How much space do you really need? My house, for example, is a petite 800 or so square feet, and while I could see it getting cramped if I had a large quantity of children, I'd class it as a nice, cozy size. It's also a mansion compared to the home of Jay Shafer, whose home is a massive 89 square feet total. No, I didn't make a typo, the house can be pulled behind a truck and takes up as much space as one of the larger rooms in most people's homes.
As one might expect, Shafer's home doesn't have the amenities that most homes do. The kitchen is just a toaster oven and a fridge, the living room is not ideal for entertaining and nobody is going to be standing upright in the bedroom. The bathroom is also unique, given that the entire room is a shower, which could be either annoying or the pinnacle of convenience.
He says he has made a tiny house because he wanted to be environmentally conscious, and cutting out all wasted space would make the place easier to heat and give the home a much smaller footprint. I imagine he's right about that, there isn't even enough space to have appliances with a large power drain, and the cramped conditions would encourage one to get out of the house a lot more often than a spacious home would.
In a way, it makes one consider how necessary the rooms of their home are. I know that as a single person, there are plenty of spaces in my house which never really get used. There are rooms that are currently unnecessary and I even have a hallway with no obvious purpose, except to make moving furniture surprisingly annoying. This is the point where I consider whether I could give up my house and live in one of these tiny places.
Well, I really can't imagine happily moving to somewhere a little over a tenth the size of my current home. It's not as though I'm claustrophobic, but I would not want to be living in a place where you can't really move. In all the places I've lived, even the smallest of them have had enough room so that you could easily go from place to place, and never really felt cramped. It's not so much a need to have a massive place, just that room to move is one of my priorities.
The other problem is that you could never have anyone else around. My house might not be overflowing with people, but I do like the option of having someone come over. This is an even larger problem for people in serious relationships, since the prospect of moving in together is completely out when you really can only fit one person in the house for any length of time.
So no, I'm not going to be getting a tiny shack to live in for the rest of my days, and I imagine the majority of other people in the world won't do the same. Sure, houses and apartments may often be a bit more than we actually need, but that just means we can stay in them longer, and they'll still fit as our lives change.
Yet, I also know that there are other people in the world like Jay Shafer, who would really like the idea of living in the smallest house imaginable. Instead of balking at the challenges faced by living in a such a tiny home, they would embrace them, and figure out ways to make space even more efficiently used and compact. More power to them, but I'll keep my house.
