Tiny home living (small home living), Part 1

The homestead in February.

I've been asked four times this week (twice on Facebook, twice in real life) to share about the "tiny home" my husband and I built. I'm up to the task, excited about sharing even. I love our little slice of paradise. But, I feel the need to preface everything I'm about to say with several very serious disclaimers:

• Ours is just a small home, it's not really a "tiny home". Ours is 600 square feet. And, we have a large-ish travel trailer that we're able to hook up at the drop of a hat for visitors. We also have a nice garage/shop.
• Building a tiny home yourself is not easy. My husband worked on the project full-time for more than 3 months - from site preparation through to certificate of occupancy. And, he's an extremely resourceful guy with many, many years of hands-on work experience.
• Building ANY home yourself is not easy. The home is never "finished". You'll always have a project to complete. You'll always have a part of the house that you want to forget. You'll always have a "failure" of some sort staring you in the face every day. (Most of the failures staring me in the face are my own contributions to the project. For example, I had the bright idea of using paneling instead of painting walls - big mistake. I had the bright idea of using drawers instead of base cabinets in the kitchen - drawers are REALLY hard to get right.)
• Building a tiny home IS really cheap. But you should only try it if you meet the following criteria:
• You have some land
• The municipality/county in which your land is located allows tiny homes. Otherwise, you'll waste a lot of time filing paperwork and getting variances without any guarantee you'll be successful.
• You have a lot of cash
• OR, you have good credit and VERY low credit card balances.
• You have a lot of patience (and emotional resilience) dealing with setbacks and weather delays.
• You have a huge desire for spending your evenings reading a bunch of instructions, construction code and how-to information. Because, let me tell ya', all that previous, hands-on work experience only gets you so far. The second you begin working on an unfamiliar installation such as electrical feeds or on-demand water heaters, all your hands-on work experience goes out the window and it's time to hit the books.
• You have a huge desire to do NOTHING EXCEPT work on your house during your spare time for about a year or more.

Now that I have the disclaimers out of the way, continue to the next post.