Yeah, my initial attraction to tiny homes was based on living in trailers, which are of course designed to hold a crazy amount of shit and have beds and actually be pretty pleasant overall. Currently in a 280 sq ft studio in a city where it’s over 100(F) in summer and sometimes snows in winter, and just putting my clothes away has been a grievous pain. Will take a trailer over this place any day of the week and never have to think of the term “floor boning” as a bonus.
Living in a wintery environment is anathema to the tiny house/no storage idea, that’s for sure.
But then there are the people who live in tiny houses and have, like, six bikes hanging from the walls. “They double as art!” the couple says, happily, until they bang their head into one of the bikes and have to walk around for a week with a scabby print of their rear casette on their forehead.
I’ve been living out of a suitcase for two months, and have maybe two suitcases worth of possessions scattered around various bags (which is still waaaay more than 6 pieces of clothing btw because I have job interview clothes and rain day clothes and I can’t wash them that frequently)
And it Sucks.
I miss my books and art supplies and tea cups and hiking gear and my childhood soft toys and having more than three pairs of pants. I bought a pillow and duvet yesterday and was super ecstatic last night about sleeping in my own bedding.
Owning stuff is Good
Yeah so much wardrobe minimalism seems to be based on having frequent access to washers and dryers. It’s just privilege-blindness gone bonkers.
I hate the people on tiny house hunters who see one option and then are like “maybe for the next we could see something bigger” like what did you think would happen what did you honestly expect from this please just go
Yeah that always boggles the mind. I was watching a marathon of Tiny House Hunters with a friend and we kept screaming, “You’re asking for a TINY house! THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS”
I have only watched like two episodes of tiny house hunters! And the people involved said things like:
“that one is way too small”
“I NEED a full sized closet”
“not enough storage space”
JUST GET A NORMAL SIZED HOUSE.
or “oh this closet is really small”
NO. KIDDING.
You see difficulty, I see opportunity.
I love you.
I think living somewhere small is wonderful to be honest, and that very few square feet is perfectly respectable for many, and that we should all consider carefully lives of excess. But the woobification of tiny houses as somehow a ~purer way of life and that it may solve society’s ills is so ridiculous that I have a mildly visceral response to the tiny house discussion now. Every time I hear someone talking about how 110 sq.ft has made the world a better place my breath sticks in my chest. I keep waiting for Mallory to appear and start narrating “Houses Made Horrifying: Tiny House, Tiny Self.”
(But nowhere to be found was a house tiny enough. The couple entered and looked around, but the house was too large. “No. No.” They shook their heads. “This is not tiny enough. Our spirits will fit. Our wills will stand tall. We cannot suffer our spirits to thrive. We must find a smaller house.”
And the couple looked and looked, but still their spirits stood tall. “It is not small enough,” they said, again and again. “In this house we can love. In this house we can breathe. In this house we may fit our minds, our ambitions, our selves. Truly this house is not tiny enough.”
And so they went, on and on, looking and smaller and smaller houses until finally they could barely fit. The couple looked at each other and nodded their heads yes, but only barely, for the house was so small. “Yes. Yes,” they said, wheezing with effort. “This house is just tiny enough.” And so the couple stood as stone and crushed their spirits day by day, until they became the house, and the house became them.)
Oh, my gosh, this is worthy of an entire post, right here.
I’m thinking of ways to expand it. A whole series of reality shows made nightmare. Property Brothers, but where the brothers only grin and grin and hold axes and as they demolish your house they get more beautiful, as though their beauty can only be fed by destruction. I’ll probably pitch it properly later in fact! Thank you for the encouragement. :’)
Please do!
Please do. Please. And might I request “House Hunters International Made Horrifying”?
Oh, god. That might be one that doesn’t necessitate any changes.
You have to work in the Third Brother!!! Something about the left out, plainer looking, unfamous brother vs the charming tv twins – there’s so much room for creepiness.
You have a very brilliant idea. And I googled “Houses Made Horrifying: Tiny House, Tiny Self,” thinking it was a real Mallory piece. You should write it!!!
I love Great British Bake Off but I would love to see it become terrifying.
Fleet Street Week
A+ would watch
OH YE GODS I am WEEPING
This is all perfect, but I need to separate out my enjoyment of the word “woobification” for special love. Also, is your username derived from the song about cows with guns?
Oh my gosh, I haven’t thought about that song in AGES. WHAT A THROWBACK. I totally know the song in question but in fact it’s a (bad) pun on my name (Steer). In hindsight I should have gone with cowdoldrums. Another username, another time. (Also, thank you! You’re very kind.)
I wouldn’t have made the connection but it was played recently during a pledge drive and afterwards the hosts devolved into Oh my Gaaahhhhd, maaan, that’s a public radio CLASSIC! (Which it is, in addition to being a perfect u/n for your name. It can be two things!)
Re. “Cows With Guns”: GONNA SAY!
That was beautiful.
“it’s because they are living in glorified trailers but seem like they would judge people who live in trailers.” THIS.
Yes. Yes. Yes. I cannot watch this show or anything about tiny houses because of the whole twee reclaimed wood it-is-NOT-a-trailer people who live in tiny houses. And the people who still expect a dishwasher and washer/dryer in a tiny house.
How in the fuck would you even use a dishwasher in a tiny house??? You don’t have enough dishes to put in it!!! You don’t need a dishwasher to wash your 2 plates and 2 bowls and 2 sporks!!!!!
Ugh totally. But these dishwasher wanters also think they will entertain in their tiny home.
OMG, the people who think they will entertain in a tiny house make me crazy!
“How are you going to have people over?”
“We can use this convertible bench/storage/second bedroom as a lovely sofa!”
NO.
I like the clips with 300 people moshing in a 100-square foot house on a Saturday night. That’s exactly how I spent my twenties.
YES. They’re the house-hunting equivalent of silicon valley start-up bros who want to invent a “ride-sharing system that runs on a certain route with a variety of stops,” but they don’t want to take the frakking BUS.
Did that actually happen? I really hope those guys exist because I would love to see them get laughed off of Shark Tank or something.
I think it did (I don’t think they actually created it, tho), but I can’t remember now where I read it.
Nope, that is legitimately an Uber service being piloted in Seattle, uberHOP.
oh, it’s most definitely happening in san francisco right now. it’s called chariot. i want to light them all on fire.
Chariot was also the name of the US government project to blast a harbor in the coast of Alaska using six buried thermonuclear bombs. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!
the name is so telling to me. it’s like their marketing team was like, “we know buses are for poor gross people. so what’s a way that FANCY people used to get around? like if you were really rich and someone was like, ‘you’re _____ awaits’ what would it be??”
i have a lot of anger about it, clearly.
OOO. I must look this up!
There’s a great book about it – kind of dense, but really good – called The Firecracker Boys, by Dan O’Neill.
The two most Palo Alto things I’ve seen so far on Nextdoor are 1. parents seeking a Russian chess tutor for their 6 year old and 2. the people looking for somewhere to put their tiny house (“no trailer parks, please”).
If there is any justice in the universe, someone sent them a reply that said “how about UP YOUR OWN BUTT”
Trailer Park: Go Fuck Yourselves
I sell manufactured homes and invariably it’s the most difficult, no knowledge having of construction standards/zoning etc whitest of the white people(disclosure I’m an NPR listening characature of a certain kind of white person) who come in to see a tiny house. Every single one of them are shocked and offended when I tell them that following their bliss will set them back $30k-$45k. The cars that they drive are $35k+ cars, but somehow they think that their solidly constructed, tiny dream homes should cost $15k because they have cash/good credit so they obviously aren’t “trailer people”. Fuck all of these smug time-wasters right in the ear.
The amount of people who do not seem to understand that the addition of a mattress with reduce the amount of height on the sleeping-shelf BLOWS MY MIND. How…how do you not get this? HOW? Never mind sex, how the hell do you sit fully upright in bed?
(I had to stop watching Tiny House Hunters because it fills me with rage)
Also making the bed would be a horror show. You’d have to roll around from corner to corner to get the bottom sheet on.
I always thought these were intended for people to put in their back gardens, like those people who have really fancy sheds. What if someone wanted to rob you? They could just…steal your entire house :/.
Could and did
https://caseyfriday.com/2014/12/end-of-an-era-our…
Oh my god, this keeps getting funnier with every sentence. The paver “driveway” that was clearly not made for vehicles! Drama at the Tumbleweed Workshop! Disabled strangers on the internet ruining the tiny house experience for this particular person, somehow!
I know! There is a tiny part of me that feels bad for them because having something stolen is always awful. But they seem like such dramatic snowflake people that I read the whole thing with a feeling of glee.
I spend around a thousand dollars JUST on the blackout shades and frame mounts for the blackout shades – for the skylights. Not even shades for all the other 8 windows.
What were these blackout shades and frame mounts made out of, unicorn bones? How many skylights could there be in your tiny ceiling?
I want to know how he spent $3100 on a ‘driveway’ that is clearly just some paving stones that have been put on the ground. No concrete or anything just laid down in the sand. There’s 135 of them that’s $23 per paver, you done got ripped off.
It was clearing the land AND the pavers. So…. basically he ethically killed a bunch of trees to make room for a movable structure.
oh my god, this duuuuude
On the one hand, I want to laugh, because what a child, and what a wild situation. On the other hand, that piece…is almost violent. Tone is totally out of control.
Even without the sex, sleeping in any of those beds sounds like hell. I remember once spending a night at my in-law’s in my wife’s childhood bed, because they don’t have a functional guest room. It’s a twin bed flush against the wall under the angled part of a Cape Cod roof, and I was on the inside. I woke up in the night because unfamiliar cat hair was giving me an allergy attack and tried to get up only to discover that the ceiling was four inches in front of my face and the only way for me to escape the bed was to get my wife to wake up and move and I couldn’t breathe until she did and nope, nope, nope, never ever again, do not ever make me sleep somewhere with less than six feet above me.
That said, in that first picture, I bet you could do cowgirl with the person on top looking out the skylight, and that seems like it could actually be pretty pleasant, if the view was nice.
“Babe, you look distracted, do you want to change positions? Is there something I can do to re-engage you in this delightful coitus we’re having?”
“Nah babe, I’m just bird-watching. They’re building a nest!”
“……..”
So my bed is in a loft like these, and rigorous scientific experimentation suggests that if there is space enough to sit up on a mattress, then cowgirl is awesome.* Even better is propping your feet on the ceiling to hit certain angles in missionary. Also, ladders make life interesting.
*confession: I have hit my head on the ceiling more times than I would care to admit.
But it is so nice just to have a little eyrie. I spent several months disabled, staring at a distant popcorn ceiling, and occasionally getting assaulted. I now have my loft with a mattress, sunlight and books and the option of literally tossing any uninvited company out, if they get past the guardcat. It is the cosiest hermit crab shell for PTSD.
So once I was camping with my family (I was 21) and we did a 10 mile canoe ride. I took a nap before dinner in the cabin bunk bed, and I vaguely remember my dad saying, “the steaks are ready!” I woke up at midnight, there was NO FOOD LEFT, and I had a huge lump on my head. Apparently I was so hungry that I woke/sat up fast enough to KNOCK MYSELF BACK OUT. I had a concussion and then my husband had to spend the whole night walking me around so I wouldn’t go back to sleep (because that was what my mom said you had to do with a concussion). I still think they could have at least saved me a steak, though.
Now I’m thinking through sex positions that could make it work — like, spooning? Side by side? Could you have like, a built in sex swing that would lower from the ceiling?
It’s like the old adage: A Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe. You can do it — but why?
As a Canadian, the answer to that has always been…. verbally.
I am friends with a carpenter who currently builds Regular Houses but wants to get into the Tiny House market, mostly because she personally would enjoy the challenges involved in changing her game like that. She lives somewhere spacious and rural where you can never hear your neighbors have sex or get murdered. She comes to visit me in my Tiny NYC Apartment and looks around it appraisingly like “okay, people can genuinely live a fulfilling life in a space that is laid out like this,” and I’d like to think that – should she fulfill her tiny-house construction dream – she will just look to NYC apartments as exemplars. Because they obviously work. Even if they’re mildly horrible and even if I have to give >100 books away on a yearly basis because of space.
Yep! The disdain for trailers cuts folks off from a bevy of design possibilities. The kitchen in my apartment is set up like that, where every non-otherwise-functional square inch is built-in storage space, but the rest of it is kind of up to me to make bearable. I’ve looked at tiny apartments for ideas, and they’re all in NYC.
These shows are also frustrating because what are you gonna do when you get too old to climb the tiny rickety ladders? What are you gonna do if you need to start using a cane or a wheelchair or you need space for your oxygen supplies?
Oh god, aging-in-place or ADA accessibility renovation programs (a legit concern for many people!) but for Tiny Houses. I think that most of the people who go for Tiny Homes can afford moving on to a more accessible house.
Absolutely. There’s such an issue with accessibility in the vast majority of tiny houses that I’ve seen on these shows–no room for walkers/wheelchairs/canes, major obstacles everywhere for those with mobility/balance issues, almost always doing stairs or ladders to the bedrooms, generally stairs outside into the house too. And then for those of us disabled with pain issues, having a bedroom or bathroom you have to constantly bend or contort to get into, not good either. I don’t know, it bums me out because tiny houses are a cheaper alternative to conventional houses, and such a large percentage of those who are disabled are in poverty and could really use innovative solutions like that. (Although I have heard that some accessible models exist, I watch most of the tiny house shows regularly, and I think I could count literally every single house I’ve seen on those shows that don’t have stairs/ladders to the bedroom. And that’s always because the house is a built-in kind of tiny house, and not a mobile kind.)
“tiny houses are a cheaper alternative to conventional houses”
That’s not even true in many parts of the country! There are plenty of Rust Belt cities where you can buy a regular house for way less than people spend on these tiny house shows. (And with presumably better access to public transportation, services, etc.)
That’s true. I forget that living in Portland OR, which is going through a major housing shortage; so the average house has shot up to $350,000 and the average 2 bed apartment is around $1450.
$1450 for a 2BR is cheap!
What about long before then, when you have a run-of-the-mill illness or injury or surgery? How are you getting in and out of The Only Place To Lie Down?
I dislocated a couple ribs a few weeks ago. Totally minor and temporary injury, and there’s no way I could have dealt with one of those loft beds with a low ceiling in that condition.
I’ve thought about that too! Like, good luck with that if you have a bad sprain. Or are 8 months pregnant. Or drunk. Or just super super tired and can’t be arsed with a ladder.
Oh, when they start aging they’re just going to invest in a cryogenics venture and hope for the best.
Now would be the time to invest in Tiny Parachutes.
Even if you’re young and healthy, those sleeping lofts and ladders are a total non-starter for me. They’re just dangerous for everyone!
Statistically speaking, if you have to climb down several hundred nights (bleary-eyed and half-awake) to pee or whatever, you’re going to have some kind of accident.
(Anecdata: My boyfriend’s sister had one of those lofts when she was in her early 30s, and she fell out and shattered her pelvis).
If you have to live in a tiny house, I don’t see why you can’t have everything on one level and just make better use of space (e.g., a Murphy bed or couch that folds out into a bed). Forget the dumb lofts!
I live in a tiny apartment with a murphy bed but I never fold it up because it frightens me so much. I don’t believe it will stay up. But Daybeds are amazing. Daybeds are a great idea.
I was so weirded out by their sub-optimal bathroom configurations that I hadn’t even thought about having sex in one of those.
Noooo this comment made me think about those two things together. Composting toilets and sex shouldn’t be in the same thought, at least not in this gal’s brain..
To me, Tiny House Hunters is the show in which women have to spend a lot of time and energy talking their husbands into indoor, flushing toilets.
Did you see the one where they almost got divorced over a composting toilet? That was my favorite one.
Husband: “Composting toilets were used for…”
Wife: “WERE used. The key word is ‘were’!”
(I’m not sure if that was the same couple, but I loved her.)
Also I am enormously claustrophilic, guys, I would probably love sleeping on a shelf 4″ from the ceiling tbh, but I don’t understand why a Tiny House has to have such a low ceiling? I mean if you want to commit to 110 ft² why can’t the ceilings be 11 or 12 ft?
This is what I always wonder! Maybe because a sufficiently tiny house would then need additional supports to keep it from falling on its side?
omg all I want is a tall tiny house with FLYING BUTTRESSES
If it’s a mobile kind of house, they have to take into account height for hauling under bridges. And then taller houses can affect weight and balance when hauling it as well.
A good point! Thank you!
Converted grain silo?
I’ve actually driven past a place a few times that is a converted grain elevator. It must be loud as heck when the wind hits the corrogated metal siding, but they have balconies up towards the top that have got to have amazing views.
Keri Hulme’s The Bone People has a character who lives in… I think it was a tower that she built, but it could easily have been a silo, and the descriptions of it are so cool!
I’m gonna need some windows but otherwise, yes.
I figured that would be part of the conversion. And the balconies you could have!
And a giant fireman’s pole for quickly getting from the top level to the bottom!
Converted MISSILE silo!
That would give you extra space for a cellar!
Why have a Tiny House when you can have a Tiny Tower?
Even better because I may have a familial connection to one King Richard III. I would so love to live in a Tiny Tower.
I grew up in a double-wide mobile home (though fairly decent and with an enormous yard), and in one bedroom apts ever since, so yeah, the romance is lost on me. But the loft bed, especially! I never got so far as to even think beyond the getting up and down to start with. You mean you’re going to climb a ladder every time you have to pee? Sure you’re young and healthy: what if you so much as sprain an ankle or have back problems and need a proper mattress, let alone worse things or a disability? Just the very idea of HAVING to climb in and out of bed (without it being a bunk-style situation and not being, you know, a kid) is crazy to me.
I got a loft bed senior year of college. When it finally clicked for me that I would be attempting to climb into this thing drunk far too often, I promptly pulled the mattress off the loft shelf, stuck it on the floor, and used the high space for storage.
Also, I couldn’t sit up in the bed AND my face was like, a foot or two from the ceiling. Too anxious yo.
Also, ETA, totally grew up in a single-wide. Romance is lost on me too.
Yes. EVERY ONE OF MY COLLEGE FRIENDS did this in our freshman dorm. It was like, common knowledge come November of that year. I’m not really anxious about the space, but climbing down the ladder when I have to pee in the middle of the night sucks. Lofted beds aren’t fun.
Yeah, I spent 3 years sleeping on a mattress on the floor after that. So preferable!
My dorm room came with bunk beds that could be separated. I actually started the year with them separate, but when my original roommate moved and I got a new roommate, I insisted we have them as bunk beds, and volunteered to take the top bunk.
But that was because when they were separated they took up roughly 85% of the floor space, and also the ceiling was reasonably high. Plus there was a shelf that was suitably located for my glasses and alarm clock.
I don’t mind lofted beds if they’re sturdy and there’s sufficient space above them. But the beds pictured in this article do not meet criteria #2.
My sister had a loft bed from the ages of about 10 to 20; it was nice, but the two main drawbacks were the loud thud as she got out of bed every morning and the fact that once we were teenagers our hips were slightly wider than the ladder. (The cats got very good at jumping/climbing into it, though.)
I think about this whenever I see one of those: what if you get food poisoning.
And also, for the couples with little kids – if you have to get out of a loft in the middle of the night to get the kids to the bathroom (because I’m sure they can’t get down by themselves), good luck with potty training!
My best apartment ever had a loft above the bathroom for the bed and it was great. There was room to stand and sit up and everything (might not have been if I were taller) and I don’t wake up in the middle of the night to pee anyway. I didn’t have a lot of sex in it, most of my sex happened in the living room but that was also to accommodate multiple people, plus it left my bed nice and dry for sleeping in.
That apartment was destroyed by an electrical fire, which we’re all pretty sure was the direct result of the of the very strange landlord doing all the work himself.
I love all the hints about your life in this comment.
I had a college dorm room once where my bed was, like, three feet off the ground (lofted slightly over a dresser). I had to use a step stool.
Even at THAT height, I hurt myself many times getting out! I can’t imagine having to climb (say) eight feet up and down an actual ladder.
Forget about sex for a minute: how on earth does one change the sheets in one of those lofts?
Pull the mattress down and put a new fitted sheet on it. Replace mattress on shelf. You can’t have a flat sheet because how are you gonna make that bed look nice? You need a duvet, of course. Which is never going to be tucked in nicely and neatly unless you want to kill your back trying for bed perfection on the daily.
A well-made bed is one of my greatest simple pleasures (it only takes a few minutes to do and then it’s so rewarding!) so this kind of bed sounds like Nice To Visit Would Not Like To Live There.
As someone who overheats very easily, the no flat sheet/only a duvet setup is MURDER and the absolute worst. It’s impossible to get comfortable! Why do people do that?
OMG, I’ve done it. Sublet a furnished apartment for a month that had a low-ceiling’d loft sleeping space, mattress on floor. I spent that month changing the bedsheets on my hands and knees. On move-out day I stripped and remade the bed and stood up when I was done, fully forgetting about the low ceiling. I slammed my head on a beam and, literally, saw stars and flashing lights and #!* just like cartoon characters do. It was scary.
This is me every time I change the sheets on the overcab mattress in our camper. (And again, Jaya and everyone above who are calling the tiny house hipsters out on their trailer-judgment are absolutely correct.)
With difficulty, in my experience.
I used to be a chambermaid at a B&B that rented out cottages, and changing the sheets on bunk beds was the bane of my existence. I can’t imagine doing that VOLUNTARILY forever.
So because we live in Vancouver where houses are all now just literally millions of dollars and the condos we think we can afford to buy are actually being sold for things like $106k over asking price LOLLLLLLLLLL, we are now planning to build a laneway house in my mom’s backyard.
It’s all very exciting and wonderful, actually. But I’m working very hard to get psyched about a very small living space. It’ll be GREAT. We will not have a loft bed.
Your final sentence gives credence to your penultimate sentence.
I visited Vancouver recently and, while I wasn’t looking at property prices, the cost of everything (food etc) means I totally believe you on that one! It’s a similar story where I live — I live in London, or Cambridge during term time, and those two places have some of the highest property prices in the UK … so I think I’ll be living at home until I can find somewhere with enough space for a decent number of bookshelves.
Oh, bookshelves. I live in London and I often think wistfully about being one day able to live somewhere with room for multiple bookcases.
I’m just trying to trick myself into thinking I’m really into e-books. I’m not, tho.
I’ve had an e-reader since 2011. I still own 450 books and acquire new (well, mostly used) ones all the time. My lifelong dream is to have a room that contains all my books, whether that’s a home library or just a living room with more shelf space than my current bedroom.
I’m trying to think how big my book collection is. 1000? I used to buy books all the time. Having ME/CFS has scuppered that, and I haven’t bought a paper novel in years. Thankfully I can manage with a good ereader app, though I don’t read that much any more. I can’t get rid of the books, though. It would be wrong. I keep nursing a hope that my eyes will improve.
Don’t you mean book-piles-on-the-floor?
No, I already have loads of those!
I saw a buzzfeed recently about what your money gets in London vs. Wales and I was DYING laughing. London is my ultimate favorite city of all time (SE4 4eva!) but jeezy CREEZY the real estate is just bananas and oppressive and awful.
I saw one that was London versus Scotland and my boyfriend and I read through it while wailing to each other. I really, really do not want to live in London forever.
The friend I stayed with on my last trip there has a little 3-bedroom terrace with a lovely back garden that has a little summer house in it, and it is the cutest place, but I just cannot get my head around how she pays for it because she is a classical musician and teacher and gives lessons and plays in orchestras and stuff AND DOES NOT HAVE ANY HOUSEMATES I mean she works nonstop but even that doesn’t seem like it would be enough for a place that I know has to be worth 600k.
I lived in Edinburgh for a year, and I tried recruiting Scottish people to move to upstate New York by telling them how cheap houses were there. (“You can buy a nice, four-bedroom house for £30K! Really!”) It was rather fun to watch their mouths drop open.
*sobs* HOW?
Well, the collapse of our industrial economy, mostly. But it’s a lovely place to live, if you can find a job!
London (and, incidentally, Cambridge) is so absurdly expensive in every way. With my health, I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to work enough hours to live anywhere. Need to move out asap. Also, another South-Easterner! Though I’m right out in the DA postcodes, which means we’re practically Kent.
If I move away from London, places I’d be likely to look for jobs include Oxford and Cambridge, which doesn’t feel like much of an improvement, pricewise. It’s dispiriting. (They’re less huge and soul-destroying, though!)
Fellow Vancouverite, YES. I just moved here a few months ago from Toronto and it is SAYING SOMETHING when a Torontonian is aghast at house prices. Even rental is hard to come by and expensive as hell. I wish you luck in your laneway endeavour!
Here’s a taste for those who may enjoy real estate horror stories: I just saw a 290 square foot apartment in Vancouver on CL… For $1295/month. “Not pets no smoking no sublets no parties no AirBnB etc”. The admonishments are almost as offensive as the price.
How do you define what’s a party? Are you just not allowed to have anyone else enter the place ever?
Well, I mean, in 290 square feet, pretty much, yeah.
Have you ever considered commuting in from Victoria? Or Nanaimo? Move fast though, we’ve been discovered. And BCFerry now has lower commuter rates than one-offs.
Thank you! It drives me INSANE when I see these Tiny Apartment interviews and people are calling 650 square feet tiny. Like, bitch I lived in a 200 sq. foot, 1-room studio for years. Shut up.
Exactly, as a studio dweller I do not see the point of a tiny house. My carbon footprint is smaller, and I have a real bed.
Lived in a 350-ft. studio for several years and it was not simple and peaceful, it was a fucking battle to fit my all of my cleaning supplies, clothes, and bedding into a single tiny closet and to keep my sheets from smelling like whatever I just cooked. I also did not have space for any respectable hobby, and spent most of my time sitting on my bed.
I live in a similar studio with my SO. We are moving in with some friends and I’m insisting on having my own bedroom, because it was either “I get a room where I can be away from you when I want” or we had to break up.
Um, 650 square feet is the size of my current apartment, which I consider luxuriously roomy for a 1-bedroom. I sometimes consider moving, but everything that I look at is tinier and then I decide to stay where I am.
I mean, it would be awfully cozy for a family of 6 or whatever, but my friend says it’s bigger than where his family of 5 lived in Hong Kong when he was a kid.
650 square feet is a NORMAL sized 1 or even 2 bedroom apartment.
I don’t want a lot of Tiny Apartment TV shows, but I often yell at home magazines over what they describe as “very small”.
My boyfriend and I shared a 450sq ft one bedroom for over a year. We had four bicycles in the living room to boot. It wasn’t ideal but it wasn’t horrible either!
My first place was ~400 sq ft but incredibly well laid-out and my husband and I would have NO trouble fitting into it. Maybe his clothes would be tricky, but that place had storage for DAYS.
Good lord, I used to try to read this magazine called Cottage Style or Cottage Living or something? Because it was billed as being about tips for “smaller houses,” and since ours is 1400 sqft (3 people and 3 cats, and yes, in the endless sprawl that is SoCal, that is small and old), that would include us, right? Well, it turns out that all the “small houses” in the magazine are consistently bigger than ours, usually between 2000 and 3000 sqft. And they are *second* houses, vacation houses, for people to get away to on weekends when they want to “relax” and “simplify” and generally be the kind of people you imagine dying in a fire.
…Which is to say, the Tiny House trend isn’t making a big splash down here.
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
I call shenanigans.
As though anyone would willingly have sex with someone that lived in a “tiny house.”
And you just know they would have one of those recumbent bicycles too!
Possibly also toe shoes.
(involuntary full-body shudder)
You have something against ballet dancers? …oh, wait, THOSE toe shoes.
Aaargh, many conflicting feelings about tiny house stuff! I’m single and introverted and travel enough to own very little – which means that it is deeply appealing but there’s a tone of evangelical privilege to so many of the shows and books. It doesn’t need to be this way!
Also, I lived on a boat for awhile as both child and grown up – DEFINITELY more fun when your parents aren’t 6 feet away at all times. But if teenaged me had had the option of living semi-independently in my own damn tiny house next door, that would have been a dream come true.
Ha; you just reminded me of this totally self-absorbed know-it-all guy I know, who is very into tiny portable homes and has utter disdain for anyone who would choose an apartment. So some woman actually married him, and they had kids, and they lived on a boat. And he went to work all the time downtown, while she was a stay-at-home mom on a boat with a baby and a toddler, and their boat toilet wasn’t working so the restroom up at the marina was their only toilet, and then their refrigerator stopped working, too, and he thought she was being really whiny and difficult because she wanted to move to an apartment and why couldn’t she just embrace his superior vision of “their” dream lifestyle?
Wow he was a real winner huh?
Ugh, he sounds like the vile, dumpster living professor of Austin. Google him only if you have liquor on hand.
And she divorced him, right? RIGHT?
I can think of lots of reasons I wouldn’t want to live in a tiny house (sex-space being rather low on that list), but I admit they appeal to the part of my brain that is convinced that I’m taking up too much space, and tend to be in other people’s way. I’ll just be in my tiny house not bothering anyone! No one has to look at me or talk to me if they don’t want to! Ha-ha, there isn’t even room to look at another person in here.
Though I know that if I ever did end up on my own with a tiny house, at some point, when I least expected it, someone would appear out of nowhere and elbow me out of my bed nook with an annoyed, “Excuse ME.”
It’s a little scary how much I feel this comment. I just keep moving into progressively smaller spaces, like Brown Recluse Spider-Man, until I guess the last one, which will come with a sod roof.
ok I know what you really meant by sod roof, but all I can think of now is having a hobbit house. I think Bag-end is a pretty respectable model for a house.
Do they make tiny house mortgage bonds? Because just judging from this discussion, in five to ten years there are going to be SO MANY tiny houses on the market.
EDIT: So, it turns out that the maximum length of time for tiny house loans is like seven years. Never mind.
It depends on the square footage and the state. It’s possible to get financed for up to 23 years in my state. I totally back you’re decision to profit from the tiny house bubble.
A lot of people are building them in areas where they’re technically illegal, so who knows WHAT could happen! It’s an exciting time.
I haven’t read this yet because I needed to scroll down right now and say that I’ve been thinking this FOR YEARS. Thank you, Jaya, for validating my weird thoughts about why tiny houses will drive the couples who live in them apart.
And now off to read!
Yup, I’m too old for this shit. If I’m gettin’ down it’s on a big comfy bed with lots of head room. These old bones and joints are OVER the “furtive bang on the floor” shit, plus! What about the next day? When you’ve got to walk over and fix meals over and sit over and just GENERALLY HOVER OVER YOUR ERSTWHILE BANG SITE?
Erstwhile bang site. Dying
#GoodBandNameBadFirstDate
When I was in college, I moved to a different dorm after a month due to many and various issues with my roommate. Because it was a month late, they were out of the loft beds for my particular dorm, so they gave me the loft bed for a different dorm, which had much higher ceilings. So I had about a foot between my bed and the ceiling. I spent the first month in my new dorm with a perpetual lump on my head from trying to sit up when my alarm went off, and my elbows were perpetually scraped from me rolling over in the night and hitting them on the ceiling. Never even attempted to have sex up there, because I could not see another person even being able to fit up there with me. Why would anyone pay to live, permanently, in that kind of situation?
I stayed in a holiday apartment in Amsterdam once which was similar to the fifth picture down. Stairs (not a ladder, thank goodness) to a sort of mezzanine/gallery with partition walls that didn’t reach the ceiling. There were two beds up there and a bathroom that FACED THE TOP OF THE STAIRS AND HAD NO DOOR. It was like a nightmare. The main living area was completely open-plan and had a curtained four-poster in the middle of it; my partner and I slept there and our friends slept in the mezzanine. If any of that had been clear from the advert I would not have booked it*. No tiny houses for me (and no open-plan living. I like closed doors between me and other people).
(In further tales of misadvertised holiday lets, I just booked somewhere on Airbnb which was listed as a “whole property” rental and said it had one bedroom. Email from the owner: “I may
stay over on the Tuesday night but won’t get in your way!”. Cue complete meltdown on my part. Apparently there was an unmentioned second bedroom. Who does that?)
What? Noooooo! That is totally worth a meltdown. So not okay.
I have since cancelled, got my money back and booked somewhere else (somewhere where the owner will not be present), so it’s fine, but argh. I went into a total panic just thinking about HAVING TO SHARE SPACE WITH A STRANGER, OH NO WILL I HAVE TO WEAR MY PYJAMAS IN FRONT OF HIM? My partner will be with me, so it wouldn’t have been a question of being alone with him – I was much more concerned with awkwardness than danger – but I don’t want to have to make awkward small-talk with a 60-something male stranger on my holiday. That is not relaxing.
Tiny House Hunters: This can only end in murder-suicide
Also, speaking of house shows – would anyone pay to take a walking tour in Boston/Cambridge of the houses on This Old House and then get to hear a curated selection of the best youtube comments? Because I’m thinking this IT thing just doesn’t have legs and I might do that. /jk
SIGN ME THE FUCK UP
We have already found this one on a two+ hour walking journey.
Highlights:
Episode 2:
At 23:34 the fine patron of cube architecture must have exerted himself too hard and fell down. Awkward recovery follows and stance follows as they wrap up the episode. Later on we realize he just isn’t sure what to do with his hands when on camera
Episode 5:
village carpenter: Should have had some caps on that rebar!
Patrick Henry: Why didn’t the rebar in your footings have caps on them?
[In case you missed how important this is] Patrick Henry: Why didn’t the rebar in your footings have caps on them?
afh7689: Where are the safety caps for all those rebar ends! ?!?
Episode 6:
ganymedeIV4: Everyone on the previous episode was talking s**t about them not using re-bar caps.
rvz77: Man there are a lot of weird people in Cambridge!
I love, *love* that the family who was in that episode actually found the post, registered their dismay, and posted a link to their blog: http://tinyhousefor6.com/. And now we get to see how that horrible crawlspace worked out.
Which is: not bad looking, but definitely still too short.
The downstairs of that house turned out pretty nice, and I wouldn’t mind living there. The loft isn’t as terrible as a lot of tiny house lofts, but I would still HATE a “bedroom” I couldn’t stand up in.
DO IT PLEASE.
Oh my God, reading that link made me want to murder the parents and buy the kids their own apartments.
I live in a bizarre little apartment (with a delightful landlady!) that is similar in weirdness and size to a tiny house (I have a four-foot-high “bedroom” area that is four feet off the ground), and the only reason it works for me as a living space is because I am a) short b) young and c) able-bodied. The slightest injury and I’d be screwed.
Yep! My friends live in a cool apt that has a real bedroom, and then their 4-year-old’s bedroom has a ceiling that’s about 5′ tall. Children LOVE it. They clearly can’t rent there forever.
Has this open letter to tiny house hunters been posted yet? http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2016/04/05/an-ope…
Apologies if it’s a repeat, but I laughed a bunch while reading and it seems relevant here. He talks a LOT about the bathroom situation in tiny houses, which is another area that is rich for exploration.
I laughed until my nose hurt at that. “Sure, go ahead and buy a whole fucking island but if you’re not building a villain cave I just don’t understand you.”
Bless you for posting this, I am dying right now.
“Yes, that is a tiny closet, and it will hold no more than the suit or dress in which they will bury you.”
I watched some of Tiny House Hunters, hoping to feel superior to smug hipsters who weren’t thinking their real estate choices all the way through. But a good 85% of the house hunters are clearly just people/the show trying to put a positive spin on not being able to afford a regular sized house. “Simple living! Cut down on complications!” just doesn’t sound convincing from episode after episode of teachers who couldn’t afford housing near their jobs, underemployed millennials, parents with multiple kids currently living with grandparents– I mean, there’s no way that teacher who moved into an actual windowless garden shed was doing that because he craved a “simpler” life.
Honestly, yeah, I think that’s the real reason the tiny house craze started when it did. The idea of owning a house-shaped freestanding structure, even an impractically tiny one, is an appealing dream when you’re stuck miles away from work/in your parents’ house/in a crappy apartment in an expensive city.
How many of these tiny house people are buying their tiny houses in the middle of the woods? Because maybe that’s their thing, having sex out in the woods. I mean, it takes all kinds.
Hi, I’ve had sex in a tiny house. (DID YOU KNOW there is a Tiny House HOTEL in Portland? Of course there is.) It was FINE, but missionary is not my jam and that’s when I decided I did not want to buy a tiny house after all. Plus: having to climb down the ladder to pee after. Nah.
Thank you for sharing your experience you are a true hero.
(Also of-fucking-course there is)
Of course there is a tiny house hotel in Portland. I have just given myself 5 minutes of cynical joy in looking at their website. Thank you.
Though their quilts get an A+.
Tiny House shows are my new hate-watch. As someone who can barely get out of bed without giving it serious thought beforehand (no disability, just a very tall and clumsy airhead), I watch these shows and scream, “Really? Try scuttling down that ladder when you have to poop like crazy!”
You also cannot fart in a tiny house. It would become a tiny gas chamber. No Mexican food for tiny house inhabitants!
LOL now I’m clicking through the blogroll from a tiny house website and on about 3/4 of them, the most recent post is about deciding to sell move out of the tiny house, because it just wasn’t working out but don’t worry you guys, we learned a lot from the process and it was still really spiritual and etc.
Bridget Jones Buys A Tiny House
Mr. Bitters and I live in a 1300-s.f. ranch, which is not Tiny by Tiny House standards but still pretty small by large suburban house standards. The bedrooms are small, but still big enough to fit regular-size beds, with regular bed frames and regular mattresses that are delightful for Evening Activities. So, Tiny House People, there’s that.
i am very content in my 650 sq/ft apartment (i was originally apprehensive about upgrading from my 450 but all is well in OCD Land) and i will never stop wanting a tiny house BUT TO BE FAIR…
1) i have no plans to live anything other than *alone* (i may have cats someday but that day is not now).
2) when i say tiny house i mean, like, an 800 square foot actual *house*. on a foundation. with plumbing and closets and, you know, all the usual house stuff.
3) i have no intention whatsoever of having a loft anything. i won’t even live on a second floor walkup as it is because: fuck stairs! (let alone ladders).
Now this sounds perfect.
I think the original tiny house people were like this, or maybe like this but mobile, and then the hipsters came and ruined it like usual. I remember small houses and cabins being a Thing in sustainability circles a while ago but then capitalism reappropritated the concept into Tiny House Lifestyle.
I 100% had a room like this at university and can attest to the fact that there is NOTHING more un-sexy than trying to cajole a half cut lover up a ladder. And then banging your head on the ceiling. It does not a romance make.
My little brother used to live in a converted garage in Berkeley (of course) that had a mattress shelf under the roof like several of these do. And he had a girlfriend at the time.
I, um, am thus finding this whole question quite … disturbing, I think, is the word I want here.
As Geico told us 10 years ago, the best response to sex in tiny houses is “Oh, are you kidding me?!?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXKqdi0Wp0E
You guys, my boyfriend currently lives in a room so tiny that we had to get a loft bed because otherwise you couldn’t open the door. Can confirm that loft bed sex = many unforeseen problems. We are considering modifying a (tiny) room in my barn for me to live in, partially (maybe even mostly?) for sex-having and privacy reasons. Why not live in a bigger place, you ask? We are poor millennials.
I get that this whole tiny house thing is annoying and pretentious, but there are actually people out there who are doing this because everything else is unaffordable! (But mainly I just want to say yes to the difficulties of sex in tiny loft spaces.)
I’m considering insulating and then living in my friend’s cagibi* over the winter, so I definitely feel you on the poor millennial problems. And I will probably have to build a loft, but on the plus side I will pay only $50 rent per month and I’ll get a bike shop in my bedroom.
*montrealese for “large enclosed structure on a balcony that functions like a shed for the third floor tenant and is also the roof access”
“You try something a little rougher one night…” Haha one night. What took so long?
In my dirtbag years, my boyfriend and I traveled around for awhile in a very old 18-foot camper. It was indeed a tiny house. I think we had sex like 4 times the whole trip. Never again.
“In my dirtbag years” is going to start so many of my sentences from now on…
A coworker of mine lives in a …250 sf? house she built in the middle of the woods, with her wife, their dog, their cat, and a small wood stove (I mention the stove simply because it takes up floor space, and therefore might as well be another person). We are reliably informed that plenty of sex happens in this house, as well as out in the woods.
Woods sex is great though.
Yet another cultural phenom I was unaware of until reading the toast.
It reminds me of this documentary I saw about the architect Philip Johnson’s estate. He designed a tiny house for himself (The Glass House) and then just kept building more tiny houses with different functions.
Iirc, in the documentary he said something about of course he didn’t have sex in the glass house, that’s what the brick house was for.
I’m delighted to know other people are yelling the exact same things as me at tiny house hunting shows.
Also, I live in Japan and can’t constantly direct House Hunters into my face at a steady stream like I want so I occasionally buy seasons on Amazon. The seasons are not consistently listed at ALL nor are their prices consistent. Some seasons will be 5 episodes for 24.99 while others are 20 for 15.99! It’s a mess.
In an attempt to get a season of Tiny House Hunters with the most episodes for the least money, I accidentally bought the knock-off show Tiny House Hunting. The houses are overall less tiny and the people less loathsome, so I enjoyed it despite the weird (DRAMATIC pop song cover) soundtrack choices. Highlight episode was two loud middle aged Jersey women buying a beach house together. I feel like gayness is so often downplayed on HGTV, but they flirted and made jokes about not being straight. I loved them.
I’m watching a THH rightthisseecond about a family of 4 being unplugged AND downsizing from 3,000 to 500(???) square feet to force more Real Family Time and More Playing Outside Time.
watching those parents being forced to occupy their 2 tween boys for 30 minutes whilst stuck inside on a rainy day made me cackle with glee. NOT SO MUCH FUN NOW IS IT?! WHY DON’T YOU WANT YO BOND SOME MORE?!?!
*drinks more wine*
*cackles some more*
I saw that episode. There’s another with 2 guys looking for a place in Michigan or something.
I dunno, like, I want to live conscientiously and have a smaller impact on the earth, but I also get extreme anxiety from not having enough space of my own. After renting increasingly smaller rooms in other people’s houses for years and years and years, I shacked up with my boyfriend in a 990-square-foot condo. In theory, it’s big enough and then some. In practice, I would not mind upgrading. Because every time I go into our spare bedroom and see all the stuff we can’t unpack, I flash back to the last shitty room I was in and kiiiinda freak out a little. Hopefully someday we can empty all those boxes and I’ll be able to breathe easier.
After living in a dorm room with a roommate, renting my own room in a boarding house, getting an apartment with a boyfriend, and finally having my own townhouse…I can’t imagine wanting to giving that up for a tiny house. I don’t need a lot of space, but I do need separate areas to cook, sleep, and poop.
I’m *SO* glad I’m not the only person super concerned about this! I got a steal of a deal on my NYC apartment, because the only reasonable place to put the bed is up on a laddered loft. Literally the first thing I thought was “GOOD THING I’M CELIBATE!!!” Due to this problem, I now have a porch and count as a Very Important Person (next step: becoming friends with other porch-important people, like Jaya).
we lived in a small house the year I was graduating and my son was graduating from high school. The 12 year old and the 9 year old had to share a slant-roofed, no closet bedroom with only a desk to separate them (boy and girl, but the 16 year old had to have his own room. I knew murder would happen.) High schooler would bring his friends over to watch tv and I’d be in my bedroom on the other side of the wall–it was pretty funny, I would pretend I wasn’t there and try not to laugh when they told NSFW jokes (since I had to pretend to be mature as the mom). There was no dishwasher, no room for a table, no kitchen counter, and ONE cabinet. With three kids! I didn’t unpack 2/3 of my stuff for that entire year. No sewing, no knitting, no painting, no anything–all the things that I need to make me calm were just not able to be done. I wrote my thesis on my bed.
Now I have too much house, the college boy doesn’t live here, but my daughter and I can sew, do fimo, plant seeds, knit, have cupboards for craft stuff. I feel totally spoiled, but even so I’m having a hard time trying to find room for the high schooler’s kick bag. So consider myself a completely sprawling crafty person that cannot do minimal–I did live in a barn with all the kids for a summer, we all slept on air beds in a loft, but the whole downstairs was toy/craft/tool heaven, and there were 30 acres to run/bike/swim, and rabbits and baby goats, so that doesn’t really count.
I always wonder about their hobbies… “Where would I put my YARN!”
I have never heard of this tiny house thing before. What it mostly reminds me of is how Torquemada in Nemesis met his wife because her family was the first to live in the new type of house Torquemada’s evil regime had designed using gravity technology. It was a single room with the bathroom on one wall and the kitchen on another, lounge on the ceiling ecetera. It was meant to seem horrible, and it did.
For some reason I find these tiny house shows fascinating and hilarious.
I too have wondered how anyone could have sex. I assumed there was either a lot of oral, floor or reverse cowgirl sex on the “couches”.
You make a good point about the floor. So that only leaves 2 other possible options.
Even if sex in a tiny house is possible for the occupants without kids, what about those with kids??? I’m not talking about the teenagers. And c’mon most of their action is with themselves in the shower.
I don’t care if they think a kid is too young to know what’s happening and if they put up a curtain in the loft. Kids have memories. And I’m sure everyone hears everything in those dwellings.
Not that I have high hopes these kids were going to grow up to be normal anyway. I have yet to see any of the adults buying/building these stupid things with all of their marbles.
Unless you want everything you own to smell like onions and garlic you can’t cook with onions and garlic in a tiny house. So, no tiny houses for me.
Also my boyfriend and I moved out of a 500-ish sq ft one bedroom basement apt this past summer to a significantly larger space (700+ sq ft) and there’s no going back. Having room to move around and places to put things is pretty amazing.
that’s why you have a couch on the main level!
The Portland Tiny House Hotel was used for this hilarious skit on Portlandia… http://www.hulu.com/watch/758264
Oh my god this is all I think about when I see lofted beds, and all I think about when I secretly think that I would like a lofted bed… but I like sex more.
Roxane Gay’s thoughts on THH answer this question: https://twitter.com/rgay/status/71717058625903411…
The only tiny house I would live in is an RV, houseboat or a gypsy vardo: something that is compact because it’s capable of moving from place to place.
And the best part of that would be no loading things into the car and then taking them out and bringing them in, or leaving things at your home. Like, you could park in the library parking lot and return your books right when you finish them!
“Like, you could park in the library parking lot and return your books right when you finish them!”
Okay, you may have just sold me on the tiny house idea.
If you design your own tiny house and you can’t have sex in it it’s your own damn fault.
A sex swing would probably be the funnest idea. Who doesn’t know how to have sex standing up??
If you have kids you probably should build two tiny houses.
If you live in a tiny house you save money there for by the time you are old you can afford old people’s housing.
Converting an old school bus into a tiny house is probably the best idea. You can purchase a bus from an auction for cheap that still runs great and when you need to move you don’t need to pay someone or own a large truck.
I just want to scream, “BUT WHERE DO YOU PUT ALL YOUR BOOKS?”
Having pretty much given up on love and society, I think a tiny house would be perfect for me!
I can just sleep in a drawer or on a shelf in a sunbeam!
It’s finally happened. Cats are commenting on The Toast.
We have a compulsive "deal" shopper who has turned it into a charity. https://frugalitiness.wordpress.com/ is pretty awesome to watch.
Many donated things, particularly clothes end up in poor countries like Haiti where they ruin the local clothing industry because people would rather wear clothes that look American.
A lot of donated objects do end up in landfill, because they are too worn or shabby to resell.
This is brilliant.
I used to, until I saw this flat in Hong Kong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQM7a5Yjp9g
I would fill that big middle partition of his with BOOKS.
(Also, I admit I pretty much must buy ebooks now.)