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By Geoff Williams, FrontDoor.com | Published: 11/13/2008
It sounds like a nice notion, living in a way that makes a smaller footprint on the environment, but one shouldn't rush into this, cautions Michael Janzen, a 40-year-old Sacramento bank executive who has a blog called Tiny House Design and is planning on building a tiny home to move in with his wife and young daughter. But he recognizes that one tiny home may be too cramped; so he may well wind up doing what Kittel often recommends: live in two, or even three tiny houses.
It may sound odd at first, but it's working for Angi and Mark Morse, 33 and 35, who since July have lived with their 3-year-old and 9-month-old in two yurts in Snohomish, Washington. Yurts are a cousin of the tiny house -- they're felt-covered, wood lattice-framed dwellings that look a little like round tents. Angi, a part-time family therapist and Mark, a substitute school custodian, spent $5,000 on a used yurt that they found on Craigslist, and pay $900 a month on their other yurt, which they will have paid off in five years. Angi didn't want to say exactly how much that second one cost, but she said that they can range from $9,000 to $20,000, depending on the extras.
They built a deck underneath each yurt, which lacks running water but has an extension cord, bringing electricity from the nearby barn. They're located on Angi's father's property, and it seemed like a much better proposition for the young family than remaining in their one-room apartment or buying into a house that they couldn't afford, not that bankers haven't been very generous about doling out mortgages. But Angi may not have taken it anyway. "I think being able to not worry about that high mortgage payment every month is really freeing," says Angi, who adds that she wishes they had taken the leap and bought a yurt sooner.
But a tiny house -- or yurt -- isn't for everyone, which is why Janzen cautions that if anybody is considering the idea, he would first suggest simplifying things before moving.
"Downsize your own life," suggests Janzen. "You know, maybe we're like fish, and we all grow to the size of the tank. So I've been trying to get rid of my stuff ... reducing debt, reducing the objects we have, the things we have to take care of, to start immediately getting what the benefits of downsizing in a house would be."
He adds that if you can start living in less of your home and you can get to the point "when you begin to find yourself knocking around in a big, empty house or apartment, then you begin to get closer to the question we all could ask ourselves: how much do you really need?"
Geoff Williams is a freelance journalist and the author of C.C. Pyle's Amazing Foot Race: The True Story of the 1928 Coast-to-Coast Run Across America (Rodale). His two-story house was built in, um, 1994.
