How to build a tiny house – In this article, we’ll share out tips on the best way to build a tiny home that is just right for you. Each and every tiny house should be a unique representation of their owner and accommodate your specific needs in terms of living, storage, and amenities.
Read: What is The Tiny House Movement?
1. Visualize
If you’ve made the decision to build a tiny home of your own, now it’s time to come up with a plan. First, take a piece of graph paper and sketch out a couple of ideas including what you want the outside to look like and how many rooms you need.
Create a visual of the size space you wish to live in, and have fun with it! Try building a cardboard version or a digitalized version of what you want and play around with what you think is best for your lifestyle. Visualization is a crucial part of the brainstorming process, but remember, nothing is set in stone just yet. This is your chance to live the life of your dreams.
2. Identify Your Needs
What will you need in order to live the life of your dreams? Do you love to entertain? If so plan your kitchen and living space accordingly. Do you work from home? If you have multiple kids, could they share one room?
Make sure to create an appropriate office space. Remember that space will be very limited, so prioritize your plan. Adapt your tiny house design to your own specific purposes and request your designer to keep your needs in mind when creating the design for you.
3. Windows
When you live in a tiny house, windows will make all the difference. They open up cramped areas allowing natural lighting to extend an opening effect. Without sufficient windows you’ll end up feeling like you live in a box creating a claustrophobic experience. A good rule of thumb is that, as long as they are placed symmetrically in your tiny home, the more windows, the better!
4. Storage
This is why paring down your possession is so important. Look at what you own, decide what’s important to you and plan where to keep it within your new home. By the time you’re done with the minimizing phase, you should actually take measurements of the stuff that is going in your tiny home.
Incorporate those measurements into a storage area within your building plan. Not only will this allow you to organize your space more readily once you move in, you’ll also notice how open your space can feel with the right amount of organization. We’ll go over a wide variety of storage tips and techniques later in this book.
5. Budget
It’s important to consider your budget for building a tiny home before getting the blueprint together. Putting together a brand-new home from scratch is never easy. The materials alone can be quite expensive, and if you don’t have any knowledge of construction it is strongly recommended that you hire professional contractors to help you build your tiny home.
Luckily, even the cost of materials and labor will be a fraction of the price that you might pay for a traditional home. Tiny houses have been built on budgets of $8,000, where there were no labor costs, to upwards of $40,000.
Read: How Much Does it Cost to Build A Tiny House?
Don’t let those figures discourage you if you only have $10,000 and don’t know how to swing a hammer. The great thing about tiny homes is that, not only do they greatly reduce the cost of living, but they can be built on pretty much any budget. Even if you don’t know your way around a toolbox, surely you have friends and neighbors who do. Recycled materials can be used to supplement plenty of store-bought construction materials. As long as you’re creative and believe in yourself, you’ll have the tiny home of your dreams in no time!
6. Building Plan
So by now you have a pretty good idea of what you want your tiny home to look like and how big it is going to be. Unless you have experience in hand drawing your own blueprints, it’s best to find a building plan for your tiny house. This is a guide that will show you each step of building your tiny home, such as building a frame, installing a window, and so forth. Building guides still require some basic construction knowledge, but they are easier for most people to understand than a blueprint.
Tiny Home Design Software
You can also design your own building plan with tiny home design software. There is a lot of home design software programs out there, some free, some cheap, and some very expensive. While professional designers often use AutoCAD, you don’t need anything so serious. The same company offers a free, web-based floor plan design tool. A lot of tiny home designers have found SketchUp to be very useful. SketchUp is a free 3D modeling program that is not difficult to learn. With this software, you can design not only the floor plan but also the full three-dimensional design and details for your tiny house.
Although design software tutorials are available on the internet, if this is an area that you’re having trouble with then feel free to find an expert who has experience producing building plans for tiny homes. Getting a really good building plan together is the most important part of building a tiny home and is definitely not an area where you want to risk any small mistakes, especially considering the amount of time and money you’re about to put in.
The two most important things to remember before you finalize your building plans is to plan for the future and be realistic about the space you need in each room. Even though your final building plan might look good on paper, think long and hard about every measurement before you invest in the decide to start building.
