Professor At UT-Austin Lives In A Dumpster

[Jered]

I'm a big fan of the small house movement. I've actually designed my dream bachelor house, should I ever find myself single again. It's only about 1000 sq ft, but it is heavy on creature comforts.

My house is 1050 square feet.

It's full of stuff, too.

[randy]

I'm just waiting for some early morning with a hungover sanitation truck driver selecting the wrong dumpster to empty.

[PawPaw]

I'm a big fan of the small house movement. I've actually designed my dream bachelor house, should I ever find myself single again. It's only about 1000 sq ft, but it is heavy on creature comforts.

My house is 1050 square feet.

It's full of stuff, too.

I could live happily in a 500 square foot house, as long as I had a 2500 square foot workshop behind it.

I'm just waiting for some early morning with a hungover sanitation truck driver selecting the wrong dumpster to empty.

Heh! Indeed.

[BDK]

I had a very comfortable 900' house plus a garage, in Houston. The old craftsman designs work quite well

1200' for another bedroom - so that boys and girls could have separate rooms, and another bathroom, and it would have been adequate for a family - provided they didn't accumulate junk.

I suspect most people live in very small spaces, and have lots of junk in their house.
Or, they have an office in it, and a gym, and workshops etc etc etc.

All things, IMO, which are better separate from the house

The workshop for safety reasons. (My family always built shops w the expectation that they might burn - they were never attached to the houses or the barns.)

The office for reasons of sanity. (Much of my family have 4+ kids.)

The gym for similar reasons.

[HTRN]

I could live happily in a 500 square foot house, as long as I had a 2500 square foot workshop behind it.

Most of the guys at work know I'm in the market for a house in the Poconos - I regularly joke my ideal house is an 8000 square foot pole barn with a cot and a hotplate.

[Aesop]

One of the things the tiny house movement is running into is that many locations won't issue building permits below a certain sqaure footage.

Old news, BTDT.
Go to YouTube and type in "tiny house".

They build them on utility trailers, thus they are trailers, not structures.
Code enforcement may find other ways to eff with people, but not that one, because they're vehicles, not houses.

Were I inclined, I've drawn up plans for a fabulous solo pad based on a 40' conex, and had I the need, I could build out a motel/bunkhouse of any size limited only by water and sewage access, with each room based on a 20' conex, with all the amenities of the local Hilton.
And the roof on the 20' will accommodate 3800W or so of solar panels, which will run the things pretty much for the lifespan of the panels and batteries.

Some of the NIMBYer counties hereabouts have already made sure to put in the building code, even for rural properties, that conexes "may not be used for human habitation". Creativity with disposable items like that evidently messes up their permitting process, and cuts off architect fees to their cronies.

I figure if they can't find it, they can't enforce it.

And once you build a minimum-sized permitted house on a semi-rural lot, a conex barn/garage is whatever you do with it.
Three 40' conexes in a "U" (or four in a square), with prebuilt truss roofing to span the gap, gets you 3-4 secure spaces on the periphery at 320 ft2@, and a 24x40' internal bay/shop/garage/man cave to do or use for just about anydamn thing you could want or need.

If one were to start collecting salvage tire discards from the local shops, a 3' thick wall full of tamped earth takes shape until you get to the top of the conex, at which point ain't nothing driving or shooting through your walls unless you open the door for it. Stucco or concrete the outside, collect rain water runoff with a metal roof, and you have a house worthy of a Mad Max pockylypse. It's also quiet enough at that point to make a decent recording studio space.

That it can be off-grid in every way, and uses up landfill materials is just a little green icing on the cake.

Hence it pisses the local permitting folks off to no end.



As for professors living in dumpsters, it's UT-A.
Sounds like a good place for him.

[Odahi]

a lot of permitting issues can be worked around if it's built as a towable.

Which is one of the major reasons for building a tiny house on a trailer frame. Another thing, a trailer is NOT a tiny house. A tiny house will typically have much better insulation, better materials throughout, and may even have laundry provisions. Trailers for the most part are not designed as permanent residences. One huge beef I have with many tiny house builders is the "composting toilet." Paw Paw got it right, it's shitting in a bucket. Then you scoop sawdust over it, and dump it every so often. No thanks, I LIKE first-world plumbing. There is one guy who built (and sold) a 60-square-foot tiny house. It had a hot plate, teeny sink, and dorm fridge, along with a working shower and a "composting toilet," and would be plenty spacious if all you're doing in there is eating and sleeping, with the morning SSS ritual. I'd like about 200 to 250 for Mrs. O and me, and we've seen some that are pretty nice. Add on a storm/root cellar, and a garage/workshop, and you could be pretty well set. The problem, it seems, is finding affordable land in an area where the powers that be aren't a bunch of nosy assholes.

[blackeagle603]

not a tiny house if it's on a trailer? semantics


http://tinyhousetalk.com/tiny-house-on- ... big-porch/

[HTRN]

Some of the NIMBYer counties hereabouts have already made sure to put in the building code, even for rural properties, that conexes "may not be used for human habitation". Creativity with disposable items like that evidently messes up their permitting process, and cuts off architect fees to their cronies.

It's more to do with aesthetics and property values - people don't want their nice half milion dollar house to have a view resembling a shipping port, and thus take a hit in value, considering what they just spent. So they raise a stink to the community board.

[308Mike]

It would be VERY EASY to use a bulldozer and backhoe to dig out a nice pit to ROLL your TEMPORARY HOME (transportable on wheels at ANY TIME) below ground level, to simply establish a permanent site to include a BELOW-GROUND Maintenance Building/Machine Shop/Fab Shop, for your TEMPORARY RESIDENCE simply because you were living out of a vehicle on wheels (even though it might be a 5th-Wheel trailer with MORE THAN all the comforts of home, a very spacious home with all the slide-outs extended, and quite easy to live in for one or two people.

If *I* were to design such a thing, I would have a septic tank buried nearby to handle all the human waste and grey water waste, the overhead insulation of natural earth would be more than enough to help keep the temps at a stable temperature, and if necessary, I'd be able to hook-up to our home trailer (retract the slide-outs) and hit the road with it in tow should the circumstances warrant it. Any forest fires would pass harmlessly overhead (since we'd be under at least a few feet of earth supported by steel beams), our water supply similarly protected, and our pantry would be similiarly protected under layers of earth and insulated agains drastic changes in temps by the earth - something the liberals would LOVE, but since I wouldn't be including THEM in my plans, they'd HATE IT!!

Of course, all of this would be backed up with firearms and like-minded folks/neighbors convinced to do the same thing.

Naturally, the folks who lost their homes in the most recent fire while all of us were untouched besides the amount of burnt trees and other above-ground items we'd accepted would burn in a large fire, now all wished they'd listened to us and also planned for such an event. Being good neighbors, we helped them dig out, provided them a safe place to live, while they were rebuilding their homes - but THIS TIME with something more - a place to live and shelter should the same nightmare ever visit them again (you can't change everyone's mind, and to a certain degree, depending on the views, perhaps it would be excellent to rebuild at the same location should they decide to do so - but at least they'd understand and no longer call their underground neighbors KOOKS (GUARANTEED).

I'd LOVE to do something like that!!! If I had the land, I'd put a couple of 40' containers end to end underground and use THAT as my indoor range!!

Just check with the gophers and other critters who've survived the various environmental calamities - MOST ALL OF THEM did so by staying UNDER GROUND!!!

YMMV!!!