Tiny House Pros And Cons

What are the pros and cons to living in a Tiny House? Is this really the home of the future, the most eco-friendly kind of house there is?

The way some Tiny House fanatics talk, you would think the answer is yes. And there are definite advantages to living in under four hundred square feet.

Advantages of a Tiny House

1. If you want to build it yourself, it doesn’t take nearly as long as building a modern-sized house.
2. Most people can cash-flow it, instead of having to take out a mortgage or otherwise borrow money.
3. The utility bills are ludricously small.
4. There is little space to clean.
5. You save time and money on maintenance and repair, because there is not a lot to maintain or repair.
6. They can be built on trailers so as to be moved whenever the owners want to move them.
7. You don’t have to walk fifteen feet from one end of the kitchen to another three or four times during meal preparation because everything is so close together.
8. If you gotta “go”, and go bad, the bathroom is always just a couple of steps away.

We didn’t originally plan to live in a Tiny House, but I realized after spending a few weekends in the twenty-one foot travel trailer we had bought and parked on our land before moving here that there was no way I was going to spend several months living out of it.

So we decided to live in the converted Tuff Shed we had built last fall so that we could begin collecting rainwater from its roof. A week after moving in, Jerry and I talked about keeping it as our permanent home. But however attractive the advantages to Tiny living might be, over the past few months we have discovered several distinct disadvantages of Tiny Houses for our family.

Disadvantages of living in a Tiny House

1. Sleeping lofts are uncomfortable in hot weather. In the Deep South, where we dwell, summers are hot – and this year, miserably humid to boot. Most Tiny Houses, especially those built for families, have sleeping lofts – including ours. Warm air rises. Benjamin’s bedroom has been very uncomfortable many nights this summer. If it were a normal summer where the temps rise to near and beyond 100 degrees every day, he would be hot every night. Of course, our “sleeping loft” is really a second story, which exacerbates the “warm air rises” problem.
2. In hot-summer climates, a lot of energy is required to keep a wood-frame Tiny House cool. There is only so much you can do to keep such a dwelling cool (an earthbag Tiny House, having some thermal mass, would be able to be kept somewhat cooler, but one would still need supplemental cooling). How is running the A/C almost 24/7 eco-friendly?
3. It’s not that great at holding heat in, either. Our heating bill this past winter was only 1/3 the cost of what it had been in our suburban house that was seven times the size of this Tuff Shed (if the bill had been proportionate, it would have been 1/7 the cost of the suburban house heating bill).
4. There is no room to spread out in inclement weather. When it’s either too cold or too miserably humid to be outside, I can’t escape into another room to play the keyboard, sing to a CD, or write. Benjamin has no room to run around. Can you say, “Crazy parents”?
5. There is no room for hobbies. Jerry has no space to set up his art easel (part of the reason to gain financial independence and quit one’s job is to have time and energy to engage in fulfilling activities). I have no room to dance. Etcetera.
6. Storage is at a premium. Our clothes “closet” consists of two shelves on the taller of our two metal shelves. It’s hard to keep our items tidy, and most of our clothing is in large storage boxes. Go ahead and tell us just to get rid of all our extra stuff we’re not wearing. I’ll send you the bills as we are forced to buy things to replace that which we had in storage until you got in our business and convinced us to get rid of something we would need in the future. FYI, we have each edited our wardrobe down by half over the past couple of years. And I never had nearly the amount of clothing as the average American woman. So there.
7. We can’t sit together as a family to eat. Only two people can sit at a time at the dining room table.
8. Jerry and I don’t have our own bedroom. At least an entire floor separates us from our son at night, rather than a curtain as was the case in the travel trailer. But, still...Also, we have to move furniture in order to unfold our “mattress” in order to go to bed at night, and fold it back up and put furniture back when we get up in the morning. It’s gotten old, people.
9. When someone goes “number two”, everybody else gets to smell it. Thank God for vinegar, which is a good odor killer when you spray it undiluted, but not as good as it needs to be. Of course, this problem may have more to do with the fact that our bathroom “door” is merely a curtain, rather than a real door. Still, odors fade after so many feet, but when you’re living in a Tiny House there aren’t enough feet.
10. Our cat is always underfoot. If I’ve told Benjamin once, I’ve told him a hundred times: it’s a cat’s prerogative to be in your way. However, in a Tiny House, there is almost no other place for him (the cat) to be.  (By the way, we also get to smell the cat’s feces every time he lets it go in his litter box.)

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When I got into watching Tiny House videos about nine months ago, I thought the concept was really cool – to the extent that I wanted to adopt it for our household. Having lived in a Tiny House for about six months, I have come to realize that for some people, some families, the glamour of living Tiny does not extend any further than the computer screen displaying the YouTube Tiny House videos.

If you are single or married without children, have no hobbies that require indoor space, are willing to live a real minimalist lifestyle, and live in a moderate climate that can be kept comfortable in the summer without running the A/C all the time, a Tiny House may be a good, eco-friendly and economical choice for you. If not, seek other alternatives. The choice we have finally settled on – and yes, it’s eco-friendly even though it will be far from Tiny - will be revealed soon.

Until then, keep life simple!