Photo Courtesy of Morgan Karanasios

Why a Tiny Home 

For us, a tiny house was the solution to a kind of financial equation we had been struggling to solve. To build our careers, our portfolios, we needed time to create and the finance to procure the resources we needed to do so. We were inspired by the tiny house movement. Here were people choosing to live smaller and get outside more; they were traveling, saving money on bills and spending it on living. Their homes were creative and charming, each unique like the handmade homes of colonial days, and - as if this weren’t enough - they were environmentally friendly. We didn't so much make the decision as the decision made us. It simply made perfect sense.

As time passed and we began to imagine, design and create, it soon became clear that another motivation was emerging, one that would come to dominate as the driving force behind our build: it was simply…fun. Granted, building our tiny house was far from easy, but the freedom of creativity, the authority to include any idea, no matter how whimsical, and the knowledge that we would one day find ourselves sheltered by our own creation was an experience we can only compare to the building of tree forts in childhood; it felt natural, freeing, even primitive. After all, people have been building their own homes by hand all throughout history, until relatively recently. Outside the tiny house movement, some still do build their own houses, of course, but the complexity of modern building regulations, the respective knowledge necessary to work with modern materials, coupled with the cost of living and the cost of typically scaled modern dwellings has made it harder and harder for the layman to undertake the challenge successfully. Tiny houses alleviate the burden of insurmountable cost, and the scale is far less daunting.

We also knew that our financial struggle was not original. Post 2008, we had struggled to make a living like so many. Laid off from my day job, I found work carrying shingles for a roofer at $11 an hour, and I was laid off from that job a month later. It was honestly a little terrifying. So as the years passed and we struggled to pay our bills, not to mention build our careers, we searched more and more, not only for a path that would break us free from financial constraint, but one that would ultimately contribute to others who were also struggling. When tiny house owners rent land that would otherwise sit unused, they not only get a home at a bargain; they give the landowner a financial boost, and the two, having more money to spend are free to put more money into the economy, helping still others. This ideal, along with a fierce passion for protecting the natural world - living harmoniously in its midst both environmentally and aesthetically - is at the heart of our endeavor. We are by no means entirely successful, but we push forward with this goal in mind, making improvements when we can and learning from our mistakes as often as possible.


Photo's Courtesy of Pat Piasecki, Morgan Karanasios, & John Hession

We didn’t so much make the decision as the decision made us. It simply made perfect sense.