$9 Computer with Built-in WiFi

Its Kickstarter description says CHIP is a computer for students, teachers, grandparents, children, artists, makers, hackers, and inventors. It includes a fully integrated battery power circuit that allows you to make your project mobile with just a 3.7v LiPo battery. The dev board-looking device has specifications at par with standard traditional computers: 1GHz processor, 512MB … Read more

Consumer Sovereignty and the Apocalypse-proof Dream

Dreaming tiny dreams has become a favorite pastime in the past five or 10 years.  The “tiny house movement” is gaining greater traction as ever more people choose to downsize for economic or ecological reasons. A small house, usually being defined as one offering less than 400 sq ft of space, offers a stimulating challenge about living … Read more

The Small Footprint Kitchen

This is the Ecooking unit that Italian manufacturer Clei showed in Milan at the 2014 Salone del Mobile furniture fair. The Ecooking kitchen’s moving parts rotate around a central pivot that also serves as the exhaust pipe for the sink and dishwasher — and as the conduit for the plumbing and electricity. The tower can … Read more

A $200 Dome Home

It’s a tiny geodesic dome built for a grand total of two hundred bucks by Jeffery the builder at Aprovecho, ” a regional resource for researching, demonstrating, and educating the techniques and strategies of sustainable living” that will be a story on its own. “To begin the project I constructed a nine-foot, ten sided deck … Read more

The Murphy Bed

For years, one of the best ways to achieve the open-plan bedroom has been to install a Murphy bed—a hinged bed that folds vertically into a wall closet when not in use. Various legends have it that in the early 20th century, William Lawrence Murphy applied for a patent on the device, which he devised … Read more

Tiny Home – Japanese Style

A teacher built a tiny house in the forest. Brian Schulz recently completed his forest house in the Oregon Woods. He built the home himself, and the design and concept of it were inspired by the traditional Japanese Minka homes, which are built using local materials and steeply sloped roofs to create affordable, open structures. … Read more

City Zoning Laws Allow Tiny Homes for the Homeless

Madison Wisconsin has changed its zoning laws to allow tents and tiny houses on property owned by churches and other non-profit organizations. The groups would need to have a management plan for sleeping areas, restrooms and parking, under the amendment. Occupy Madison’s “OM Build” initiative to create a sustainable village of “tiny homes” for the homeless … Read more

Reflections on Right Sizing

“The foxes have holes, and the birds of heaven have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” and so it is today for many of his followers. Despite all the warnings about the snares laid by moneylenders, despite the fact that gage mort is literally translated as a pledge to … Read more

Credit Where Credit is Due

While credit for the Tiny Home Movement can’t be assigned to just one person or house, there is one influence that seems to have held particular sway. The prohibition on small houses, itself, has probably done more to shape this movement and the houses most associated with it than anything else.  Loopholes in our antiquated … Read more