Big plans for firm that builds tiny homes
ST. LOUIS — Samantha Roberts knows exactly how crazy her plan sounds, so hold your comments.
Telling people that she voluntarily wants to live in a 336-square-foot house with her spouse, kindergartner, 7-yearold, teenager, a Shih Tzu mixed breed, and another aging dog that is blind and diabetic elicits the same gut response from nearly everyone.
“I’m tired of people telling me I’m crazy. We’ve thought about this more than any of them. Trust me, I know it’s not going to be all unicorns and rainbows,” said Roberts, who currently lives in a custom-built 2,300-square-foot home outside St. Louis. They put the four-bedroom house on the market last month for $225,000.
If all goes well, as soon as it’s sold, construction will begin on their 28-foot-long tiny home with two loft bedrooms and a modest ground floor master bedroom that will cost about $50,000.
Instead of eight rooms and two-and-ahalf bathrooms, they’ll live together in a space smaller than her current kitchen.
The biggest reason for the major shift is economics. They’ll be able to pay for their tiny home outright and live mortgage-free.
“We can afford the house where we live, but we can’t afford to take our kids on trips,” she said. The family of five hasn’t gone on vacation in seven years.
The only people who aren’t skeptical of her plan are the homebuilders, a company run by a couple who aren’t just selling homes but presenting a philosophical challenge.
What’s really important? Creature comforts at the expense of your free time, your financial security and your familial bonds?
Mark Mitchell and his wife, Emily, were living in a 2,000-square-foot home when he became obsessed with tiny homes. It took three long years to sell the house once they put it on the market.
He was a building project manager at the time working on large-scale projects that were very lucrative. It was a “good job,” Emily said, but Mark says it just wasn’t satisfying.
When he proposed the idea of quitting his job to start a company making tiny houses, Emily wasn’t sold. She works as a real estate appraiser for St. Louis County and said she had no idea what the market for tiny homes would be. The trend hasn’t really hit Missouri, she said.
Mark kept his day job as he designed his first prototype, an 288-square-foot home on wheels. He built it with the same materials that traditional homebuilders use, including double-pane windows. He employed many of the same downsized design elements and incorporated full-size items, such as sinks, when he could. This couldn’t be a dollhouse, he said. The stairs to the loft had to be navigable by an adult, and so did the bathroom. He worked on unexpected storage options and included a ceiling fan.
The first house sold to a guy moving to Kansas City, and it sold before the open house. He saw the photos online and told the Mitchells that he had to have it.
Interest in tiny homes is big, but the most persistent obstacle to customers is siting regulations. Mitchell’s homes can be operated off the grid, if people want to invest in land, composting toilets, rainwater capture and solar panels. But most of his sales have gone into RV or mobile home parks, although one is being used as a backyard mobile hair salon.
Some RV parks don’t welcome tiny homes; because of their relative novelty, many sites don’t know how to classify them.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development hasn’t decided if tiny homes are actually homes. The department sets federal housing policy and also decides building standards for a variety of movable homes to ensure safety standards are met. It hasn’t yet weighed in definitively on the construction of tiny homes, which means that RV parks can exclude them at their discretion.
It also means that it’s hard for anyone to quantify how many tiny homes are in existence because many are operated under the radar. A “PBS NewsHour” story called them “trendy, minimalist and often illegal.”
Eventually, Mark Mitchell dreams of starting his very own tiny house community, but in the meantime, he quit his day job, and Mini Mansions Tiny Home Builders became his full-time endeavor.
In the spirit of tiny home enthusiasts, Mark and Emily downsized before the company launched.
They now live in an 800-square-foot home (small but not tiny) and bought the vacant lot next door for Mark’s workshop.
Ironically, he builds the tiny homes in a space that is twice the size of his home — 1,600 square feet.
“When I realized that just to move into 800 square feet that I’d have to get rid of three-fourths of my stuff, I was not sold at all,” Emily said. “Then one day it snapped and I was like, I get it. We could definitely go even smaller.”
She said that there were boxes in the basement that they had moved from the basement of their previous home. The containers hadn’t been opened in at least six years.
If you think living in a tiny house is crazy but you’re clinging to items that you can’t even remember, who’s crazy? Emily Mitchell asked rhetorically. She said downsizing was a relief. Mark Mitchell said he prayed a lot about it and prayed about the business venture. After the first few sales, he said that he’s convinced that he’s found his calling in life. Customers speak of his work in glowing, reverential terms.
Their business has been featured on HGTV’s “Tiny House Hunters,” and Mark is currently near completion on his 10th tiny home. All but two of them were sold online before they could host an open house, and the other two were gone within a week.