I have a (tiny) dream

http://www.escapehomes.us/

I can’t remember exactly how, but I stumbled upon the picture above recently. It’s an Escape Homes mobile home. Actually, it’s technically an RV. It’s only around 37sqm (400sqft), but has every luxury you could imagine. The basic model costs only 80K US, and can be upgraded to include things like underfloor heating, stone countertops and vaulted ceilings.

Instantly, I wanted to have one. I have become, it seems, the latest convert to the Tiny House Movement.

There are SO many benefits to living small in this way. These are the main ones for me:

1. You can be completely mobile. You can literally pick up your house and go wherever you like, so long as you like a place with plumbing and electricity. While there are tiny homers who prefer to live off-grid, that’s not the kind of lifestyle this city slicker is after.

2. You simply cannot accumulate clutter. While these homes have plenty of clever storage spaces, you’re not going to be featured on an episode of Hoarders anytime soon.

3. You can own your own home within a couple of years. Or at least, a heck of a lot quicker than you can with a traditional mortgage. Imagine all the hundreds of thousands people spend on homes. And I appreciate big, spacious homes – I do. But the idea of being completely tied to one spot for decades, and shelling out large portions of my wage for all of that time…it’s not what I want to do with my life.

Escape Homes bathroom upgrade

As quickly as I realised this what exactly what I wanted to save towards, the problems became clear as well.

The biggest one of all is that there are so few places to actually park these things. This has been lamented in many of the blogs I’ve been reading recently. Traditional trailer parks don’t mix well with the types of people who are interested in small homes: educated, young, optimistic primary property owners. Trailer parks might be fine, but they have bad reputations.

There are one or two places opening up that are sympathetic to the cause. Spur, Texas has been declared the world’s first Tiny Home town. The Timber House Country Inn Resort in Canada is opening its doors to pre-fab home owners, tiny homers and RV home-makers. The Napoleon Complex (can we all just take a moment to appreciate how clever that name is) is planning on opening in 2015, and bills itself as “Co-housing for the Anti-Social”. And there’s a great proposal by Andy R. Thompson here, which also outlines the reasons it would a great success.

Still, places are few and far between. I don’t even know what kind of jobs there are in Spur, Texas – but it doesn’t sound like the kind of place desperate for an Internal Communications specialist. In some of the forums, I’ve heard of people finding elderly couples with large plots of land and who need some assistance with things like mowing and gardening. They park their RVs there in exchange for helping with chores. But those sorts of agreements are going to be hard to come across, and also set both parties up for co-dependency – which seems contrary to the Tiny Home Movement mindset to me. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s a nice symbiosis.

Sustain MiniHome via Inhabitat.com

Sustain in Canada have the most amazing mobile tiny homes I have ever seen. Featuring rooftop gardens, storage space for Africa, generously-sized creative floorplans and plenty of deck and loft space, they would be an absolute dream to live in. My dream.

Once again, the problem is only where to put them.

I think the world is working on this. It has several years while I first ween myself off spending and then start pulling the money together to buy one.

Come on, developers, jump on the tiny bandwagon!

Header Image Photo Credit: thewhitestdogalive via Compfight cc