Creative ideas for fitting a family into a tiny home
Last year, William and Laura Baird got rid of half of their kids’ toys, half of their kitchen’s contents and a third of the family’s clothes. It wasn’t just de-cluttering — they also ditched almost threequarters of their home’s square footage, moving from a three-bedroom house into the 440-squarefoot cabin on wheels that they share with their three children, three cats and a hamster.
“I was looking for less to clean,” Laura Baird said. “Less upkeep, less impact on the environment, less electricity, less use of resources.”
Living with less is the philosophy behind the tiny house movement — the rising popularity of scaleddown homes, usually less than 500 square feet, some as small as 80 square feet.
Living in these small spaces does mean less responsibility (low prices mean many are mortgagefree), but a growing group of tiny-house dwellers are far from rootless vagabonds. Like the Bairds, they’re parents with young children.
Laura, a nature educator at a state park, and William, a philosophy professor, have gotten creative to maximize space in their new home, which is parked in a campground in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina (they plan eventually to move it to their own land). They’ve built a fold-out table for family meals, installed bunk beds for their 8-year-old twin daughters and designated their 4-year-old son’s sleeping loft as the playroom. Laura even ripped out wall panels in the kitchen to build a spice cabinet when she discovered 3 inches of wasted space.
The family is still trimming down their belongings and settling on where to store things (bulky towels are especially challenging) but the parents like that they spend more time together as a family, and more time outdoors.
“We’re figuring out how to compromise more, even if it’s just, ‘I’m going to the bathroom now and you can go after me,’ ” Laura Baird said.
“It’s not as convenient as having a big house where each kid can have their own room, but it’s not necessarily a good thing that everything’s convenient.”
Eight-year-old Jessica Baird agrees that the smaller space has brought the family closer. Her favorite part of living tiny: “Every room has at least one cat in it,” she said.
Small-space living with kids in tow means balancing a commitment to minimalism with the realities of family life, said Derek Diedricksen, a tiny-house designer and builder and author of the new “Micro-shelters: 59 Creative Cabins, Tiny Houses, Tree Houses, and Other Small Structures” (Storey Publishing).
“Just because you have a space that a kid can sleep in, that’s not going to be enough,” he said. “You need some common living and breathing and moving space. It shouldn’t be a jigsaw game of Jenga to be able to sit down.”
In addition to having a roomy common area, Diedricksen suggests thinking about privacy, including isolating adults’ sleeping space and insulating interior walls so everyone can get some peace and quiet. Other tips when designing a tiny family home: Don’t skimp on windows — they make a small space feel less claustrophobic — and plan for storage, including offsite space if necessary. Diedricksen recommends storage sheds, which can double as offices or even playrooms in a pinch.
As kids grow, tiny houses can become especially challenging, so some families add separate dwellings for teenagers.