Dreaming of living off-the-grid and realizing the dream of building your own tiny house? Here's everything you need to know about building an off-the-grid tiny house quickly and affordably! Beginning in Winter of 2013, my husband Brian and I began the process of building an off the grid tiny house on our homestead, from scratch. While the infrastructure creation process is far from over (we still are living without running water), I wanted to put all of our posts about building a tiny house in one place, so anyone interested in small-scale construction could follow our process from beginning to end. We initially intended to build a tiny house that would transition into a guest space … [Read more...]
Three Reasons to Build a Tiny House
Tiny houses have emerged as an extremely popular alternative to modern “McMansions,” and as a way to create shelter that is affordable, sometimes portable, and eco-friendly. We have spent the last two years building our 350 square foot home. And while I’ll be the first to tout the benefits of going tiny, I’ll also admit this: We never set out to build a tiny house. Even so, it was a great decision for our family, and in this post, I will share with you my top three reasons to build a tiny house. When we moved to NE Missouri in 2011, one of the aspects of living in this rural community that most excited us was the opportunity to build our own home, in a county that has very … [Read more...]
Tiny House Tour :: Part One
One thing I love about blogging is receiving emails from people who are following their own radical homestead path. Frequently, the questions I receive are related to building and living in a tiny house, particularly an off-grid tiny house. Often I get asked for photos or a tour of our tiny house interior. If you've been following along for a while, you know that my husband built our 350 square foot home. (If you're new to Homestead Honey, please check out this category for posts that I've shared as we've built.) With hardwood floors in place, bookshelves neatly dividing the living room from the bedroom, and windows freshly washed, it seemed like the perfect time to take you on a video … [Read more...]
Building a Tiny House :: Flooring
There are many cliched bits of advice you come across when building a house: - "Build a house, lose a spouse" - "Everything will take twice as long and cost twice as much" -"Don't move in until you've finished your house, otherwise it will never get done" Well, I'm pleased to report that Brian and I are still happily married to one another, and we actually have stayed well within our house's budget. However, I can absolutely attest that everything DOES take twice as long to build, especially when balancing building with homeschooling two young children and attending to other homestead chores. And more importantly, it is extremely challenging to work on a house while living in … [Read more...]
A Homestead Shed
This spring we needed to move all of our belongings out of a 24x36 storage shed and onto our land. While this was great motivation to get everything we owned in one place, it was also a bit daunting, as we had not a square foot of storage space! Brian quickly began work on a 100 square foot tool/storage shed. The construction of the shed itself is really interesting - he hand-hewed off-cut black walnut limbs into square posts that created the shed's support. We purchased some newly milled local lumber from the Amish and a new metal roof that is used to collect 200 gallons of rainwater. The floor, loft and siding were constructed with reclaimed plywood that was literally lying on the side … [Read more...]
Spring on the Homestead
Like so many homesteaders I talk with these days, we are in the midst of our busiest season. Summer harvest days can also be full, but there is nothing like the surge of spring energy to tackle lists of tasks that have accumulated all winter long! Here's a glimpse into what's happening on our homestead. Canning Black Walnut Syrup We took the many cups and pints of black walnut syrup that we boiled down over several weeks' time and consolidated them. In total, we got about a gallon and a quart of syrup! Here's an earlier post about tapping our trees. Building a Blacksmith Shop For the past year and a half, Brian's been working out of the shop on a neighboring piece of land. … [Read more...]
Out the Front Door
Snapshots and snippets of the beautiful, crazy world right out our front door. If you’d like to share some of your own photos or a blog post, please leave a link in the comments! Despite the persistent cold, my internal clock tells me that it's gardening season. First up on our list of gardening to-do's was expanding the fenceline to be able to double the growing space (yeah!!). Here Brian uses a few tools that he welded to remove fence posts, and then pound them into their new location. The expanded garden, and the start of my new sheet mulched beds. I am reshaping a few, and creating many new ones. I am so happy to report that the beds I created last year from straw and … [Read more...]
How Much Does it Cost to Build a Tiny House?
Over the past few years, I've detailed our adventures building an off the grid tiny house, A question that comes up frequently when we mention that we're building a house is, "How much does it cost to build a tiny house?" How Much Does it Cost to Build a Tiny House? It depends. I know that's a horrible answer to give, but it's true! The cost of a tiny house will depend on many factors such as: Whether you are doing the building yourself or hiring out the labor What building permits are required where you live If you're using new or reclaimed/recycled materials The quality of your materials (for instance a granite counter top vs. a re-used counter from … [Read more...]
A Permaculture Approach to Building
As we create our homestead from scratch, our projects and goals are very heavily weighted toward building and creating infrastructure. Settled into our tiny house for the time being, our next projects include a shop and a smaller tool/garden shed. My husband Brian is our family's builder, and he has collaborated with me on today's post. There is a mindset that lends itself well to homesteading, which is to look around and make best use of what is available. For instance, instead of finding a new recipe that we wish to try and purchasing the necessary ingredients to prepare a meal, we rather look first at what is growing in the garden or stored in the freezer or pantry, and then find a … [Read more...]