There is a documentary about Tiny Houses on Netflix. I think it's out there on Youtube too.
My friend, Andi told me about this documentary, and last night I watched it. Tiny is about people who choose to live in micro houses. Mostly these seem to be built on trailer beds, so they can be moved, if need be, and also to get around the local ordinances that dictate the minimum square-footage required for a dwelling. Many of these residences are 200 sq ft or under. I wonder what the square footage is inside the 24-foot RV’s I’ve been looking at. My one bedroom apartment is a palatial 625!
Being mathematically challenged, I used to literally, figure-out problems like this, by drawing a floor plan, and converting the graph paper boxes to inches and feet. Them we'd make "colorforms" cut outs of the furniture and other objects, all drawn to scale, which we could move around in the sketched space to see how things would fit.
Measure both the long side and the short side of the rectangle; in this example, the length is 20 feet and the width across the rectangular patio is 10 feet. It may be helpful to draw a rectangle shape on the paper and record the measurements on the drawing.
Calculate the square footage by multiplying the length times the width of the object. In this example, 20 feet times 10 feet equals 200 square feet.
Read more about this at: ask.com
When I ballpark 95” as 8 feet, and multiply that by 24, I come up with the figure 192. I’m looking at downsizing from 625 to about 192 square feet. That’s without any slides, and truly, I’d prefer to own an RV that has no slide-outs.
That’s because I read, in a must-have guide for all prospective first time RV buyers, (and yes, I understand keywords, but my feminist hackles got up when I read the title, so I’d propose that this is a useful guide to any first timers, not just women)
http://www.amazon.com/Women-Only-Traveling-Solo-Your-ebook/dp/B005L9UPNM/
Ms. Armstrong writes that the area around the slides is a place where, as the RV ages, the summer heat and the winter winds will find their way into the motor home, because the insulation around the slide will age and begin to fail. I felt that I didn’t want slide outs even before I read Armstrong, because my life has taught me that the less moving parts a thing has, the less things will need fixing.
One of the last good things I remember from the Bloomberg administration here in overcrowded NYC, was the way he re-jiggered the minimum square footage requirement requirements for dwellings, and he held a design contest for architectural firms to design some micro-apartments.
Actually, for a long time here, people have been renting average size, one-bedroom apartments, and hiring these companies to come in and put up temporary walls to give them privacy from their roommates. They need roommates so they can afford the insane rent for apartments in New York City.
I remember a sad news story about firemen who were seriously hurt trying to fight a fire in a place that had one of these, because they were in the dark, in the smoke, finding walls where there was supposed to be open space. These temporary walls are totally illegal, but they reveal the need for smaller, more affordable space to live in in NYC. How big is the average hotel room? All a business traveler really needs is a bed, TV and a shower.
Anyway, the ever-responsive Mike Bloomberg (she wrote, ironically) held a contest for architects to design some micro living spaces and he waved his imperial wand to do away with the old square-foot requirements. I heard about this on NPR, Maybe I can find a link to that story. I know that hearing this contributed to my dream of traveling lighter, owning less stuff, and needing less space to put it in.
Just fyi: Thoreau’s cabin at Walden pond was 10 x 15, and that equals 150 square feet.