Tiny House

About living small

I imagine most of people featured in the documentary, Tiny House, a story about living small, live in Colorado, Oregon or in the woods or backyards of hippie Marin County in Northern California. I imagine many of these tiny houses on large plots of land with amazing vistas of mountains and vast planes. The documentary tells the amazing story of how people build tiny structures of about 100 square feet on trailers to get around the building codes. They live a simple, spartan and minimalist lifestyle.

Our house in Silicon Valley is not a tiny house. By most standards nevertheless, it is considered quite small. Our house is about 1050 square feet. Ten times the size of Christopher’s house, yet fifty percent smaller than most homes in San Jose. It is difficult to get a lot of data on the average size of a home in the area. Most statistics are about the average home price ($776,000!). We know that the Bay Area is out of whack with the rest of the country when it comes down to home prices.

Back to the size of our house. It has 3 bedrooms, a decent size common bathroom with a full bath and a small bathroom with shower in the bigger bedroom. I don’t call it the master bedroom as that would be overstating it. The kitchen is roomy and all nicely redone, as are the bathrooms. We don’t have a separate dining area; it is part of the kitchen. The living room is a one cartwheel kind of room, with a fireplace. The 1050 square feet do not include the garage, which technically has space for 2 small cars. The one small room missing is an office. A small office with a desk and some cabinets would have been fantastic. My small office currently consists of a desk and filing cabinet, next to the washer and dryer in the garage. When I host a video conference meeting for work, I hang a light green sheet behind me to hide the rest of the garage. It does however give it a sort of terrorist look. Time for Google Hangouts, or Skype to support green screen replacement.

I love our small place. It has made me down size continuously and just keep what is really necessary. And yet with 1050 square feet, you can still have quite a bit of stuff stored. Our kitchen for example does not lack anything, except perhaps a wine fridge, which I image are now standard in McMansions.

It was interesting to see friends move from their 2600 square feet home on the peninsula to a 700 square feet San Francisco apartment. That move required some serious downsizing skills.

Now, go check out http://tiny-themovie.com/ and enjoy the kind of luxury you do live in.