I’ve been interested in Tiny Houses since I first started building forts in elementary school. These little structures were created using wood and sticks I found in abandoned lots, in ditches, in garbage cans- anything that looked like it didn’t belong to somebody was fair game. The forts I built ranged from the usual- a small treehouse with so many holes in the walls you couldn’t hope to keep out the Minnesota mosquitoes- to a very cool underground fort. I spent weeks digging a huge hole, lined the dirt walls with thin paneling material, used an old rug for the floor and then created a woven stick structure as the roof. The idea was that I could be inside and anyone walking around above me would think my fort was just a pile of sticks.
So, the tiny trailer project is just an adult outgrowth of all those things that drove me to build childhood forts- the coziness of small spaces, the independence of having your own ‘house’, the satisfaction of building something all by yourself.
In my day job I work as a film professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. I just learned about a very cool student competition that the university sponsored that combines sustainability with tiny houses. Check out the link below. Clearly the twenty-somethings of today not only get the issue, they are actively working to make sustainable living a reality.
