Misc Extras

We also have another 36" exterior stove pipe to raise the top of the stovepipe higher above the roof, though we don't have a picture of it installed.

Currently our house is located in Portland, Oregon. If you are somewhere else let us know and we can figure out how to best meet your needs.

I wanted to talk about the lack of bathroom, as this is the topic we have received the most questions about. I know this is long, but I wanted to be thorough and hopefully avoid wasting folks' time:

When we built this we had no intention of selling. We built the house for us to live in and to suit our needs. Keeping that in mind, we put a lot of effort into making it strong and beautiful (solid construction, high-quality metal for the bolts that attach the walls to the trailer, cedar interior, etc) and decided to forgo a bathroom or plumbing inside the house for a number of reasons. The house is only 12 feet long. This is SMALL, even for a tiny home. The space required to accommodate a toilet and shower were not worth it to us. We knew that we would be living in the house in a very rural location with lots of privacy, and an existing, communal composting toilet system. Bathing was done by taking sponge baths in the house, when we visited friends with traditional houses, or at the local hot springs. We've spent time living on boats and years camping in the Utah desert, so water conservation is pretty second nature to us.

All tiny houses have plumbing issues that make them less convenient than traditional houses connected to municipal systems. Composting toilets still need to be emptied and that means you need to have a place where you can keep your compost long enough to fully break down any possible parasites, bacteria and pathogens in the poop. If you empty the contents of your composting toilet every 10 weeks, that means that, while some of the poop has been composting for 10 weeks, some of it has been in there less than 24 hours. Which means it is not compost, it is still poop. Most books state that the amount of time poop needs to be actively composting (ie: in a hot and active compost pile) is one year before it is safe to spread around your yard. This requires a lot of space. If you don't have much experience with composting your vegetable scraps, composting human waste is not the easiest place to start. While one blog I looked at said you can just dump the bin from your composting toilet into the trash, I would recommend against this as it is explicitly illegal since fecal matter is considered a bio-hazard (nursing homes either have to mark it as such or incinerate it).

When it comes to gray water, most tiny houses drain to either a tank which needs to be emptied regularly (either by driving to a pump-out, like an RV, or by manually draining the tank on-site) or via pipe/hose to a spot outside with well draining soil. We decided that freezing tanks and pipes in the sub-zero temperatures of Montana was not worth the hassle and so left out the pipes and tanks and simply poured our gray water outside after each use, washing dishes, hands, etc into a basin. In this way we could easily spread out where the water went each time.

These are all things to consider when it comes to having a tiny house. If you are hoping to use this tiny house in a city, you'll probably need access to external bathroom facilities. As stated before, we put a lot of energy, attention and love into this house to suit our needs. That said, we understand that the lack of facilities would not work for everyone. And we priced the house with that in mind. There are plenty of situations where this house would work, just some things to think about when considering your specific needs.