Beyond the Tiny House

I guess the phenomenon of the "Tiny House" is now part of our culture, since there are now HGTV shows about Tiny Houses.  I love a well designed small house.  I am not a fan of Tiny Houses on wheels for a couple of reasons.  It can be hard to find a place to park a tiny trailer and actually hook it up to a sewer line unless you go to a trailer park or RV park.  Tiny Houses on wheels are not built under typical local building codes but under a  the ANSI standard A119.5 for Park Recreational Vehicles, (specifically RV's without motors, gasoline tanks or diesel tanks).  If you would like to put your tiny house on wheels on a permanent foundation, you will need to convince the local building official that the trailer meets the local building code.  It is possible to get your tiny trailer certified to comply with the International Residential Code (IRC) by a third party inspector who watches the trailer being built by the fabricator, but this is not a typical practice by many of the folks building Tiny Homes/Trailers.

For the next couple of months my wife and I are living in the little pink cottage shown above in the Cottage Square neighborhood in Ocean Springs, MS.  This little one bedroom cottage was used as temporary housing during Mississippi's recovery from Hurricane Katrina and was later removed from its transport frame and placed on a foundation at Cottage Square.  It was dual certified by the manufacturer as a HUD Manufactured Home (mobile home) while it was attached to the transport frame and as a IRC compliant modular cottage when removed from the frame and set on a permanent foundation.

We are finding the cottage to be quite comfortable.  We have an actual bedroom compared to the sleeping lofts often provided in Tiny Houses/trailers.  The kitchen and bathrooms are pretty straight forward, built from standard cabinets and fixtures.  There is plenty of natural light and a porch we can sit out on when the weather allows.