Why do people want tiny homes so much?
ST. LOUIS – Aug. 22, 2017 – Samantha Roberts knows exactly how crazy her plan sounds, so hold your comments.
Telling people that she voluntarily wants to live in a 336-square-foot house with her spouse, kindergartner, 7-year-old, teenager, a Shih Tzu mixed breed, and another aging dog that is blind and diabetic elicits the same gut response from nearly everyone.
"I'm tired of people telling me I'm crazy. We've thought about this more than any of them. Trust me, I know it's not going to be all unicorns and rainbows," said Roberts, who currently lives in a custom-built 2,300-square-foot home in O'Fallon, Mo. They put the four-bedroom house at 159 Fox Creek Drive on the market for $225,000.
If all goes well, as soon as it's sold, construction will begin on their 28-foot-long tiny home with two loft bedrooms and a modest ground floor master bedroom that will cost about $50,000.
Instead of eight rooms and two-and-a-half bathrooms, they'll live together in a space smaller than her current kitchen.
The biggest reason for the major shift is economics. They'll be able to pay for their tiny home outright and live mortgage-free.
"We can afford the house where we live, but we can't afford to take our kids on trips," she said. The family of five hasn't gone on vacation in seven years. At the time, it was simply a drive to a neighboring state to visit family with her newborn.
The only people who aren't skeptical of her plan are the homebuilders, a company run by a couple in St. Peters who aren't just selling homes, but presenting a philosophical challenge.
What's really important? Creature comforts at the expense of your free time, your financial security and your familial bonds?
Mark Mitchell and his wife, Emily, were living in a 2,000-square-foot home in Wentzville when he became obsessed with tiny homes. It took three long years to sell the Wentzville house once they put it on the market.
He was a building project manager at the time working on large-scale projects that were very lucrative. It was a "good job," Emily said, but Mark says it just wasn't satisfying.
When he proposed the idea of quitting his job to start a company making tiny houses, Emily wasn't sold. She works as a real estate appraiser for St. Louis County and said she had no idea what the market for tiny homes would be. The trend hasn't really hit Missouri, she said.
Mark kept his day job as he designed his first prototype, a 288-square-foot home on wheels. He built it with the same materials that traditional homebuilders use, including double-pane windows. He employed many of the same downsized design elements and incorporated full-size items, such as sinks, when he could.
This couldn't be a dollhouse, he said.
The stairs to the loft had to be navigable by an adult, and so did the bathroom. He worked on unexpected storage options and included a ceiling fan.
The first house sold to a guy moving to Kansas City, and it sold before the open house. He saw the photos online and told the Mitchells that he had to have it.
Where to live
Interest in tiny homes is big, but the most persistent obstacle to customers is siting regulations. Mitchell's homes can be operated off the grid, if people want to invest in land, composting toilets, rainwater capture and solar panels. But most of his sales have gone into RV or mobile home parks, although one is being used as a backyard mobile hair salon.
Some RV parks don't welcome tiny homes; because of their relative novelty, many sites don't know how to classify them.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development hasn't decided if tiny homes are actually homes. The department sets federal housing policy and also decides building standards for a variety of movable homes to ensure safety standards are met. It hasn't yet weighed in definitively on the construction of tiny homes, which means that RV parks can exclude them at their discretion.
It also means that it's hard for anyone to quantify how many tiny homes are in existence because many are operated under the radar. A "PBS NewsHour" story called them "trendy, minimalist and often illegal."
Eventually, Mark Mitchell dreams of starting his very own tiny house community, but in the meantime, he quit his day job, and Mini Mansions Tiny Home Builders became his full-time endeavor.
In the spirit of tiny home enthusiasts, Mark and Emily downsized before the company launched.
They now live in an 800-square-foot home (small but not tiny) in St. Peters and bought the vacant lot next door for Mark's workshop. Ironically, he builds the tiny homes in a space that is twice the size of his home – 1,600 square feet.
"When I realized that just to move into 800 square feet that I'd have to get rid of three-fourths of my stuff, I was not sold at all," Emily said. "Then one day it snapped and I was like, I get it. We could definitely go even smaller."
She said that there were boxes in the basement that they had moved from the basement of their previous home. The containers hadn't been opened in at least six years.
If you think living in a tiny house is crazy but you're clinging to items that you can't even remember, who's crazy? Emily Mitchell asked rhetorically.
She said downsizing was a relief.
Mark Mitchell said he prayed a lot about it and prayed about the business venture. After the first few sales, he said that he's convinced that he's found his calling in life. Customers speak of his work in glowing, reverential terms.
Their business has been featured on HGTV's "Tiny House Hunters," and Mark is currently near completion on his 10th tiny home. All but two of them were sold online before they could host an open house, and the other two were gone within a week.
Learning to adjust
Roberts said that her family had been watching tiny house television shows and documentaries for more than a year as they considered the move. Everyone is on board, and she's sure it's the right decision, but she does have one reservation.
"I think about it every day, and I'm worried. I really am," she said. "The thing I'll miss the most is the privacy of the master bathroom."
Mitchell is reconfiguring his design to give Roberts a bathtub, at least. They'll have to give up a little living space to accommodate one instead of the standard shower stall, but Roberts said that she'll need the comfort of a hot bath more than ever. It will be one of only two rooms with a real door.
"I think about it every day. Every. Day," she said. Even in the span of a 40-minute phone conversation she was interrupted three times, once by each of her children – she excused herself to listen to a poem, answered a query and went to find a Band-Aid.
But Roberts has her eyes on the prize – financial independence and family bonding.
"Right now we have so much room that we have to call out forced family time," she said. But in a tiny home, for better or for worse, it will be family time, all the time.
Roberts, a stay-at-home mom about to launch a bridal event planning business called St. Louis Popup Weddings and Rentals, isn't delusional about what could go wrong.
Hillary Sanford, 32, lives in Davenport, Fla., with her mom and three dogs in one of Mitchell's tiny homes and offered some advice to Roberts and her family.
The Sanfords' home was delivered in April, and she's totally smitten. She said that she smiles just thinking about it and eventually says she'll retire in a tiny home.
Sanford works as a firefighter, and her mom is a retail manager at Disney World. They spend five days a week in the tiny home on the outskirts of Orlando and drive 92 miles to the small community of Brooksville, where they each live separately on weekends. Her parents live together in a traditional sized single-family home, and Sanford with her boyfriend and his son live in another.
The daily commute was awful, so Sanford had been researching tiny homes for years before her mother agreed. It cost about $39,000 including delivery and a fancy $2,000 built-in combined washer-dryer unit.
When they have a full house, her boyfriend and his son spend the night. So that's four humans and three dogs, if you're keeping track.
"My advice to is to practice first. You'll need to learn the give and take of really sharing space with people," Sanford said. "Get a cabin or small space to live in for a month or so."
Almost everything you do in a tiny home affects someone else, she said.
Sanford and her mother lived in a 104-square-foot home that she bought secondhand on Craigslist for six months. They cooked in a microwave and showered at the campground facility, and the place rocked when anyone would enter or exit. When the Mitchells delivered their sturdy 278-square-foot Mini Mansion with a full bath, they walked inside and were awestruck – "It's so big."
"It's not just a new home," Sanford said. "It's a new mindset."
Copyright © 2017 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Debra D. Bass. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.