Yes I think a tiny house would work for a family with children. You might not be able to fit into 140 square feet. But there are so many other options. I’ve spoken with families who live in spaces ranging from 300 to 1000 square feet. If you have a chance read Little House on a Small Planet by Shay Salomon. She offers a variety of housing options for large a small families. It’s amazing what people can do with tiny spaces.

Thanks for reading RowdyKittens! I appreciate it.

While we put in the utilities and added a room for batteries for our off-grid manufactured home (dug the trenches, laid in the conduit, put up the panels, installed a well pump and tanks), my partner Robyn and I lived for nine months in a 28 ft. travel trailer. It was very freeing not to have much stuff — no room for it! (note: the workplace was elsewhere. It’s now here at the house).

We learned how to use a space in multiple, often ingenious ways: the toilet was also a backup chair. The dining booth was also another bed. The dishes had to get washed every night, or there weren’t dishes left to eat on or a place to cook.

We learned how to work around each other in a small room, negotiate for places to do projects or to make noise (turn on the radio vs. wear headphones). It’s cozy and intimate. We loved the simplicity of that life.

Robyn still grieves leaving it, rightly intuiting that she’d never again have that simplicity in “the big house” (which is about 1500 square feet). She’s right. Stuff accumulates to fill the space, and especially as we grow older, family memorabilia comes to us.

And there’s a tradeoff with being supplied for resiliency: extra hoses if we do a garden. Tools for doing our own maintenance on the house. Those tools need to be stored somewhere. As well as the half-can of paint, which’ll be needed to touch up the porch in a few years.

This journey is about tradeoffs. But I think tiny tiny houses are a wonderful and freeing approach to shelter that’s about appropriate scale, and low footprint. I think a little ecovillage of tiny houses is a marvelous idea.

Follow your passion. As Mary Oliver writes, “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?”

Journey well — Janaia
(host, Peak Moment TV, peakmoment.tv)

P.S. We taped a wonderful conversation with Shay Salomon, author of Little House on a Small Planet, episode 119 (www.peakmoment.tv/conversations/?p=191).