Helpful Resources Along the Way

I have been asked a few times of any helpful books I have used along the way, I thought it was about time I put together my version of my most helpful resources.  What I would like to inspire is confidence that, really, with the right mindset anyone can build their own tiny house.  There is nothing magical about any step along the way, with a little research and a lot of patience and persistence, and reaching out to others along the way when needed (HERE is a good list of others to contact for any specific questions). Also on that list you will find several FAQs listed about a lot of different builds, you can see, there is more than one solution to every set of problems, all are valid.  [Also, if you happen to have a tiny house and want to give me your FAQs, please download THIS form and shoot it back to me at mizacy@gmail.com, I’d love to get your build listed as well! ;-)]

My point is that even without previous building experience it is completely achievable.  There are a ton of places online where you can buy floor plans, I will leave that search up to you (Google Tiny House Plans and a bunch will come up). My own floor plan came straight out of my head but eventually I will have it available for download as well, once I get around to drawing it up, along with another version or two that I have thought up that would be nice if I had it to do over again.  If however you have gone through plan after plan and none of them are quite like you’d like then that’s great!  You can make your own!  🙂 I started by looking through a TON of tiny house books and pulling the pieces that I liked from various houses.    If you’re not quite ready to make the investment in books there are a couple options.  In my experience libraries don’t have much of a selection but are worth checking out,  Also, if you head to a book store (Barns & Noble is my bookstore of choice) they keep a lot on the shelves that you can thumb through.   I tend to cheat by looking there and then buying the ones I want online, they are always so much cheaper there.  Here is a list of my best resources, I have more than this but these are the ones that I went back to again and again or that I wish were available when I started my house.

• Just recently Drew put out an e-book (a couple weeks or so ago) from tiny r(e)volutions on how to decorate a tiny house. I have had the chance to look through it, it goes over a lot of great ideas and is nicely priced for the info contained.  It has a lot to do with storage types of ideas, psychological effects of various design components etc. It’s quick and concise.  You can see download that HERE, definitely worth the money.
• There is another book called Compact Cabins: Simple Living in 1000 sf or less, this one is great for looking at various floor plans, sometimes it’s hard to make sense of the space for me in 2D like that but it’s got a TON of plans.  It is not graphically ‘magical’ but there are some cool concepts to think about, unfortunately mostly in plan, not as much in elevation, still, is a good resource.
• Books like NanoHouse are great to flip through and pull ideas from. Not as much for reading but looking through for ideas at all the pictures.  I personally get a lot of ideas that way.  That one is more ‘modern’ in style, but there are others.  I am assuming you may gravitate that direction though if you like my house :).  Some other great flip through books I have got enough out of to purchase are Small Eco Houses, Off The Grid Homes, and The Big Book of Small House Design.
• For questions about any code issues (which may seem overwhelming in and of itself) Ryan at thetinylife.com put out a great little ebook called Cracking the Code.  There just always seem to be questions from others and that book clarifies the main issues so you can at least talk back to those critics without letting them overwhelm you with doubts like critics tend to try to do :).  It’s not so much about ‘design’ in the traditional aesthetics sense but great info that is highly recommended.
• For actual construction details on specifically attaching to a trailer Go House Go is highly recommended (I found this very helpful even if very technical, and not so much about the ‘design’ side as much as the necessary side of things). Depending on your area there are a lot of good moisture protection details in there too.  Dee Williams put it out and she lives in the rainy Pacific northwest, that may or may not be helpful but it’s great info to know about at least.
• Another resource I will officially ‘plug’ is the Tiny House Magazine that Kent Griswold has been putting out.  They have been running some great articles in there, I have even got to help write a couple! :).  How to make your house your home etc.  Lots of pretty pictures and ‘How-Tos’.  I’m not sure if he’s running any now but he runs specials sometimes.  I hear a lot of great feedback from those magazines.
• For electrical and plumbing steps I went down to home depot and snagged some basic wiring and plumbing books. I liked the Black & Decker ones (Plumbing, Electrical) but I’m sure any of them are great, it’s really pretty basic information that you need to know and fortunately tiny houses aren’t usually big enough to get too complex if you don’t want them to! 🙂
• I suppose a good framing book would be good too but some of that is in the Go House Go book too so I would start there and then look further for any other info on king-studs/top plates etc. that you’d like to know.  The internet has some great basic guides on that too.  Again, nothing will be too complex on a tiny house, they tend to be WAY over engineered because of their small spans anyway.   A simple diagram like the one quickly Googled below can cover a lot of the basics about typical wood construction, if you’re interested in SIPs panels, metal studs or another more unique situation it is definitely worth looking that up and/or reaching out to another tiny house builder who has taken a similar path, referring back to the first link HERE. Hopefully those resources cover most of the big issues, I will certainly add to it over time, I have several other books that I could suggest as well, and I probably will at a point :)…

Please, If I missed something shoot me a note or a comment, I didn’t mean to!