It ended up costing ~$50k (not counting labor) and took a year to build, and they sold it for $115k. The cabin looks phenomenal. I wonder how a tinyhome would compare in cost and features?
back
6 comments
I don't really get the tiny home fixation some people have. If it's a move towards minimalism, fine, but I don't think it's a practical cost cutting measure if we're talking about rural properties.
The reason I say this most of the costs in rural homes have little to do with house size. My septic, well, electricity, tractor + attachments, mower, etc. and the piles of tools I need are all fixed costs that have little to nothing to do with my house size. Likewise my municipal taxes are based on assessment value which in large part is lot size and location.
And many municipalities and townships have rather tight restrictions on what can be built and where, and many of the ad-hoc tiny homes may not meet them.
Living in the country looks simpler to people in the city than it is. It is often very very expensive no matter how low the actual land value cost is.
There's a lot of "tiny houses" that technically don't qualify as an accommodation in various ways, like not having a foundation.
What you're currently seeing is the evolution of the movement to be more photogenic. The OG tiny homes were a (successful) attempt at running around laws about home construction in previously extremely rural areas that now have zealous code enforcement. If it's not technically a house you save a load of money not just in taxes but also permit, inspection, utility, and insurance costs. As a bonus sometimes you can move your living space.
There are often plots of land for sale that will fit just under an RV and may or may not have utilities running to them. The kind of person to buy a lot like that, maybe $1000 total, was the person originally looking at building a tiny house.
Best I can tell, tiny homes are mostly just very expensive, more-instragrammable Mobile homes, kit-prefabs (A-frames, say), or RVs (depending on how they're built) for people whose class-self-image would be threatened by living in a Mobile home, RV, or prefab. It's not about cost-cutting.
There's a lot of sanity saving aspects of living in a tiny house versus a travel trailer. However a lot of people would in fact be better served living in a fifth wheel trailer, both in terms of space, cost, time investment, and ability to transport/park it places.
For me, it is being off-grid. No $300 bi-monthly water/sewer bills (that's base charge w/o using any water). $7k - 10k in property taxes yearly. Huge heating and cooling costs for large living spaces.
I do not especially like tiny houses on wheels, but I think I could live comfortably in an 800sf small house on a rural piece of land.
I can you that the amortized cost of a septic system could easily work out to $300 bi-monthly over a decade or two. Managing your own sewer is not trivial or inexpensive.
For me, the tank plus installation was almost $10k CAD, and then the septic field itself would probably run between $30k and $50k CAD. So to be generous we could say $50k total for the full install. So that's about 8 years at $300 bimonthly just to pay it off. And you'll need to get it pumped every 3-4 years depending on tank size (a couple hundred bucks). And the field won't last forever, so in about 25-30 years probably looking at major repairs or even replacement of the field.
Then we get to the well... Also not inexpensive to install... But varies a lot depending on bedrock depth, etc. But probably $20k to install. And then you'll probably want water filtration... because do you trust your neighbour's septic systems? :-)
Yeah, septic and well are definitely not something you do to save money. They're things to do because you can't get water or septic at a location.
My water bill in the city would more than pay off the well in 10 years, including all the power to run the pump (not much) wells should last for many years with just the pump replaced every 20 years. Likewise septic is cheaper than city sewer over 10 years. Of course my city lot doesn't have a place to put either ( I want a safe non polluting system, compromise that and it works out)
My overall point is... let's dispense with the libertarian yeoman self-sufficient fantasy: if you want to save money, live in the place where economies of scale have been achieved... towns. People have been doing it this way since the neolithic.
Should you really like nature and having space and big gardens and farming and the like, then be prepared to pay for it.
I find the opposite : towns are more expensive. Towns have libraries, and other nice things that might or might not be worth the cost.
How are those things paid for? Property and sales taxes, neither of which you save by not living in town?
Lots of tiny house owners don’t have septic, I’ve seen use composting toilets as a common option as well as incinerating toilets. Definitely more work, but way more appealing then storing tons of waste in an underground tank.
Not sure how they fare long term, but the septic isn’t the only option if you don’t have sewer available.
What a sensible minimum size is depends on the use of course, but at some point, you're giving up a dedicated library/office, room to entertain, a spare bedroom, room to put up guests, storage, a nice kitchen, etc. You don't need all that of course and I'm not suggesting most people really benefit from having a 5,000 square foot house. But at some point, the house starts to seem cramped and you're not really saving all that much cost. Even 1500 square feet versus 400-500 square feet is enormous in terms of usability.
At least in Germany, afaik, it is partly a building code thing. Afaik, it counts as a mobile home, so you don’t need permission to build it, even if you never intend to move it.
A lot of rural districts in North America explicitly forbid mobile homes _because_ they don't want people coming in and screwing up the land values and communities with shacks and trailers and temporary houses.
I suspect most of their ordinances also apply to "tiny homes"
Do you have a good concrete example? I'm aware of no location in the US where tiny homes are forbidden or even RVs. Laws can't really dictate what you do with your land aside from public safety concerns.
I vaguely remember few cases where people tried to sic the authorities on a tiny home owner and ended up wasting a bunch of money.
> My septic, well, electricity, tractor + attachments, mower, etc. and the piles of tools I need are all fixed costs that have little to nothing to do with my house size.
If your electricity is used for heating/cooling, it likely has a lot to do with your house size.
I built a tiny house on wheels. My house totaled about $55K, due to my preference for premium materials and contracting out work that I did not feel comfortable doing myself (e.g. wiring a 50amp power box).
My house was built to be on grid and could be parked in any trailer park. I could connect to city power, water, natural gas, and sewage.
Off-grid homes are more expensive due to the need to install solar panels, drill wells, bury a giant propane tank, and purchase land.
$50K is honestly one of the cheapest builds I've seen for an off-grid cabin. Their house looks amazing.
> I could connect to city power, water, natural gas, and sewage
How?
I planned to park my house in a trailer park, and purposefully built my house to have the same kind of hookups as an RV or manufactured home.
For power, I installed a 50amp RV-style power inlet to my house. I ran a 50-amp cable from from the power pole to my house.
For water, I was able to connect a standard drinking-water hose from the water line to the inlet into my house.
For natural gas, I ran copper flex tubing from the gas meter to the gas inlet in my house. I ensured that all of my gas appliances had the correct orifices.
For sewer, I drained all of my water fixtures (two sinks, shower, and toilet) through the floor, connected them to a common drain line, and through a sewer hookup below the house.
I thought a lot of trailer parks wouldn't allow something that wasn't built by a certified builder?
How are they going to know? Are you one of those people that thinks people shouldn't be allowed to work on their own car?
Through hookups built into the side of the tiny house.
$65k "profit" not including labor wouldn't seem so bad if they could have worked on it full time and gotten it done in 4-6 months, right? You could certainly live on $60k/yr (split proceeds from selling two of these), once you put in the initial capital to get off the ground. I guess on the pro side, you would assume they'd get better at it as they went along; on the con side, maybe they got lucky with the selling price for this one and it's not a repeatable business process.
The did a seller finance. I suspect the 115k includes "interest" so to speak and that an actual cash buyer would have been lower, maybe closer to their all in cost than the final sales "price".
Your Q reminded me of Frank Lloyd Wright's Pope-Leighey House. The client, Pope, had challenged the famous architect, who to date had built mansions for the super wealthy, to design an affordable house for the everyday American:
"Dear Mr. Wright, There are certain things a man wants during life, and of life. Material things and things of the spirit. The writer has one fervent wish that includes both. It is a house created by you."
Wright delivered. It's a beautiful and simple design, initially estimated to cost $5,000 but ended up costing $7,000 (1941) dollars.
That works out to about $123,000 after inflation, for anyone else wondering.
Thanks, was wondering about that. (I think one should factor in the war effort and impact, if any, on construction material cost.)
Usonia! 99% Invisible did an excellent episode about this:
Late, over budget, and surrounded by other half-done projects made me think that it could be a builders' equivalent of Microserfs.