Designing a Tiny Home That Meets Your Needs
Whether it’s still just an idea or you’ve taken the plunge, you are designing a tiny home that will meet your needs.
Wherever you are in your tiny transformation, you are facing countless decisions. Just beginning can seem daunting when you realize that each of these choices will lay the groundwork for where and how you will live. The concept of endless possibilities suddenly doesn’t seem helpful when each and every course of action carries far-reaching effects.
Take heart! Wherever you are on your journey, tiny life pioneers have gone before you and paved the way. Let’s take a look at what choices you will need to make, in what order, and how to make them.
Designing a Tiny Home, First Decisions
Depending upon how much research you’ve done, you may already know that there are dozens of choices for tiny living structures. Visit our page on types of tiny houses to discover a myriad of options. Pinterest is also a terrific site for building your own collection of ideas; here’s my page as an example.
Arguably the biggest decision is whether you plan to be mobile or stationary.
Will your home be on wheels, or on a HUD approved foundation?
If you are planning to build a THOW (tiny house on wheels), you’ll have to decide what size you’re going for. Two make-or-break decisions here are size and quality of the trailer.
If you’ve decided on a permanent foundation, the limitation might be how many square feet you can afford.
Other Tiny House Design Decisions That Will Affect Your Tiny Home
Here are some additional questions you can answer to quickly scale down the design decisions you’ll need to make.
What kind of home will it be?
- If it’s going to be mobile, how mobile do you want it to be? These answers will greatly impact the size. You already know it will be rectangular. There are maybe six lengths and three widths of tiny house trailers to select.
- Have you chosen a geodesic dome? Your house will obviously be a dome shape, so the interior design will need to accommodate that.
- Shipping container homes are neat. Again, while there are a myriad designs you can choose you’ll be limited to the size and shape of shipping containers.
- If you’ve chosen another option, you’ll want to do your research before spending any money. Learn the pros and cons, and explore YouTube for personal stories of folks who have gone this route. Forewarned is forearmed.
The Devil’s In The Details
The broad aspects for designing a tiny home can be selected fairly quickly; it’s the thousands of small details that can stop us in our tracks. Luckily for us, many smart people have gone before us and are looking back to give us a hand up. I call these folks Tiny Life Pioneers. They learned the hard way. Ethan Waldman of The Tiny House wrote a book, Tiny House Decisions, detailing the decisions you’ll need to make during your design process. The book is divided into four sections.
- Part 1. Big Decisions, some of what we covered above.
- Part 2. System Decisions what I call infrastructure. Plumbing, heating, ventilation, and electrical.
- Part 3. Construction Decisions like framing techniques, insulation, flooring material, roofing, etc.
- Part 4. Living Tiny covers preparing a site and moving your tiny house safely.
Tiny House Decisions also includes interviews with other tiny house builders and dwellers so you can see how they answered the questions that led to their unique build. In addition to the book, Ethan brings you into a group of people all moving in the same direction so you’re not left stranded. See more details about this unique situation on this page: Tiny House Books Comprehensive List.
Click on this image to see more great interior design features that make this tiny house one of my favorites.
Decisions That Will Help Define Your Tiny Home Design and Decorating
Continue making your list of things you want in your tiny house.
Most houses will have four basic living areas
- Living Room
- Kitchen: what appliances must you have.
- Bathroom: must you have a tub or just a shower?
- Bedroom: how big will the mattresses be? Must you be able to walk around both side of it? Can it be a loft, or must it be on the ground floor?
Don’t forget storage, space for a furnace, water heater, and possibly a wood stove; home office, washing machine, craft space and suddenly- we’re out of room. Spaces, like everything in a tiny house, will need to serve more than just one purpose.
Then there’s your stuff. If you don’t plan a storage space for your stuff, it’s going to get crammed somewhere and your living space will feel tight and cluttered. You might need an entry way or mud room for heavy coats and boots.
Convertible Spaces
Can you combine the living room and kitchen, or convert the living room into the bedroom at night? The bed in this image pulls our from under the raised kitchen floor transforming the living room into the bedroom.
In this great YouTube® video, Bryce Langston of Living Big In A Tiny House shares some of the best examples of transforming spaces he has seen over the years.
Designing a Tiny Home to Fit Your Lifestyle
My wife and I live in a very small house, but one of our must-haves was dual recliners. Recliners are large. If we were to go even smaller, we would have to design a space for them, even at the expense of other furniture.
Watching TV is a big part of our lifestyle as well. The wall space provided in the small house we purchased was just big enough for a large flat-screen TV. Knowing the particulars about how to make this work is detailed in my page Adding TVs to Your Tiny House.
Designing a Tiny Home Interior
Once the nitty-gritty of the build is set, decorating the interior is next challenge. My wife has a flair for this. She just naturally knows what colors and styles go together. I do not have this ability.
First she starts by choosing a design style. Here is a list of the most popular styles from the HGTV website:
- Farmhouse Style
- Scandinavian Design
- Coastal Design
- Bohemian Style
- Traditional Design
- Mid-century Modern Design
- Art Deco Style
- Industrial Interiors
Refer to their website for descriptions of each style.
Next she chooses a color scheme. For those of us who don’t know about such things, using a color pallet generator is just the ticket. Starting with the hardest (and most expensive) things to replace, she decides on the flooring, and then moves on to furniture, window coverings, and lighting.
Paint and pillows are cheap and easily replaced, or changed as the room develops. In our bathroom, she chose a shower curtain and a photograph to complement the colors of the tile and fixtures.
You might have a desire for a divided sink or a copper sink in your kitchen, and then plan the cabinets, appliances, and accessories accordingly.
How Do You Find What Works?
I first developed an interest in the tiny lifestyle back in 2017 when Rachel and I were still working, running two businesses out of a big house that was falling apart around us. We were closing in on retirement age and keenly aware of our limitations, both financial and physical. In Downsizing, Our Journey, we candidly describe what we’ve learned and what we’re still learning.
Though you can’t foresee every difficulty, you find out what works by doing your homework beforehand. We’ve done a lot of this for you.
Creating, maintaining, and expanding this website is a labor of love for the discoveries we’ve made in tiny living, or in our case, at least much smaller living! Years of research and writing has gone into this free resource. The only money we make is small commissions on products with links on our pages. We appreciate your visit, and hope you find the answers you need on TinyLifeConsulting.com. Thanks for stopping by!
Other Pages Of the Tiny Life Consulting Website You’ll Like
| Unique Tiny House Furniture Tables and beds
Sofas Recliners and Chairs for RVs and Tiny Houses |
Tiny House Lighting Tips to Make it Great
Flooring Choices For Your Tiny Home or RV
Tiny House Sinks and Dishwashers
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