Tiny House in Place on Our New Land

Friday we placed a concrete pad for the Tiny House on our new land and this week we moved the house onto it’s new slab.  The tiny house will be used as a guest house and is now connected to sewer (flushing toilet!  hooray!)

The front entry courtyard with the tiny house in place.

We obscured the view of the gooseneck hitch with a dry-stacked CMU wall that can be disassembled when we want to move the tiny house.  Shane will add a little shed roof over this masonry wall and it will be outdoor storage area and there will be a wall connecting the main house to this masonry wall.

The south side of our new house and the tiny house entry.

The tiny house is an integral part of our new house design – we were able to make our new house smaller (only 1 BR 1 BA) because the tiny house will serve as a Guest House.  It also blocks wind and creates an outdoor courtyard shielded from the adjacent road to the west.

In the photo above you can also see our hot water solar panels in place!  These will heat our domestic hot water and radiant floors.

We ended up orienting the Tiny House with it’s entry facing away from the main house entry because the views were better from inside the tiny house – we wanted the full height windows in the Tiny House living room to look at the mountains to the east, not the road to the west.  It’s more private inside the tiny house this way.

Really amazing views from inside the tiny house.

The tiny house is connected to water, sewer, and electric and we’ll be moving into it at the end of September while we finish the inside of our main house.

Tiny House (un)Progress: Nervous Breakdown

Hello everyone!  today is a much better day than yesterday.

I am a huge fan of honesty and transparency, so I want to tell you all about the emotional breakdown(s) and arguments of yesterday… but, because this is going out into the world, and this is our blog for a business of  making tiny homes for others… I’ll just give you the highlights.

These quotes pretty much sum it up:

• “I wish I would have a real tragic love affair and get so bummed out that I’d just quit my job and become a bum for a few years, because I was thinking about doing that anyway. ” – Jack Handey
• One can go faster.  Two can go farther. – Unknown

Tiny cut: Big Hand Splint

Yesterday I was starting the siding at the bottom for the plumber so we can install the water bib. I installed the bottom Z bar and was putting on the siding next to the wheel wells for a nice tight fit when my knuckle hit the Z bar. Then it cut so deep that I was able to see the knuckle bone. I was going to do my own stitches but thought  better and called Carrie for a rescue to take me into the ER. After the Dr. took a look he noticed the I also lacerated the extensor tendon. I also had to get x-rays to see if I hit the bone, which I did not but very close.

So now I have to go to a hand surgeon to get it repaired (Friday). So this is going to slow down things but we shall keep moving forward.

– Shane

Second Step – Sewage system.

It’s a fact of life, isn’t it?  that we create waste?  Well, in planning out this Tiny House I just wasn’t super excited about hauling around 55 gallons of septic waste, and then finding somewhere to put that ____…  “Say, is that your sewer clean-out there?  Would you mind if we just connected this hose?  Or worse, somehow filling a bucket with waste and then manually transporting it somewhere.  True, if we stayed in RV parks it’d be no problem, just plug in and forget about it, like we’ve always done.  But we’re in our thirties, not our sixties, so we’re planning to try to stay on someone’s land or in someone’s large yard, rather than a commercialized park.  I also feel a bit of a cringe when I think about traditional sewer systems – contaminating our drinking water.  doesn’t seem brilliant.  but it is so clean and so odorless.

So, the options:

– a 5 gallon home depot bucket with a toilet seat and some sawdust inside.  (which poses the same problem of asking our hosts if they’d mind if we just started a little human waste pile out back by their kids’ playground.  “don’t worry, it just takes a year!”)  I would totally do this if I had my own land, because it’s free, and it creates compost.

– a Clivus Multrum or other similar composting toilet

– or an Incinolet incinerating toilet

we ended up finding this beauty only a mile away here in Prescott:

It’s an Incinolet incinerating toilet, which are normally $1800 or so (what?!) but we got this for less than half price.  So, no sewer system required, no tanks, no fresh water needed to process our sewage.  It turns it into ash.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

we’ll let you know how it goes…  😉