A Prefabricated House Or Build It Yourself
Once you’ve decided to live in a tiny home, one of the main decisions you’ll be facing is whether to build your new dwelling yourself, or purchase a prefab tiny house. Here are some benefits of buying one, as opposed to going the DIY route.
Designed By the Pros
Getting out the draft paper and creating your own small house design is appealing, sure, but it’s a project that comes with a lot of headaches – and most of those headaches are simply impossible to foresee. It’s very difficult to visualize exactly how a small living space you draw on paper will materialize in the real, three-dimensional world. This is part of the reason why architects are expensive and have to go to school for a long time. And there’s a good chance a prefabricated tiny house will have been designed by an architect, which is something most traditional homes can’t even claim.
Built By the Pros (and You)
Statistically, it’s very unlikely that you are Bob Villa or part of his construction team. Building a tiny house from the ground up is, naturally, easier to build than a large traditional house, but that doesn’t mean anyone can just jump right in and start hammering pieces together. When building a prefab tiny house, however, you can just jump right in and start hammering pieces together. As long as you follow the instructions, that is. These are referred to as kit houses, and they work just like a scale model car: you buy the pieces, which are pre-cut and ready to assemble, and put it all together yourself. The other kind of prefab house requires no assembly at all. It comes completely built already. You simply deliver it to the spot you’d like to live, make sure the floor is level, and plug in the water and power.
No Shopping List Required
If you’ve ever undertaken a large (or not-so-large) home improvement project, you may have experienced countless frustrating trips to the hardware store for parts you forgot, or discovered you need. Once you got home with the new materials you found you needed some other kind of building supplies. Sometimes it seems it’ll never end. This isn’t a problem with prefab tiny houses. Everything you need is included. It’s almost like buying a house in a box from IKEA and putting it together yourself. (Incidentally, if you’re wondering why nobody makes IKEA-style houses like that … they do. A company called Ideabox in Oregon started doing that in 2012.)
What You See Is What You Get
“It doesn’t look like I imagined it.” These are the words you don’t want to hear your wife say after you painstakingly built your new tiny house from the design plans she sketched out. Well, with a pre-built tiny home you won’t have to worry. Whether you got to set foot in a real model home, or just browsed through an online catalog, the prefab house you get will look exactly like the model. They were built from pieces from the same facility, after all!
One last thing about design: a common complaint about tiny house designs is that “they all look the same.” Actually, this is deliberate, and it has to do with the nature of tiny homes in general. They are usually built, and then transported to a lot, kind of like a mobile home, but without the “wide load” difficulties. Many of them are built to remain on a trailer, but some are transported to their site, then removed from their wheels and set upon a more permanent foundation. Because of this, the majority of tiny house designs are simple rectangles. You can find tiny house designs that are more creative and elaborate, but they’ll tend to be bigger tiny houses. The bigger they are, the more pieces they’ll come with, and the longer they’ll take to build. When shopping for your tiny house, a good strategy is to look at the inside first. Try to imagine what living in the space will be like. Since tiny houses are, well, tiny, and have less space, it’s the interior that matters the most.
There are a lot of options out there when it comes to prefab tiny house floor plans, so you’re almost certain to find something you like. And while they might be slightly more than the cost of building a house from scratch, the ease of building a prefab tiny house might make the price difference worth it to you. Fortunately, it’s a trend that’s still growing, and more and more companies are offering attractive, well-built prefab tiny houses.
Once you’ve decided to live in a tiny home, one of the main decisions you’ll be facing is whether to build your new dwelling yourself, or purchase a prefab tiny house. Here are some benefits of buying one, as opposed to going the DIY route.
Designed By the Pros
Getting out the draft paper and creating your own small house design is appealing, sure, but it’s a project that comes with a lot of headaches – and most of those headaches are simply impossible to foresee. It’s very difficult to visualize exactly how a small living space you draw on paper will materialize in the real, three-dimensional world. This is part of the reason why architects are expensive and have to go to school for a long time. And there’s a good chance a prefabricated tiny house will have been designed by an architect, which is something most traditional homes can’t even claim.
Built By the Pros (and You)
Statistically, it’s very unlikely that you are Bob Villa or part of his construction team. Building a tiny house from the ground up is, naturally, easier to build than a large traditional house, but that doesn’t mean anyone can just jump right in and start hammering pieces together. When building a prefab tiny house, however, you can just jump right in and start hammering pieces together. As long as you follow the instructions, that is. These are referred to as kit houses, and they work just like a scale model car: you buy the pieces, which are pre-cut and ready to assemble, and put it all together yourself. The other kind of prefab house requires no assembly at all. It comes completely built already. You simply deliver it to the spot you’d like to live, make sure the floor is level, and plug in the water and power.
No Shopping List Required
If you’ve ever undertaken a large (or not-so-large) home improvement project, you may have experienced countless frustrating trips to the hardware store for parts you forgot, or discovered you need. Once you got home with the new materials you found you needed some other kind of building supplies. Sometimes it seems it’ll never end. This isn’t a problem with prefab tiny houses. Everything you need is included. It’s almost like buying a house in a box from IKEA and putting it together yourself. (Incidentally, if you’re wondering why nobody makes IKEA-style houses like that … they do. A company called Ideabox in Oregon started doing that in 2012.)
What You See Is What You Get
“It doesn’t look like I imagined it.” These are the words you don’t want to hear your wife say after you painstakingly built your new tiny house from the design plans she sketched out. Well, with a pre-built tiny home you won’t have to worry. Whether you got to set foot in a real model home, or just browsed through an online catalog, the prefab house you get will look exactly like the model. They were built from pieces from the same facility, after all!
One last thing about design: a common complaint about tiny house designs is that “they all look the same.” Actually, this is deliberate, and it has to do with the nature of tiny homes in general. They are usually built, and then transported to a lot, kind of like a mobile home, but without the “wide load” difficulties. Many of them are built to remain on a trailer, but some are transported to their site, then removed from their wheels and set upon a more permanent foundation. Because of this, the majority of tiny house designs are simple rectangles. You can find tiny house designs that are more creative and elaborate, but they’ll tend to be bigger tiny houses. The bigger they are, the more pieces they’ll come with, and the longer they’ll take to build. When shopping for your tiny house, a good strategy is to look at the inside first. Try to imagine what living in the space will be like. Since tiny houses are, well, tiny, and have less space, it’s the interior that matters the most.
There are a lot of options out there when it comes to prefab tiny house floor plans, so you’re almost certain to find something you like. And while they might be slightly more than the cost of building a house from scratch, the ease of building a prefab tiny house might make the price difference worth it to you. Fortunately, it’s a trend that’s still growing, and more and more companies are offering attractive, well-built prefab tiny houses.