I’m overdue for an updated blog! The Tiny House we started at the July build we had here at the Sanctuary, is starting to take on its personality, with the bulk of the outside being finished. As you can see from the photo, we decided to build the house with the trailer hitch at the FRONT of the house at the suggestion of Daniel Bell, the instructor at the build. It has become a very positive decision which has helped us come up with some neat options for the front deck. Some of the deck sections are removable for transporting. The best advantage is that we can now back our Tiny House into its location rather than pulling it through. Many locations just don’t have the room for pulling your truck out once you’ve got the house where you want it. We put in the skylights and, although they can be expensive, they really add a sense of more room to the sleeping loft. We used steel roofing with hidden fasteners, which was my first experience installing and was really quite simple. At some stores, you can order your steel cut at the exact length you need so there is very little cutting. We were contacted by the Minneapolis Home and Garden Show ( http://homeandgardenshow.com/ ) , which is a huge deal here in Minnesota every year. They are going to have the front foyer of the Minneapolis Convention Center be a display of Tiny Houses! They will have 5 tiny houses on display (including ours) and will be landscaping them so it feels like a village. Over 100,000 people attend this annually and we expect a lot of questions about tiny houses and our village. Speaking of our village, things are moving along and we have been in touch with many potential residents and some that probably won’t work out. A lot of people have different reasons for wanting to live tiny, which may or may not fit in our village. Some people want to live in a tiny house but want a huge garage next to it….um…no. Some want the hookups that RV’s are used to being provided with, but as of now, our village will offer a nice secluded spot in nature with one 15 amp electrical wire to plug into. We are looking for about 6 permanent residents (in which some have been filled) in our village, and we are now considering having a couple of houses outside of the village for people to rent short term to “try out” Tiny Housing. Our plan is to have The Sanctuary offering community space and amenities that some tiny houses may not have (like laundry) and tools that can be used by the community. This whole idea evolves daily so who knows what tomorrow will bring? We recently had a Tiny House meet-up here with about 35 people coming up here to visit. It went great! I strongly encourage anyone in the area who is interested in the Tiny House Movement to join the meet-up!
http://www.meetup.com/Tiny-House-Mpls-Saint-Paul/