Show Notes:
In this episode we cover Tiny homes, what they are and why they’are becoming so popular.   What is the difference between ADU’s Additional Dwelling Units, guesthouse, and granny flats.
Transcript:
Interviewer: Hello everybody. It’s Episode 33 of the Panelized Prefab Kit Home Building Show. With me in studio is the President and Founder of Landmark Home and Land Company, a company which has been helping people build their new homes where they want exactly as they want across the nation and worldwide since 1993, Steve Tuma. Steve, how are you doing, buddy?
Steve Landmark: I am doing great.
Interviewer: Fantastic.
Steve Landmark: It’s always a good day in Landmark Home and Land Company Land, helping people come up with some cool ideas on how to get their home.
Interviewer: So Steve, today I want to bring up a subject that seems to be on the minds of a whole lot of people on social media, in magazines, at coffee houses, and that’s a subject of tiny houses. People seem to be downsizing their lives all over the place, their cars, their stuff really, and now this phenomenon known as the tiny house. So if you will, tell our listeners what the heck is a tiny house?
Steve Landmark: Well, tiny home is kind of an interesting concept that evolved. I think after the economic crash in ‘08 and ‘09 where people are building big houses and then suddenly financially, the world had a huge amount of problems. So suddenly go the other way. Instead of build a big McMansion, let’s go build a tiny home. So the concept being that hey, do we really need 8,000 square feet, 14 garages, 12 bedrooms, things like that? And what’s the reality of what you need? So the kind of the pendulum swung the other way to like, “Hey, let’s live in 200-square-foot homes.
Interviewer: Right.
Steve Landmark: So my belief and from what I saw is that the concept came that there are a lot of people that weren’t able to afford a home for financial reasons, loss of job, variety of different situations that came up. So the concept came up of, “Hey, I’ll go move into the parents’ or my friend’s yard. I’ll just put a little house on a trailer because I could get around zoning and building codes.” As long as the trailer has a license, you can live in it just like if you had a motor home in your driveway.
So what happens is people came up and started developing these tiny homes. It kind of sounded cool. It’s in Vogue. It’s like, “Hey, there are financial issues. Let’s go the other way. Let’s build a little house. I’ll live in 200 or 300 square feet.” So what ends up happening with that is it sounds kind of cool but imagine all your clothes in the close and everything and you’re just cooking this killer garlic dinner and it gets through your whole 200-square-foot home and for the next week your clothes smell like garlic? So there is the neat idea behind it and then there’s OK, as it settles and people get into it, the reality of this, of you can’t really put a husband and wife, two kids, and a dog in 200 square feet. So sometimes these homes get a little bit bigger. So I think now they kind of consider tiny homes less than 800 or 1000 square feet.
So in that evolution of this where they started having a lot of people putting these secondary houses like on trailers on their backyard, people are like, “Hey, wait a second. Neighbors are looking over the fence saying, “Is there a septic in that tiny home? Where is the water? Why suddenly are there 12 people at this house?”
So the Zoning and Building Departments and communities kind of started pushing the word they have to regulate it. So sometimes what it has evolved to is where you have some communities will allow smaller homes. So if you check with building departments, a lot of them will have a minimum of 900 or 1000 square feet.
Interviewer: Right.
Steve Landmark: So in a lot of these places,