Nine Tiny Feet

Here are more drawings of the Nine Tiny Feet design. The interior is 78″ high (6 1/2′), the sleeping loft is 34″ by 76″ and extends over the porch. The bay windows server double duty as windows and space for small cabinets to hide away plumbing and the 12V DC cooler.

I still need to think through how the  trap door to the loft will work and the vent for the fireplace (not pictured here) which will sit in front of one of the bay windows. I think there is enough room for the stack to vent out the bay window roof. If that doesn’t work I may put if over the toilet/chair.

I’ve made a few scale models from cardboard as the design has evolved. I’ll make a new one with these revised dimensions and post photos of it next. 3D drawings help visualize the space too but I find old school hot glue and cardboard does a much better job.

Now that I have a tiny trailer for my tiny nine square foot house I need to change the design slightly. It shrank in width six inches to fit between the fenders of the tiny boat trailer and got a little longer to keep it at just under nine square feet. I also added a couple inches to the sleeping loft that spans the house and porch.

One night while falling asleep I was noodling over some stuff I’d been reading about the tiny house movement. I had just finished reading Jay Shafer’s tiny house books while on a business trip to Santa Monica. Living in a smaller space sure was making a lot of sense to me, reduced maintenance cost, easier to clean, more time to do the things with the people I love.

But then I wondered how small could a house be and still meet most of the basic requirements, bed, bath, kitchen, work space, lounge space, etc. Like I said I was lying in bed so I imagined how much space I took up lying in bed. That seemed like a good starting place because who would want to sleep standing up? I’m six feet tall and about two feet wide in some places and one foot wide in others. I guessed about nine square feet would be the starting place and then I’d add on square feet for the other stuff. About that time REM took over and I crashed.

But in the morning when I started to draw a picture of the nine square feet required for sleeping I realized that maybe I didn’t need any more space if I added a loft and bay windows. These spaces are not normally included in square footage calculations so it seemed fair to add them and keep my official square footage to nine square feet.

After several concepts and foam core models I landed on this design. I’ll share more of the design as I refine the idea but as you can see the interior floor measures 40″ X 32″ which is actually 16 square inches less that nine square feet (1296 square inches). There is a big porch in front and the sleeping loft extends over both the porch and house under a 24:12 pitched roof (not pictured here). The toilet I’ve select is a small composing toilet used in small sail boats called the Air Head. A seat would cover the toilet when not in use. The refrigerator is a 12V DC cooler made by Koolatron. They make bigger models but I like the P20′s exterior dimensions. The kitchen bay window would also contain a sink and stove. In the opposite bay window a Dickinson Marine fireplace (like the one Jay Shafer uses in his Tumbleweed houses), would be used for heat. Storage will be minimal but I suspect I’ll add in some cabinets once I get started in building it. Electricity will be from solar panels.

I plan to build the Tiny Free House first and then move onto this project. But this project will brew on the back burner all the while and I’ll post design progress as I make it.

OH… WHY?

No I don’t intend to live in it. Building something like this will be an interesting journey and I plan to use it as a home office some or all of the time. I may also use the Tiny Free House as an office too, I just haven’t decided. The other reason is to show people how small, small can be. I’m beginning to develop a theory that nine square feet is all we really need and that every square foot after that is for added comfort, vanity, or people.

So the short version… I’m building a nine square foot house to explore the possibility to satisfy my own curiosity and explore my own values. If successful I hope it will act as a tool to help other people see that the least is the most.