Tiny Homes For People Who Can Really Use Them

Maud and Everett Lewis, Marshalltown Nova Scotia

I am a tiny house advocate and enthusiast and have been ever since my grandparents lived in an approximately sixteen foot (4.87 meter) square, one story house.  I can remember it from about the time I was four.  When my mother was young, she, her older sister and my grandparents lived there. Two  small rooms and a small kitchen with a water closet and an outhouse for the summer.   It has always been one of my favorite houses, with my grandmother's craft projects and brick-a-brac, my grandfather's pipe tobacco, a 2nd edition Webster's unabridged on a pedestal table, books on the shelf, magazines, newspapers,  a standing lamp shaded by a large photograph of the White Mountains and not much room to walk around in.  I remember my entire family in there with my grandparents, it never seemed crowded.   

My grandparents were working poor, working across the border in a small shoe factory in Rochester,  New Hampshire, we lived in Maine.  Saving enough to purchase a small farm at the end of the depression, when their oldest daughter and her family moved into “the little house” until they retired from small scale farming.  My aunt moved with her husband to another state and my grandparents returned to a house so small they could afford it on their social security.  

I live in my own tiny house, though when I built it the term wasn't in use.  It was just a really small house inspired by my grandparents' home.   Having made the incredibly practical choice of a music major and the career of a private music teacher,  it was what I could afford and it suited me too.  When I found out about “tiny houses,” in the period when the insane vulgarity of the McMansion was blighting the country and ruining people whose TV based dreams and criminally granted mortgages were driving so many into ruin.  I said, sign me on, I'm already a member of the club.  Only, as I started looking at the tiny houses with their rather large prices I quickly saw it wasn't anything I could get on board with.  I signed up for a number of tiny house sites and saw the adorable and even, sometimes, cool modern bijoux that they featured and increasingly felt alienated from them.  They were just radically downscale versions of the McMansion. Seeing a house as big as most peoples' bedroom with a price tag going into the upper five figures (American money) turned my stomach.  

Then it happened.  One of the more active tiny house blogs used the phrase “trailer trash” and I was over that.    I immediately wrote to condemn the snobbery and class bigotry telling them how millions of children were hurt by that kind of put-down, ending my subscription.  I'm over that stuff.   

I guess for me, it all starts with the people and not the architecture and decor   I'm a tiny home person, I guess, not really a tiny house people.   I think there's an enormous need for tiny homes like my grandparents and my mother and aunt when they were children during the depression.  The poor you will always have with you and they need tiny houses a lot more than people who are just charmed by the cute little houses with the enormous prices.   This is a blog for those people, MY PEOPLE and our friends who can afford to live in a big house but aren't snobs about it.