I Meet The Tiny House of My Dreams

The first thing that struck me about the tiny house of my dreams was that it was really tall and I hoped it would work okay in the space I had in mind. The second thing that struck me was that inside the house that very same height was what would save my sanity. Having space overhead made things feel spacious.













In person the texture and variegated color of the reclaimed walls also helped dispel the feeling of being in a box.

When I met the builders John and Phil I realized that they were not tiny house people in the

progressive hippie sense. They were small town people with working class just-do-it sensibilities. John was the business minded entrepreneurial negotiator who worked the flea market at Santa Cruz. Phil was a roofer. Both were dads who had in mind to build a vacation home they could park on a friend's land and take their families to. It took them a year and a half to build it and then the friend sold the land so they decided they had to sell the tiny house. They had not begun work on the inside except to put in electricity and lights. I felt better after hearing that they had built it for a specific purpose and it was perfect that it was essentially just a shell because the only reason a tiny house can work, especially one this tiny is if it is custom fit. 

I was glad I took my carpenter friend Tim to look at the house with me because he asked all the technical questions about how the walls were held together. Phil especially was enormously proud of his work and was eager to explain to Tim how the shingles used for the siding and the trouble he had taken to install them would insure that the siding would last a long, long time. Tim said he wouldn't have let me buy it if he didn't think they'd done a good job though he did think I could have bargained a bit more, but I had already made up my mind that I wanted it and  so I wanted their goodwill in case I needed anything in the future. We arranged for delivery in two weeks and they would make sure it was level and would be okay where it was parked.