I’m obsessed with tiny houses. I watch all the new shows dedicated to this unique style of living: Tiny House Hunters, Tiny House Builders, Tiny House Big Living, Tiny House Nation. I just eat all of them up. I love learning about the different benefits that tiny houses offer to their owners. I also love seeing the different ways they’re designed and decorated to be perfect for their owners’ needs.
Over time, I’ve learned about nine big benefits of living in a tiny house:
1. You can take it traveling
One of the biggest benefits of having a tiny home is the ability to just hitch it to a truck and drive it to a new location.
Whether you’re trying to move to a new spot of land or just go on vacation without having to pack up some suitcases, having a tiny home makes it surprisingly easy to see new places.
Different tiny homes are built in different ways. Some are equipped with rainwater collection and solar panels. They are designed to live completely off the grid and can be parked just about anywhere you want. Other tiny homes are built more traditionally, needing power and water hookups. They are better suited to dedicated plots of land or RV/mobile home parking.
No matter how you design your tiny home, its potential mobility is a huge benefit.
2. You don’t have to spend a lot of money building it
If you have the time and ability to design and build the house yourself, you can only spend your money on materials. There are tiny home designers out there who will create and build it for you, but that obviously costs more as you’re paying for material and manpower and that company’s overhead.
That said, tiny homes are just a fraction of the price of traditional homes, and you can have everything designed specifically for you. Prices for tiny homes can range from less than $19,000 to around $50,000 depending on its size and the kind of finishes that you want.
The low price also means that you can potentially pay cash for it if you’ve spent enough time saving up. If you can’t pay cash, the loan payments will be much smaller than a traditional mortgage. No more $2,000 house notes for you!
3. You don’t have to worry about future moves
One thing that often holds people back from purchasing a traditional home is its permanence. You’ve invested a lot of money into this immovable structure and the land surrounding it. What happens if you get a new job in a different city, state, or even country and have to move? Or if you just get some super annoying neighbors?
Unless you actually buy a plot of land to park your tiny home on, you’re not tied to any property. Your only permanent tie is to the house itself, so if you get a new job somewhere else you can just hitch it to a truck and drive it to that new place! You still have to find a place to live, but the actual house itself will never be in question.
4. You can be extremely environmentally friendly
Because your house is going to be so small, you can make a lot of it out of recycled, re-purposed, and salvaged materials. In addition to making your house look cool and unique, it also saves that same amount of new materials from being made.
Like I mentioned in the first point, you can also set up your home to live off the grid. Using solar or wind resources to give your house power, using a rainwater catch and filtration system, and installing a composting toilet are all steps to enabling your tiny house to be functional anywhere in the world.
5. You can be extremely energy efficient
Whether you use solar power or hook your house up to a power line, the energy needs of such a tiny space are much smaller than the energy needs of a traditional home. Smaller appliances work more efficiently and a smaller space uses less power to heat and cool the air.
If you need to connect to a power source, you’ll still have to pay your electric bill, but it can be a quarter or less of your traditional house’s bill. On top of everything you’re saving on your mortgage, think about all the trips you can take with that money you’ll be saving!
6. You can de-clutter your life
Well — you have to de-clutter your life. After living in a traditional home for a few years, stuff just piles up everywhere. You can’t stuff everything that fits into a 2000+ square foot home into a 200 square foot home, so by necessity you’ll be donating or selling a lot of things.
This gives you a chance to really look at your possessions to see what honestly matters to you and what you just have around because it’s always been there or it just looked cool so you bought it.
Once you’ve pared down your possessions, you’ll only have meaningful and really necessary things. Plus, it’ll make your move much easier.
7. You can spend less money on decorations, even if you love to change things up
If you’re the kind of person who loves to redecorate a traditional home every year or two, a tiny house might be the best canvas for you. Even if you wanted to repaint the whole thing, it would be done in a single afternoon with just a can or two of paint. New flooring? You only have 200 square feet to recover!
If smaller pieces of decor are more your thing (pictures, throw pillows, rugs) the same thing applies here too. You have such a smaller area to coordinate that it’s much easier and cheaper to redo the entire house. You won’t have to go just one room at a time since you have extra money in your budget — the whole house is yours to play with.
Maybe that’s where your energy bill savings can go.
8. You can spend less time/money on cleaning
Another benefit that comes from having less space is you won’t use as much cleaner since you won’t have to buy it so often. Sweeping will only take a couple of minutes. Dusting? Even less time.
Some people love cleaning, so this might be a disappointment. However, if you hate cleaning, then this is a definite plus of tiny homes.
9. You can stay tidier easier
This follows naturally from having to de-clutter to move in to a tiny home. You have less stuff, but everything actually goes somewhere. You’ll never let stuff pile up on the floor just because you don’t know where it goes or because that back closet is just too full.
What is it your mom always says? “A place for every item, and every item in its place.”
Again, if you love to clean, this won’t really mean anything to you. However, if you’re perpetually cluttered and untidy, this will be a great bonus to you because you can finally quit worrying about tidying before guests come over. Even if you let things get a little untidy, cleaning becomes much, much faster than before.
Featured photo credit: Tammy Strobel via flic.kr
