Tiny House: Interior Design Ideas

Folding table that doubles as wall art: click here for website

that table idea is SO awesome, and looks quite easy to make.  we won’t have room for it in this Tiny House because our wall heater is where a table would need to fold up, but a really great idea.  (is it just me, or does it look like the girl in the photo above has a giant picture of herself for wall art?!  funny.)

I love this wood and white look:

and here’s a plywood interior:  (a little more plywood than we could handle, but these wall and ceiling finishes would work in a tiny, mobile house because of their inherent flexibility)

here’s more Plywood! this time plywood walls AND floors:

It looks like a metal ceiling, like a shipping container, but corrugated metal roofing panels could be used for a modern tiny house ceiling finish.  the acoustics might be bad, but that could be accommodated with textiles in curtains or seating, or with cork flooring.

we’ve been obsessed with trying to use plywood in our design, but it’s actually quite expensive.  (AC grade or sanded plywood is $45 to $50 a sheet for a decent thickness.)

this is an open shelving design that looks pretty stunning with the green accent wall:

would love to see a tiny house with color in it!  but my tendency is definitely toward white…  I feel like it must be white and light and bright with almost NO texture in order to feel bigger…  the good thing with a tiny house is that you can paint and re-paint and re-paint again with very little paint and money spent!

would love to hear about any tiny house interior design ideas you all might have…

take care,

Carrie

Tiny House Design: color palettes and sketches

I wanted to give a long overdue update on the design process of our new Tiny House.  Though we did work out the plan and do a 3D model of the project prior to building, it’s definitely a design-build project.  We’re letting things like exterior and interior wall cladding and materials work themselves out as we go.  But!  I like to have a concept, even though it keeps changing.

We started the design process by sketching plans to scale on grid paper, then I built a sketchup model.  (well, I built a trailer park of sketchup models!)  Then I printed images and sketched over them to determine window placement and exterior siding options.  Then I drew the plan and elevations in AutoCAD so we’d have some dimensions.  Though the plan is so simple, we don’t actually have any drawings on site.

Here’s our plan:

The total area inside is 162 SF, not including the closet space under the bed platform.  Here are a few sketches of the exterior showing cladding options:

Option: Hardie panel exterior siding in 4'x8' sheets

Option: Rainscreen with 12" wood planks

Option: Rainscreen with varied height wood planks

Our current plan is to go with the 12″ high wood plank rainscreen system.  Sort of modern, and the material is $1/sf, so not too expensive.  Also it is much lighter than the Hardie panel siding, which lists as 2.6 lbs. per SF!  whoa.  We joked about doing strawbale walls… but the interior would have been 4′-0 wide after deducting the 24″ wide straw bales.  haha.  Because Tiny Houses are portable and built on a trailer foundation they don’t seem great candidates for natural earth building techniques like rammed earth, earthbag, strawbale, cob, or adobe.  So, another way to be environmentally sensitive is to use small amounts of conventional construction materials – and tiny houses only use small amounts of everything, instantly minimizing their carbon (and literal) footprint.  Another way to be “sustainable” is to use high-tech materials that are recycled, recyclable, rapidly renewable, or durable to minimize the need to replace or maintenance them.

Enough about that.  Here are the two finish palettes we arrived at:

This first one is more rustic and would utilize wood reclaimed from a tornado:

This second palette (the one we’re planning on) is more modern, using locally available materials that are inexpensive:

We’ll keep you posted on what materializes (ha).  And if you’re looking to purchase a custom built tiny house from Clothesline Tiny Homes, we have many more options and are ready to start the design-build process with you!