Photos and cover image courtesy Blue Rider Press, The Big Tiny, copyright 2014
Dee Williams, of Portland Alternative Dwellings, leads workshops focused on tiny house design and construction. "I used to have a three-bedroom bungalow with a nice yard and massive windows that looked out at the gardens," says Dee. She sold her Portland home ten years ago, ordered plans from Tumbleweed, built an 84 sf house on a truck trailer, drove it to Olympia, Washington, and parked it in a friend's backyard.
She initially discovered tiny house building from a magazine article about Jay Shafer, who designs tiny homes. "I went to the library and researched how other people had done this; I looked at gypsy wagons, covered wagons, travel trailers, and RVs," Dee writes in her book The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir (Blue Rider Press). "I'd imagined I was perfectly suited for building a house. I just needed the right how-to books and the proper tools." She built it in about 3 months for $10,000, half of which was for the materials (mostly salvaged) and the other half for the low-e windows and the solar electric system.
Dee, Jay and Derek Diedricksen are among an increasing number of people choosing to construct their own tiny dwellings--the small house movement includes those seeking to reduce their living space and save on labor costs while developing construction skills in the process. Micro building can be for a house, guesthouse, studio, or office and these structures generally occupy between 100-400 sf.
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