A downsizing dream has been stalled for one Anderson County man who spent his entire life savings building a tiny home that the state says is not certified to move into a mobilehome park.

Bob Pritts built the 208-square-foot home himself. It’s only 8-feet wide and 26-feet long, but is equipped with a bathroom, kitchen, and living room with a couch that converts to a bed.

“This is all I need. I just want to finally move,” said Pritts. “The movers are ready to go. The mobile home park is ready to go. I’m ready to go. But the county says ‘no.'”

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“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 give up one’s life, millions have lost their homes through mortgage exploits, and their quality of life through the service of debt.

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TreeHugger Founder, Graham Hill, Lives In A Mind-Blowing 420-Square Feet ‘Tiny Home.’ His home is a prototype of spaces from LifeEdited, Inc., a company dedicated to showing people how living in small spaces can actually be a good thing. In the video, we see Graham uses just 420 square feet of space to sleep, host a dinner party for 10 and even watch a movie projected on the wall. This is thanks to nearly every inch of the place being foldable or hidden. At the end, Graham pulled out one of the walls and turned it into a room divider for guests.

Consider the Source

 Consider the First Source!

“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 give up one’s life, millions have lost their homes through mortgage exploits, and their quality of life through the service of debt.

Find Out How to Get Your Life Back!

Solar tiny house designed by Michael Janzen and built by Bill Brooks.

PART I

PART II

PART III

PART IV

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As much as he enjoys talking about design, what Jay Scaafer really wanted to talk about in this interview was the politics of tiny houses. Why building and zoning codes are stacked against tiny houses, how the costs of purchase and upkeep compare to the big houses he calls “debtors’ prisons”, and why, when the Big One shakes the land around San Francisco Bay, he’d rather be in his tiny house than anywhere else.

Dee Williams decided to downsize from a 1,500 square foot home to a 84 square foot home after a trip to Guatemala. She built her current home, “The Little House,” herself for about $10,000. With a propane tank for heat and electricity coming from solar panels, Williams cost of living runs extremely low.

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Dan Louche built this tiny retirement house for his mother who was in need of a home.

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Over winter break, Cornell students began building an affordable and environmentally sustainable model house in Nicaragua. The students, who are part of Cornell University Sustainable Design — an organization that promotes sustainability through design — traveled to Nagarote, Nicaragua to build the house. The house will serve not only as a home for a family, but also as a platform to demonstrate ideal eco-friendly housing initiatives, said Kai Keane ’14, one of the students who led the project.

The house and its landscaping — part of the Sustainable Neighborhoods Nicaragua project — are the product of more than three semesters’ worth of research on designing sustainable and affordable housing for low-income Nicaraguan families, according to Keane. The house is scheduled to be completed around mid-February 2013, according to SNN’s press release.

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Wouter Kalis and Corinne de Korver are two Dutch designers who have long been aware of the overall importance of sustainable accommodations throughout the world. Based in Amsterdam, the duo are dedicated to socially-conscious designs that incorporate simple and often recyclable elements, such as their most recent piece, “Social Unit.”  Devised as a solution for aid organizations in Holland, the cupboard bed space is part sleeping compartment, part storage space that fits the basic sustainability criteria: they are compact, inexpensive, durable and easy to maintain. The Social Units are produced entirely from consumer plastic waste such as bottle caps and beer crates, manufactured using woodworking techniques no more complicated than sawing, drilling or cutting.
The design was a response to the conditions of homeless shelters in Amsterdam. Although shelters offer people a single room in the Netherlands, the rooms often are full of broken, chaotic interiors with not enough storage space for all the personal belongings people carry around. The designers decided to help people find their way back into society, and concluded an interior should also be inviting and with positive signals.
They talked to the staff of Salvation Army and were told furniture should be easy to clean and ‘gorilla proof’, really strong. They found this recycled consumer waste plastic, made of bottle caps and beer crates, and that triggered it. They made a design that was functional, durable and green. It’s a modern version of the historical Dutch ‘cupboard bed’, that was traditionally built into a wall to preserve warmth and have some privacy in large families. And, it has a built in psychological side effect: it makes people feel secure and comfortable by giving them their own private space.
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In the 1930s, after a prolonged nonviolent struggle, Sweden and Norway “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and thereby created the basis for something different. When the 1 percent was in charge, both countries had a history of horrendous poverty as hundreds of thousands emigrated to avoid starvation.
Under the leadership of the working class both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment.
The Swedes and Norwegians paid a price for their standards of living through nonviolent struggle. There was a time when Scandinavian workers didn’t expect that the electoral arena could deliver the change they believed in. They realized that, with the 1 percent in charge, electoral “democracy” was stacked against them, so nonviolent direct action was needed to exert the power for change.
In both countries, the troops were called out to defend the 1 percent; people died. Award-winning Swedish filmmaker Bo Widerberg told the Swedish story vividly in Ådalen 31, which depicts the strikers killed in 1931 and the sparking of a nationwide general strike.
In Norway labor seized the three largest banks, fired the top management, left the stockholders without a dime and refused to bail out any of the smaller banks. The well-purged Norwegian financial sector was not one of those countries that lurched into crisis in 2008; carefully regulated and much of it publicly owned, the sector was solid.
Society’s high level of freedom and broadly-shared prosperity began in both countries when workers and farmers, along with middle class allies, waged a nonviolent struggle that empowered the people to govern for the common good.
Consider the Source – Sweden
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The material has been dubbed “ultralight metallic microlattice,” and according to a news release sent out by UC Irvine, it consists of 99.99% air thanks to its “microlattice” cellular architecture.
It is so lightweight that the research team consisting of scientists at UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories and Caltech say in the peer-reviewed Nov. 18 issue of Science that it is the lightest material on Earth. As yet,  no one has asked them to run a correction.
“The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than a human hair,” lead author Tobias Shandler of HRL said in the release.
To understand the structure of the material, think of the  Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge — which are both light and weight efficient — but on a nano-scale.
The material in the picture above is made out of 90% nickel, but Bill Carter, manager of the architected materials group at HRL, said it can be made out of other materials as well — the nickel version was just the easiest to make.
As for the uses of such a material? That’s still to be determined. Lorenzo Valdevit, UCI’s principal investigator on the project, brought up impact protection, uses in the aerospace industry, acoustic dampening and maybe some battery applications.
Aevia — Consider the Source