Woman Lives Contently in Tiny, Tiny Dream House
July 15th, 2007Enemy combatant.
Via: katu:
Talk about down-sizing! One woman is living in a house that you really have to see to believe.
“It’s 84 square feet, so roughly the size of a parking spot. Actually, smaller than a parking spot,” says Dee Williams, who decided it was time to move. She was living in a 1,500-square foot home in Portland, but decided the house wasn’t small enough – yes, small enough!
Dee built the tiny cabin herself out of salvaged material. She picked the door out of a dumpster and retrieved the floors from a house fire. Dee’s new tiny home sits in her friend’s backyard.
“In exchange, I do work on their house,” she says.
It takes Dee five steps, sometimes four, to get from one end of her house to the other.
“Two steps through the kitchen and you’re in my living room. Two steps into the living room, you bang into the wall,” Dee says, laughing.
Two solar panels provide electricity. A tiny propane tank allows Dee to cook in her $10,000 home on wheels. Do her friends think the 44-year-old hazardous waste inspector is crazy?
“My friends definitely thought, well, they had some questions for me!” she says.
The obvious question: Why?
The simple answer:
“A simpler life, time, more money. I don’t have a mortgage. I don’t have a big utility bill,” Dee says.
Her monthly heating bill in the winter is $6, less in the summer.
“I’m able to offer money to my family if they need it, (and to) my friends if they need it,” says Dee.
To get to her bedroom, she walks up a step ladder to her loft.
“Every night I look at the stars and watch it rain over and over again. So this is it. Not much to it,” says Dee.
And that’s the point. Not much to it. Simple. Small. A dream house tinier than a parking spot.
“Right now there’s nowhere else I want to be!”
Related: Defunding Fascists with Asymmetric Economic Warfare, or Being Happy with Less
Related: Farmlet
Related: Tumbleweed Houses (Don’t want to spend thousands? Check out the Mad Housers.)
Thats awesome, what a great story!
There are “affluent” houses here in my town, and neighboring areas, where people, can’t call them families because they haven’t any children living with them… so lets call them “couples”, have built or live in unbelievably huge structures. These edifices are more like castles than a house. My wife and I kept asking ourselves for whom did they build them? Their egos? Now, don’t get me wrong, I believe in the freedom to do as you wish with your money or your property, thats the libertarian in me, and I wouldn’t want someone forcing their “diktats” regardless if they’re green or greedy, but it simply begs the question as to their motivation.
Can’t see anything wrong with that!
Great story indeed.
That is so cool! If something like that were to be mass produced, would anyone buy it?
Forgive my cynicism, but….
..it is my contention that even if we all decided to live in tiny little shoe boxes in order to defund “the man”, they would just find another way to extract their pound of flesh. Please don’t get me wrong, I am definitely all about living simply, and we have paid off our home and are furiously saving every penny we can to have a cushion when the doo-doo inevitably hits the fan, but I won’t live in a cell until they put me there kicking and screaming. 😉
There is an elderly woman in our lake community who has lived in a camper-trailer for years. It’s kind of an interesting story how she came to be there. She was homeless because her house in a neighboring town had burned down. Someone offered to give her the lake lot for free, because they were tired of paying taxes and assessments on it, and she already owned a camper-trailer, which had been sitting on a relative’s property.
She lived in the camper-trailer happily for years, despite our city government’s harassment. Her tiny home was scarcely visible–tucked far back from the gravel road on a heavily wooded lot, surrounded on all sides by other heavily wooded lots.
The city passed an ordinance after she began living in the camper-trailer, making it illegal to live year-round in this kind of domicile. For years, she was able to continue to live there because, obviously, she was “grandfathered in.”
The latest word is that the city has finally succeeded in forcing her to move to a mobile home that she subsequently purchased.
Cities–and even neighbors–are notoriously unfriendly to small and simple living arrangements. The reason: Quite a few residents have ambitions for our little “dogpatch-by-the-lake” community. Nearby lake communities are studded with half-million-dollar homes, and their marinas are studded with (probably) half-million-dollar boats. Why not us? Why can’t our community re-invent itself as a playground for doctors and lawyers–thus sending our property values through the roof?
Well, one reason is because the community is home to quite a few poor people, and the perceived solution is to run them off–with an eye to picking up their property for pennies on the dollar.
It’s been amusing to watch property values in this area plummet, mainly because high gasoline prices have made it far less attractive to live this far out in the country. I’m delighted to see so much connivance and speculation in land deals–often spiced with fraud–come to nothing.
I sometimes think my own dream house would be tiny–though maybe not “camper-trailer” tiny. But the only place it would be legal to live that way would be on an acreage with no restrictions.
Yep, my husband and I–25 years ago–thought about having a house of about less than 200 square feet, but realized that if we had kids that would be too small. So we built our own house roughly 800 square feet which we live in today (well, my husband did 95% of it himself; I just helped raise the walls and put nails in the roof). Raising two kids in a very small house has been quite an experience!
The sad thing is that you see this same developer/tax hike cycle go on and on everywhere. For example, what did “I” do to deserve a rate hike in property taxes for something that is supposedly “paid off”? Just because others want to play the real estate game does it mean I have to suffer? Its absurd that people with no stake in these shennanigans are constantly roped or raped by the system. The burbles vomiting out of the developers mouths always talk about how much good they’re doing for the “community” (read… more tax money for city government to further grow in its bloated self-conceit) even though you’re the one who ends up paying through higher taxes. Some bargain that is! The only way to live cheaply would be to find some place so far out of sight and mind from demographic patterns that you could fly under the radar. To live near any growing city is an invitation for trouble unless you’re looking to tap into that population for business reasons.
I’d like to see more good news/sane individual stories like this
Allowing for the caveats eg she is dependent on her ‘landlords’
Two words….cabin fever.