Tiny Hall House

Question:  My question is-WHAT DID YOU USE ON THE INSIDE WOOD? Mine is Cedar on the outside, with natural pine tongue and grove on the inside, and I am tired of tan and brown and more tan and brown, I've been looking at some white stains, but thought you might know what would to use. Your's is beautiful!

Hello and thank you for the kudos, it’s nice to hear all the positive response to our tiny house!  Now to your question.  Our interior is pine shiplap.  I white washed it (fancy word for tacking a terry cloth rag, and ragging on the paint instead of using a prush) with a diluted Benjamin Moore low VOC paint.  The color was creamy.  If you search the blog for paint, white washing or interior, all the post that talk about it in depth should pop up.  But just the rough recipe, I diluted it with water about 1/4 water to 3/4 paint.  Where the wood was darker, I went almost half and half.  I would recommend taking a scrap piece of cedar and experimenting (which you can also see my mad scientist paint experiment early in the blog) and see what works the best for your taste. The trick is to keep moving, so don't slow down and wait.  Do whole sections at once, so that you can match up the color.  I personally like to do just a quick wash and then really rub it into the grain, which usually is easy because dry wood is thirsty!  The best part of this technique is that it only gets prettier as it gets older and all the color comes through with the grain, not to mention is super easy to touch up your walls if you should need to.  Hope that is helpful to you, and send me a picture once you get yours done.  That would be great to see!  Happy White Washing!

Question:  Where did you get your shower curtain?

Answer:  Believe it or not, it’s an all natural organic cotton shower curtain from Bed Bath and beyond.  I knew I wanted a white waffle fabric, and it just was an accident that I found exactly what I was looking for there.  Shower curtains off gas ALOT, so I wanted to make sure in such a small space that that wasn’t something we needed to even think about.  BTW:  Not a silly question.  Goodluck with your journey!

Link to Site

There seems to be a lot of interested in the sleeping situation of a family in a tiny house.  So I will take a minute to talk about what our experience has been  I will first say that EVERY single decision in this particular tiny house was made as a group.  Equal vote for all three of us, this includes the sleeping arrangements.  

We first offered our Son (18) the loft so that he could have more space than us, but he didn’t like the feeling up there, so he preferred to have his bed on the first floor.   The next phase was, how wide of a bed would he be comfortable for him, so we began experimenting at our old townhouse with bed widths, etc.  If you go back to the earlier post we show lots of photos etc about that process.  Before he was sleeping on a twin bed, so in order to have the font door be in the center of the tiny house, it would need to be about 2″ less wide than he’s previous bed.  So we cut down is old latex mattress to that size, and he slept on it for months before we moved in.  He determined for himself that that size was perfect for him.  We offered to make that downstairs bed a fold out, double size or a queen and move the door over etc, but in the end he liked the modified twin.  So away we went.  He and I built it together, and tested it’s comfort all the way.  He has two giant storage compartments under his bed, one of which is filled with his books, games and misc items.  The other side is for the couch pillows and this sleeping linens.   The other unintended perk of him taking the downstairs, was he stays up way later than us, so it works out well that he can be in the main part of the house late into the night... and we can be asleep upstairs and not be disturbed.  

Lot’s of questions about what his bed is made of since it’s not a typical size. His bed is made of two 4″ pieces of natural rubber latex purchased from our favorite organic mattress store.  It works great, and we flip it over each day to keep both sides fairly even and no moisture build up

As far as the upstairs loft bed, we’ve always slept on a queen size and we just stuck with that, even though a full would have worked for sure.  As far as the privacy thing goes, well there is none when everyone is home.  I’ve thought about adding a curtain to the upstairs loft so that you could pull it closed when you wanted more darkness or privacy, but it hasn’t been an issue so far.  You defiantly have to tune into each family member and get the sense of when they need space, and then give it to them.  For me, when I don’t want to be in the middle of it, I go upstairs, and put on my headphones and chill.  My son like to mediate up there etc.  As far as more adult activities, as in every home, you take advantage of alone time when it comes.  If you think about it, most families are not all home, all the time.  There are lots of blocks of time, where one, two or all of you aren’t home.  So what I’ll say about that is, that works just like every other household.

There have been LOTS of questions about the stove!  Yes indeed we do have a stove, but it’s not installed into the counter itself.  We wanted to have the choice of having more countertop space when we needed it.  It’s approx 5.5′ of counter space which is cut into by the sink.  We use an induction stove, Fagor Brand, we also have a little Cusinart Toaster Oven that we can pull out if we want to bake or roast etc.  We kind of went for what we could put away, and pull out as we needed.  I little bit more effort, but for us it’s worked out.  The stove fits, nicely under our stairs so super easy.

Link to Fagor Product info

Answer:  We use an Envi panel (400 watts), if it drops below 10 outside, we also have a little vortex heater we can pull out, just the the coldest part of the night.  We are investigating installing a Kimberly wood stove, but it’s really over kill for our 196 sq ft. house.   The winter of 2015  was one of the worst winters on record and our tiny house sailed through!  There are pics of the tiny house in 10 ft of snow... so you get the idea!

Tiny Hall House Exterior Pictures 2015

A few shots of the improvements we’ve made around the exterior of the tiny house.  It’s been a good summer for plants and gardens!