Planning The Tiny House Layout

Now comes the fun part. Designing the tiny house layout. When my future host came to visit the tiny house she commented that it looked like a tiny Zen Buddhist meditation hall. She calculated that it could fit 20 meditating practitioners if the loft was also used. I was inspired by this image and decided to photograph myself inside the house meditating. The result made the interior look quite small.













But when I measured the actual space and laid it out on grid paper I could see that the space would fit everything I needed including my red desk which had been my command center for 20 years so I was quite attached to it. Luckily it was very small, only four feet wide by two feet deep.

It was my professional philosophy as an organizer that if you kept a very small desk, things would fall off it before you were truly able to pile it beyond the point of overwhelm. The point of overwhelm being the tipping point between function and chaos. My red desk was the first tiny house furniture I marked out on my grid paper along with the rocking stool I used with it. (What ADHD clients use to provide a sense of movement in order to stay focused.)

I had not had any qualms about being able to fit inside a tiny house because I had been living tiny all along in my one room in my ex partner's house. This 10 x 12 room contained everything I needed for all my many hobbies. In fact having a loft essentially increased my living space to two rooms because I could sit up in the loft easily and having only a single bed would allow me all kinds of room for storage. My chief worry was having enough book shelf space.

I also needed a workshop space and was able to negotiate with my step mother to use her garage where my father had built himself an impressive wall length work bench filled with drawers and there was even a small closet that was going unused she let me have. In return I took away all my father's old books and papers that were stored in the garage storage room as well as a huge old TV and anything else she wanted to get rid of. I was satisfied that I was keeping up my end of the exchange. Meanwhile I was cutting bottle brush at my future parking space.

At night I would sketch on my grid paper changing things constantly and researching options. My tiny house instructor had talked about the brain fatigue of having to make so many decisions about every little detail. Granted I didn't have to build from the ground up. But because I had done so much of this decision making practice in my mock tiny house project and had done space planning and problem solving for my clients storage spaces I found this planning to be stimulating and exciting. Sometimes a new idea would keep me awake for hours into the night and I had to stop looking at Pinterest right before bedtime if I wanted to get any sleep at all.