RobertSmalls - now with 350ft²! - Page 2

benpope · 01-07-11, 01:48 PM

My wife and I are moving into a small house this weekend - 650 sq ft. We are going from 1500 sq ft, but I think we are going to like small house living. One thing I know is that any sort of renovation is going to be easier because I have less house to deal with. I don't think there is going to be any excess capacity like RobertSmalls has though. Kudos to you for thinking smaller.

After a long hiatus, I too will enjoin the holy war against entropy, AC_Hacker. May our R values ever increase and our utility bills ever dwindle!

AC_Hacker · 01-08-11, 01:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by benpope

...I too will enjoin the holy war against entropy, AC_Hacker. May our R values ever increase and our utility bills ever dwindle!

I hear the music playing, I see the people cheering, I even feel a new Eco-Pledge of Allegiance coming on!

-AC_Hacker

RobertSmalls · 01-08-11, 09:15 PM

What do you need in a house? A place to cook, eat, entertain, play, sleep, and work. The kitchen and living room satisfy the first four, eliminating any need for a separate dining room.

A bedroom doesn't need to be any larger than required to hold a bed and store clothes. A 6'x8' cell, plus closet, is just about the minimum for a queen bed and a dresser. Add some insulation to the interior walls for noise reduction and a reclining chair with a bookshelf and/or television, and you have a place to get away from the other occupants of the house.

I do my computing on the television in the living room, from the couch or the reclining chair. You could set up a second computer on the television in the bedroom if you need to have two. Hence, no need for a seperate room with a desk. As for a workbench, that belongs in the garage and provides another way for occupants of the house spend time apart.

You'll also need an indoor bathroom, and 5'x6' is the minimum for a western bathroom with 5' tub and linen closet inside.

Those of you with additional rooms: what do you do with them? How much square footage is dedicated to walkways and interior walls?

I laid out a few floorplans to see what might work. I could live very comfortably in 221ft² plus an attached, 400ft² garage with shoes, coats, and major appliances in it. There would be room for a workbench, tool chests, a project car, and a daily driver in there.

I could move the bed-room to an attic, under 45° rafters, and tell the zoning board the whole thing is 578ft² including the foot-thick exterior walls, or about 1000ft² including garage. See? Now it doesn't sound crowded at all.

Piwoslaw · 01-10-11, 01:26 AM

In Central Europe there are lots of families living in apartments with just 25-40 m2 (250-400 ft2). "Families" in this case may mean only two people, but may also mean 2 parents + 2-3 kids + grandma. The living room often doubles as the parents' bedroom, the small bedroom is for the kids plus storage (but you don't need much storage space when you can't afford to buy junk to store...). I've seen a few apartments with no separate kitchen, only a sink + stove + fridge in one corner of the bedroom. I've also seen tiny apartments rented by 5-8 students with a portable stove on the washing machine in the bathroom.

You don't need a tub in the bathroom, since you'll only be taking showers if you want (or need) to save water.

Hmm, which rooms do you use least often? The kitchen and the bathroom, each for an hour or less per day, so do they need to be heated 24/7? Give that some thought. A hundred years ago having your own bathroom was considered a luxury, the stardard was one bathroom per 3-10 apartments, or an outhouse and a pot of warm water for washing. Yes, sharing bathrooms or kitchens with family members is not easy, let alone with strangers, since everyone seems to 'needs to go' at the same time

The problem with today's way of life is that everyone thinks that they need more of everything, instead of getting by with what they have. If you don't have a 4000ft2 dollhouse with 7 bathrooms, an individual room for each and every activity (no matter how seldom you need it), and a three car garage full of old junk, then you're not worth anything.

Oh, I just remembered that when I was in Berkeley, the room I rented was something like 18'x18' or maybe smaller. It was just one room, with the kitchen in one corner and enclosed shower + toilet + sink in another. In the other two corners were a bed and a sofa + small table, and that's it. Having grown up in a 100m2 house with a garage and yard it felt cramped at first, but I got used to it since it was quite functional. A little rearranging would allow two people to live there.

strider3700 · 01-10-11, 01:44 AM

my old house was just over 800 sqft with 2 bedrooms. 400 of that was way out of proportion living room and kitchen. I also has a just under 300 sqft shop. It was too much space for just me. Lots of room with my wife and starting to get tight with 1 baby mostly due to the giant living room. 2 kids wouldn't have worked.

MN Renovator · 01-11-11, 06:43 AM

You could go smaller with good design and probably not lose much comfort versus 400sq ft.

Combining the toilet into the shower area is an idea and it doesn't matter if the toilet gets wet. You don't really need a tub, I barely fit in anything smaller than one of the small hot-tub style bathtubs due to my height so I always shower, less water usage that way too.

Using an open attic second level design for sleeping or whatever purposes you wish is a good idea, depending on ceiling height requirements you could even manage a tiered system of two levels in the attic area. Code requirements might require that it only have the single top level though, at least when it is initially built so it can pass and I think you would have trouble getting it to pass as a legal sleeping area so you'd have to designate it as storage, I think.

You wouldn't have any storage space in a house built very small and would probably use the garage attic or if there is an unheated basement or crawlspace to store things and you would lose space for entertaining or even inviting someone over for the night unless sharing the bed but for ideas on how to live in a very small space, this site might be very helpful since they show their 65 square foot house that appears to be designed right, fits a queen size bed too.
XS-House

[This paragraph is a little off topic to robertsmalls place and a small home, feel free to skip] With all that said, I like to be able to have ample room for dry and canned good storage and enough dishes, pans, and other cookware which requires a decent sized kitchen. I like the idea of bringing family over and usually that involves being able to fit up to 20 people(eventually, family is expanding with children on both sides) in the house to eat dinner so for me having the ability without putting people on two separate floors was needed, in my case the kitchen table could have 6 comfortably or 8 with a little squeeze, I think I have another leaf to add. Then I've got a pop-open table and couch space for the rest to fit in the adjacent living room that has no walls between it. Also to have space for another person or two in the house requires another bedroom, in my case I can get away with about 1000 sq ft for what I want. If I was living alone and didn't want to ever have friends over to have a little party now and then or invite family or have roommates, I'd probably be in the 800 sq ft range since I still would like to have space for storage and a separate computer area and my home theater system which has a projector that needs a good 10 foot throw to produce a 93" image but I probably shouldn't mention that as it is supposed to use a little under 200 watts in econ mode and 230 in bright mode.

I'd imagine super-insulating and air sealing a new 400sq ft internal space would leave a 9,000 BTU air source heat pump barely running at 5 degrees F and even 110 degrees F. If I remember right, ASHRAE recommends that ventilating air exchange be about 1/3 of the air in the house and I think the manual J's definition of "Tight" is 30% air exchange every hour. Seems like quite a bit of air to me but in a small space with a person in it, well air sealed it would likely get a bit humid with perspiration and exhalation without some air being swapped out. Of course there are good heat recovery ventilation devices designed to go this with reasonable efficiency.

Have you considered the size needs of your heating and cooling system for the lowest and highest design temperatures for your area? It seems that the smallest natural gas furnaces I can find are 35,000 BTU input and more expensive modular ones that go as low as 22k BTU but they are larger and I assume far more expensive units. For air conditioning the smallest normal units are 18k BTU. This is normal stuff though, a super-insulated structure is probably going to use so much less to where I couldn't see a ground source heat pump being a cost effective solution and an air source inverter heat pump doesn't function in extreme cold(some can do 0 degrees F and slightly below but I don't know of anything that can handle -20f) so you'd need a backup solution of some kind. You've probably got it planned out, what are your ideas on HVAC for such a small place at this point? What would you expect heating and cooling costs to be, I'd imagine nearly nothing especially outside of the extremes with passive construction using windows for heat gain in the winter and awnings to provide cover against the sun in the summer.

redneck · 01-11-11, 10:08 AM

According to this guys thoughts on the minimal amount of sq. ft. a person needs to live in, we are all living beyond our needs.

Nine Tiny Feet

Claustrophobics people need not apply...

>

MN Renovator · 01-11-11, 11:28 AM

I agree that I'm living in a space beyond my needs, the major factor towards that is that I moved to a neighborhood where if I sold the house, I would most likely get more money from it if I sold it sized to fit a family of 4. I think it is on the smaller side of that but it has three bedrooms so it seems to work that way.

If I didn't care about resale value or the time on market for my home when I sell it eventually, I'd probably have tracked down a place 800 sq ft but houses that small can't be found where I live. The smallest looking ones from the outside are single story homes that are 1000 sq ft, but they still have the basement directly under them, unfinished or finished it is 2000 sq ft. There are a few split level 1600 sq ft homes but there aren't that many of those.

With a 400 sq ft house, you might be hard pressed to find someone to even look at it if you wanted to sell it, so you would need to make sure you bought it without planning to sell it. ...and when you do the buyer will likely not even care that you superinsulated and the energy costs will be low.

RobertSmalls · 01-11-11, 06:08 PM

This isn't strictly hypothetical. I'd like to move out of my current house ideally in spring 2013. I could purchase an old (1955), oversized (1000-1500sq ft), poorly insulated house in a fairly nice neighborhood and spend the summer renovating it, or I could build one that meets my needs a little better.

The purchased house in the village sells for $120k, plus the roughly $60k cost of servicing the mortgage. I would expect to recover $120k of inflation-adjusted dollars upon the sale of the house.

Building a new, 400-600 sq ft house plus attached garage woud be dramatically less expensive. I'd want to have the foundation, framing, siding, and utility entry ports done for me, have insulation, flooring, and drywall delivered, and I can handle the rest. I figure $30k should be enough to get me to that stage. You can forget about a bank lending you money for a project like this (I assume), so everything but the land would need to be out of pocket. Upside: the house is paid off before it's built!

As for heating, I could look to the Passivhaus. Important features include a heat recovery system on the ventilation air, R-13 vacuum-insulated glazing, and so little heat loss that the heat of people, their toys, and sunlight are generally sufficient to keep the house warm. If it gets too cold, I could turn on a 200W projector.

But seriously, I have a 6000BTU/hr Frigidaire ASHP that I could hack up into a GSHP with a correspondingly small field loop if a natural gas or electric resistive solution can't be found.

Regarding guests and parties, I require the following: A couch for three, a rocking/reclining chair with stool, and kitchen table for three. So I count 7 guests, and that's excluding the patio.

I am aware that the resale value would be quite limited, and the house would be too small for more than two to occupy (and the WAF of a tiny house is very limited, so even two is in question). Two possible solutions come to mind.

One, you could leave room to double the size of the house.

Two, you could accept that you will sell it for $10k less than it cost to build - maybe $25k plus the cost of the land. The money you lose on the sale of the house is less than you would have spent servicing a mortgage, provided that you stay at least a few years.

Anyway, I have some time to mull this idea over. Hmm, I wonder what the smallest house ever sold in this county is. Perhaps Zillow can answer.

Edit: Yes, it can.

Code:

Currently for sale are a 543ft² crackhouse:
10/20/2006	 Sold	 $10,000	 -37.5%	 $18	 Public Record	
09/01/2005	 Sold	 $16,000	 -36%	 $29	 Public Record	
08/11/1998	 Sold	 $25,000	 --	 $46	 Public Record

A 576ft² crackhouse:
05/20/2010	 Sold	 $9,500	 	-79.8%	 $16	 Public Record	
06/28/2002	 Sold	 $47,000	 --	 $81	 Public Record

And a 460ft² mobile home in an expanding suburb:
05/12/2006	 Sold	 $60,000	 150%	 $130	 Public Record	
08/10/1992	 Sold	 $24,000	 --	 $52	 Public Record

strider3700 · 01-11-11, 06:54 PM

up here at least I believe the minimum size new home allowed by code is 650 sqft. The banks won't even mortgage a place under 500 sqft. Everything is designed to force you into larger. I can't imagine how many kids I could have and still have some space in this house at 2400 sqft. Those 5000 make zero sense with me. I haven't been in the upstairs living room or the room my wife uses for sewing in the last 2 days... It's 1100 up 1100 down...

01-10-11, 01:26 AM	#14
Piwoslaw Super Moderator Join Date: May 2009 Location: Warsaw, Poland Posts: 961 Thanks: 188 Thanked 110 Times in 86 Posts	In Central Europe there are lots of families living in apartments with just 25-40 m2 (250-400 ft2). "Families" in this case may mean only two people, but may also mean 2 parents + 2-3 kids + grandma. The living room often doubles as the parents' bedroom, the small bedroom is for the kids plus storage (but you don't need much storage space when you can't afford to buy junk to store...). I've seen a few apartments with no separate kitchen, only a sink + stove + fridge in one corner of the bedroom. I've also seen tiny apartments rented by 5-8 students with a portable stove on the washing machine in the bathroom. You don't need a tub in the bathroom, since you'll only be taking showers if you want (or need) to save water. Hmm, which rooms do you use least often? The kitchen and the bathroom, each for an hour or less per day, so do they need to be heated 24/7? Give that some thought. A hundred years ago having your own bathroom was considered a luxury, the stardard was one bathroom per 3-10 apartments, or an outhouse and a pot of warm water for washing. Yes, sharing bathrooms or kitchens with family members is not easy, let alone with strangers, since everyone seems to 'needs to go' at the same time The problem with today's way of life is that everyone thinks that they need more of everything, instead of getting by with what they have. If you don't have a 4000ft2 dollhouse with 7 bathrooms, an individual room for each and every activity (no matter how seldom you need it), and a three car garage full of old junk, then you're not worth anything. Oh, I just remembered that when I was in Berkeley, the room I rented was something like 18'x18' or maybe smaller. It was just one room, with the kitchen in one corner and enclosed shower + toilet + sink in another. In the other two corners were a bed and a sofa + small table, and that's it. Having grown up in a 100m2 house with a garage and yard it felt cramped at first, but I got used to it since it was quite functional. A little rearranging would allow two people to live there. __________________ Ecorenovation - the bottomless piggy bank that tries to tame the energy hog.

01-11-11, 06:43 AM	#16
MN Renovator Less usage=Cheaper bills Join Date: Nov 2010 Location: Minneapolis, MN Posts: 939 Thanks: 41 Thanked 116 Times in 90 Posts	You could go smaller with good design and probably not lose much comfort versus 400sq ft. Combining the toilet into the shower area is an idea and it doesn't matter if the toilet gets wet. You don't really need a tub, I barely fit in anything smaller than one of the small hot-tub style bathtubs due to my height so I always shower, less water usage that way too. Using an open attic second level design for sleeping or whatever purposes you wish is a good idea, depending on ceiling height requirements you could even manage a tiered system of two levels in the attic area. Code requirements might require that it only have the single top level though, at least when it is initially built so it can pass and I think you would have trouble getting it to pass as a legal sleeping area so you'd have to designate it as storage, I think. You wouldn't have any storage space in a house built very small and would probably use the garage attic or if there is an unheated basement or crawlspace to store things and you would lose space for entertaining or even inviting someone over for the night unless sharing the bed but for ideas on how to live in a very small space, this site might be very helpful since they show their 65 square foot house that appears to be designed right, fits a queen size bed too. XS-House [This paragraph is a little off topic to robertsmalls place and a small home, feel free to skip] With all that said, I like to be able to have ample room for dry and canned good storage and enough dishes, pans, and other cookware which requires a decent sized kitchen. I like the idea of bringing family over and usually that involves being able to fit up to 20 people(eventually, family is expanding with children on both sides) in the house to eat dinner so for me having the ability without putting people on two separate floors was needed, in my case the kitchen table could have 6 comfortably or 8 with a little squeeze, I think I have another leaf to add. Then I've got a pop-open table and couch space for the rest to fit in the adjacent living room that has no walls between it. Also to have space for another person or two in the house requires another bedroom, in my case I can get away with about 1000 sq ft for what I want. If I was living alone and didn't want to ever have friends over to have a little party now and then or invite family or have roommates, I'd probably be in the 800 sq ft range since I still would like to have space for storage and a separate computer area and my home theater system which has a projector that needs a good 10 foot throw to produce a 93" image but I probably shouldn't mention that as it is supposed to use a little under 200 watts in econ mode and 230 in bright mode. I'd imagine super-insulating and air sealing a new 400sq ft internal space would leave a 9,000 BTU air source heat pump barely running at 5 degrees F and even 110 degrees F. If I remember right, ASHRAE recommends that ventilating air exchange be about 1/3 of the air in the house and I think the manual J's definition of "Tight" is 30% air exchange every hour. Seems like quite a bit of air to me but in a small space with a person in it, well air sealed it would likely get a bit humid with perspiration and exhalation without some air being swapped out. Of course there are good heat recovery ventilation devices designed to go this with reasonable efficiency. Have you considered the size needs of your heating and cooling system for the lowest and highest design temperatures for your area? It seems that the smallest natural gas furnaces I can find are 35,000 BTU input and more expensive modular ones that go as low as 22k BTU but they are larger and I assume far more expensive units. For air conditioning the smallest normal units are 18k BTU. This is normal stuff though, a super-insulated structure is probably going to use so much less to where I couldn't see a ground source heat pump being a cost effective solution and an air source inverter heat pump doesn't function in extreme cold(some can do 0 degrees F and slightly below but I don't know of anything that can handle -20f) so you'd need a backup solution of some kind. You've probably got it planned out, what are your ideas on HVAC for such a small place at this point? What would you expect heating and cooling costs to be, I'd imagine nearly nothing especially outside of the extremes with passive construction using windows for heat gain in the winter and awnings to provide cover against the sun in the summer. Last edited by MN Renovator; 01-11-11 at 06:46 AM..

01-11-11, 06:08 PM	#19
RobertSmalls Journeyman EcoRenovator Join Date: May 2009 Location: Buffalo, NY Posts: 344 Thanks: 3 Thanked 17 Times in 15 Posts	This isn't strictly hypothetical. I'd like to move out of my current house ideally in spring 2013. I could purchase an old (1955), oversized (1000-1500sq ft), poorly insulated house in a fairly nice neighborhood and spend the summer renovating it, or I could build one that meets my needs a little better. The purchased house in the village sells for $120k, plus the roughly $60k cost of servicing the mortgage. I would expect to recover $120k of inflation-adjusted dollars upon the sale of the house. Building a new, 400-600 sq ft house plus attached garage woud be dramatically less expensive. I'd want to have the foundation, framing, siding, and utility entry ports done for me, have insulation, flooring, and drywall delivered, and I can handle the rest. I figure $30k should be enough to get me to that stage. You can forget about a bank lending you money for a project like this (I assume), so everything but the land would need to be out of pocket. Upside: the house is paid off before it's built! As for heating, I could look to the Passivhaus. Important features include a heat recovery system on the ventilation air, R-13 vacuum-insulated glazing, and so little heat loss that the heat of people, their toys, and sunlight are generally sufficient to keep the house warm. If it gets too cold, I could turn on a 200W projector. But seriously, I have a 6000BTU/hr Frigidaire ASHP that I could hack up into a GSHP with a correspondingly small field loop if a natural gas or electric resistive solution can't be found. Regarding guests and parties, I require the following: A couch for three, a rocking/reclining chair with stool, and kitchen table for three. So I count 7 guests, and that's excluding the patio. I am aware that the resale value would be quite limited, and the house would be too small for more than two to occupy (and the WAF of a tiny house is very limited, so even two is in question). Two possible solutions come to mind. One, you could leave room to double the size of the house. Two, you could accept that you will sell it for $10k less than it cost to build - maybe $25k plus the cost of the land. The money you lose on the sale of the house is less than you would have spent servicing a mortgage, provided that you stay at least a few years. Anyway, I have some time to mull this idea over. Hmm, I wonder what the smallest house ever sold in this county is. Perhaps Zillow can answer. Edit: Yes, it can. Code: Currently for sale are a 543ft² crackhouse: 10/20/2006 Sold $10,000 -37.5% $18 Public Record 09/01/2005 Sold $16,000 -36% $29 Public Record 08/11/1998 Sold $25,000 -- $46 Public Record A 576ft² crackhouse: 05/20/2010 Sold $9,500 -79.8% $16 Public Record 06/28/2002 Sold $47,000 -- $81 Public Record And a 460ft² mobile home in an expanding suburb: 05/12/2006 Sold $60,000 150% $130 Public Record 08/10/1992 Sold $24,000 -- $52 Public Record Last edited by RobertSmalls; 01-11-11 at 06:29 PM..

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01-07-11, 01:48 PM	#11
benpope Helper EcoRenovator Join Date: Jan 2010 Location: Little Rock, AR Posts: 95 Thanks: 16 Thanked 13 Times in 12 Posts	My wife and I are moving into a small house this weekend - 650 sq ft. We are going from 1500 sq ft, but I think we are going to like small house living. One thing I know is that any sort of renovation is going to be easier because I have less house to deal with. I don't think there is going to be any excess capacity like RobertSmalls has though. Kudos to you for thinking smaller. After a long hiatus, I too will enjoin the holy war against entropy, AC_Hacker. May our R values ever increase and our utility bills ever dwindle!

01-08-11, 09:15 PM	#13
RobertSmalls Journeyman EcoRenovator Join Date: May 2009 Location: Buffalo, NY Posts: 344 Thanks: 3 Thanked 17 Times in 15 Posts	What do you need in a house? A place to cook, eat, entertain, play, sleep, and work. The kitchen and living room satisfy the first four, eliminating any need for a separate dining room. A bedroom doesn't need to be any larger than required to hold a bed and store clothes. A 6'x8' cell, plus closet, is just about the minimum for a queen bed and a dresser. Add some insulation to the interior walls for noise reduction and a reclining chair with a bookshelf and/or television, and you have a place to get away from the other occupants of the house. I do my computing on the television in the living room, from the couch or the reclining chair. You could set up a second computer on the television in the bedroom if you need to have two. Hence, no need for a seperate room with a desk. As for a workbench, that belongs in the garage and provides another way for occupants of the house spend time apart. You'll also need an indoor bathroom, and 5'x6' is the minimum for a western bathroom with 5' tub and linen closet inside. Those of you with additional rooms: what do you do with them? How much square footage is dedicated to walkways and interior walls? I laid out a few floorplans to see what might work. I could live very comfortably in 221ft² plus an attached, 400ft² garage with shoes, coats, and major appliances in it. There would be room for a workbench, tool chests, a project car, and a daily driver in there. I could move the bed-room to an attic, under 45° rafters, and tell the zoning board the whole thing is 578ft² including the foot-thick exterior walls, or about 1000ft² including garage. See? Now it doesn't sound crowded at all.

01-10-11, 01:44 AM	#15
strider3700 Master EcoRenovator Join Date: Dec 2008 Location: Vancouver Island BC Posts: 745 Thanks: 23 Thanked 37 Times in 30 Posts	my old house was just over 800 sqft with 2 bedrooms. 400 of that was way out of proportion living room and kitchen. I also has a just under 300 sqft shop. It was too much space for just me. Lots of room with my wife and starting to get tight with 1 baby mostly due to the giant living room. 2 kids wouldn't have worked.

01-11-11, 10:08 AM	#17
redneck Helper EcoRenovator Join Date: Dec 2010 Location: US Posts: 57 Thanks: 1 Thanked 17 Times in 11 Posts	According to this guys thoughts on the minimal amount of sq. ft. a person needs to live in, we are all living beyond our needs. Nine Tiny Feet Claustrophobics people need not apply... >

01-11-11, 11:28 AM	#18
MN Renovator Less usage=Cheaper bills Join Date: Nov 2010 Location: Minneapolis, MN Posts: 939 Thanks: 41 Thanked 116 Times in 90 Posts	I agree that I'm living in a space beyond my needs, the major factor towards that is that I moved to a neighborhood where if I sold the house, I would most likely get more money from it if I sold it sized to fit a family of 4. I think it is on the smaller side of that but it has three bedrooms so it seems to work that way. If I didn't care about resale value or the time on market for my home when I sell it eventually, I'd probably have tracked down a place 800 sq ft but houses that small can't be found where I live. The smallest looking ones from the outside are single story homes that are 1000 sq ft, but they still have the basement directly under them, unfinished or finished it is 2000 sq ft. There are a few split level 1600 sq ft homes but there aren't that many of those. With a 400 sq ft house, you might be hard pressed to find someone to even look at it if you wanted to sell it, so you would need to make sure you bought it without planning to sell it. ...and when you do the buyer will likely not even care that you superinsulated and the energy costs will be low.

01-11-11, 06:54 PM	#20
strider3700 Master EcoRenovator Join Date: Dec 2008 Location: Vancouver Island BC Posts: 745 Thanks: 23 Thanked 37 Times in 30 Posts	up here at least I believe the minimum size new home allowed by code is 650 sqft. The banks won't even mortgage a place under 500 sqft. Everything is designed to force you into larger. I can't imagine how many kids I could have and still have some space in this house at 2400 sqft. Those 5000 make zero sense with me. I haven't been in the upstairs living room or the room my wife uses for sewing in the last 2 days... It's 1100 up 1100 down...