Portland Alternative Dwellings (PAD) is a new tiny house construction company based in Portland, Oregon.  It’s the creation of well-known tiny-houser Dee Williams and Katy Anderson, a licensed contractor with over 20 years of construction experience.

PAD is offering tiny home plans, customized-built homes, consultations, and workshops on tiny home construction.

Their new website is built by Tammy Strobel, tiny house writer from RowdyKittens.com.

Below is a tour of one of their example homes, the Don Vardo.

The Tumbleweed Tiny House Company has just released a new video which covers the construction of the Fencl that was used for their summer tour.  There are some great details shown for those of you interested in building your own tiny home.

Tumbleweed has also recently adjusted the prices of their house plans.  The Fencl plan is now available for $795.

For anyone who may have missed this video over on Ryan Mitchell’s The Tiny Life, Jonathan Bellow’s has posted a video of his customized Fencl in the process of being built.

This is probably my favorite of the Tumbleweed designs so I was excited to see how someone has modified one for his own purposes.

Last month, the Guggenheim Museum and Google teamed up for a very innovative online design contest.   That fact in and of itself is interesting as it is a very interesting and unexpected team-up. However, what is even more interesting is the fact that the contest, entitled the “Design It: Shelter Competition” involves designing the best tiny shelter.  Participants are encouraged to design a virtual 3d 100 square foot living/working space using Google’s new Google Sketch Up software, and then place the house on a map with Google Earth.  Both Google Earth and Google Sketch Up are free to download and use.

The  contest asks participants the questions: where would you build your shelter?  And how would you respond to the environment around your shelter? Obviously, Frank Lloyd Wright was inspired by the connection of a house to its environment. The Design It: Shelter Competition seeks to reflect and incorporate Wright’s fascination with the natural elements surrounding a house.

This contest is running in conjunction with the Guggenheim’s new exhibit, running until August 23rd, entitled “Learning By Doing.” The art exhibit features shelters that were designed by students of Taliesin, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.  Through the design process, the students learn various important issues involved in design.

The Design it: Shelter Competition is open to amateur as well as professional designers. You can read more about the contest and even enter the contest at the Guggenheim’s website. Entries are being taken until August 23rd which coincides with the last day of the Learning by Doing exhibit.  (If you happen to be in New York City between now and the end of August, definitely check out this exhibit as it sounds pretty intriguing.)

The Design It: Shelter Competition rules include the following:

You can build your shelter anywhere on Earth: from city to desert, hill to valley. You cannot remove any existing buildings, but you can add on to existing structures.”

Keep your shelter small—the interior/sheltered space can be no larger than 100 square feet (9.3 square meters), and entire shelter no taller than 12 feet (3.6 meters).

Your shelter must offer protection from the elements and provide a space for one person to study and sleep. Keep it simple—no water, gas or electricity allowed.

The students at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture will choose the finalists and public voting will take place from September to October 2009.

MagCloud Magazine recently released a special e-issue of BoMoSo tiny home plans.  The issue includes 14 buildings with 21 floor plans including several that vary significantly in terms of architectural styles from many of the other tiny home plans that are available. The Tuscan designs are particularly unique to anything I’ve seen so far in the Small Home Movement.

There is also a very interesting model of an alternating tread circular staircase included.

The issue can be purchased on the MagCloud website for $15.

You may also wish to check out BoMoSo’s website.  Looks like they have a couple of interesting tiny home designs on wheels.

So all us tiny home bloggers are in a tizzy of excitement right now due to the Tiny House Project.  A group of artists, architects, and people passionate about sustainable living have gotten together on a project to build a mobile tiny home neighborhood that will serve as a traveling art exhibition.

“The Tiny House Project will put out a call for submissions asking artists for tiny house project proposals. Specific criteria for these proposals are being developed with input from members of the Project’s Advisory Committee to ensure that the resulting structures meet artistic, environmental, structural and communication objectives. A qualified selection panel will choose nine tiny house projects from the pool of applicants to receive funding (a more detailed description of this two-stage call follows). Each artist/project team will be given a 7’ x 14’ trailer bed and $23,000 to cover the cost of materials and artists’ fees associated with designing and building a tiny house that will then be incorporated into a temporarily occupied micro-community and a follow-on traveling exhibition.”

So those of you who’ve been dreaming of building your own tiny home but worrying that you simply don’t have the funds–here’s your shot.

I’m really excited to see the designs generated by this project.  In fact, even though I’m already in my own tiny home I’m really tempted to submit my own design I’d just so love to contribute to the project.

In particular, I’d really love to see some designs submitted that would work for the wheel-chair bound or people with other special needs (for example, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity).  In addition, I’d love to see designs incorporating more green materials.

If you’re interested in learning more visit The Tiny House Project . Be sure to subscribe to their RSS feed and sign up on their mailing list.

The Brightbuilt Barn is an eco-friendly 700 square feet tiny house in Rockport, Maine that was built for around $200,000.  The BrightBuilt Barn is the end result of a team of green professionals and builders that set out to see if they could build an impressive green home.  They wanted their design to be livable and affordable while having an eye towards sustainability.

There is something very unique and very special about the BrightBuilt Barn home.  This home requires no furnace even for Maine’s notoriously chilly winters.  How is this possible?  The BrightBuild Barn uses “super insulation and extreme air-tightness.”  This milestone is accomplished by creating a continuous R-40 insulated envelope, which includes the entire house, floors, walls and ceiling.   The end result is a house so well insulated that it doesn’t need a furnace.  The BrightBarn is currently on track to earn the a LEED Platinum rating.

You might be wondering how the BrightBuilt Barn can keep homeowners warm with no furnace.  It’s so well insulated that the occupants and normal use of appliances will usually be enough to warm the home.  For days that are extremely cold, a solar water heating system will kick in.

Saving energy has been factored into the design in a variety of other ways as well.  LED lighting is used extensively, and occupants are encouraged to monitor their energy usage through a real-time feedback system.  The house has a built in indicator system that tells owners as to whether or not they are on track towards being a Net-Zero home.  A Net-Zero home means that the home is generating more energy that it uses.

In terms of energy consumption, the BrightBuilt Barn has numerous solar panels to provide needed energy.  This factor combined with the very high level of insulation provides for a home that can stay warm enough in the winter that it needs no furnace.  Almost sounds like magic, doesn’t it?  Combine this fact with the BrightBuilt Barn’s potential lifespan of 200 years and you have a true winner.

Additional information on the BrightBuilt Barn can be found on their website and their Wiki.

You may have noticed that in the last few weeks I’m having increasing difficulty trying to keep people advised of new free tiny home plans as they become available.  That’s because a growing number of people have begun to develop their own designs and make them available to the public free of charge.

Not everyone seems to have the aptitude for developing their own construction designs.  (Including yours truly.)  Because of this, the purchase of plans has been one of the more costly points to entry living in a tiny home.  (With possibly only the cost of a trailer, if purchased new, the only thing being higher.)

The growing availability of free plans are a big step toward making small homes accessible to the majority, which makes me very excited.  But it still leaves me with a challenge on how to best communicate this information.  If things continue at the same rate they are currently, Coming Unmoored may start offering a weekly roundup of links to new plans.

Here are a few of the latest to appear:

• 8′ x 16′ Tiny House Plan
• Earthbag House Plans
• New designs added by Joseph Kenyon

Eco-Dome is one of those ideas that really grab one’s imagination.  The finished design really conjures up the most exotic imagery of space-age adobe homes. In fact, for most people the Eco-Dome will quickly stimulate the imagination, with its sleek curves and innate possibilities. Cal-Earth and architect Nader Khalili are behind the Eco-Dome concept, which definitely makes use of the energy saving concept of building with what is on hand.

The Eco-Dome idea has a lot going for it.  One of its strong points is that it is very environmentally friendly.  The Eco-Dome concept uses no wood or trees of any kind, instead opting for what are called “Superadobe coils.”  The Superadobe coils are a very interesting idea.  These Superadobe coils are building coils that have been filled with either a mixture of soil and cement or lime and stabilized earth.  In short, with Eco-Dome in turns out that you are building an earth home, partially solidified with lime or cement.  This is a simple idea, but very clever one.

They currently offer plans for both 400 square foot models ($2,400) and 800 square foot models ($3,200).  These prices include no building materials and just cover blueprints and engineering calculations.  However, there is little doubt that a Eco-Dome or Double Eco-Dome could be constructed at greatly reduced rate over a traditional wood or brick and mortar home.

One look at the website’s photos and you realize that the concept has some real power.  This idea could be especially good for warmer climates.  Check out the website at www.calearth.org/EcoDome.htm.

While visiting the site, take a look at one of Khalili’s other concepts for an emergency sandbag shelter.  This structure truly looks like something out of a science fiction film.  The inspiration for the design is to take the beehive or the seashell, which are among the strongest shapes in nature,  and use that as a template.  Khalili states on his site, “The strongest structures in nature which work in tune with gravity, friction, minimum exposure and maximum compression, are arches, domes and vault forms.  And they can be easily learned and utilize the most available material on earth: Earth.”  He makes a great case for his point and illuminates the question, “why don’t we build more this way?”

The SolarHome is an eco-friendly, 75 square meter houseboat design created by UK-based Mark Kingsley Architects.  The working model of the SolarHome is currently located in the Lusatian Lakelands in Germany.

The houseboat uses solar energy and has two different modes of operation–Docked mode and Self-sufficient.  In Docked mode, it draws fresh water and power from its moorage.  In Self-Sufficient mode, it’s a self-contained unit and can supposedly operate for 6-12 months at a time.

(Unfortunately, I have no information on it’s water catchment and management system, nor how it handles sewage.  Presumably it must have some sort of containment system for the later.)

The designers are quick to say it offers all the modern amenities one might want and that they are willing to design customized homes.

Credit for the discovery of this groovy little house goes to James, who is rapidly becoming my unofficial researcher for potential articles.  (I have to confess, though, that of all his finds, the river shanty and its colorful inhabitants featured  earlier this week is still my favorite.)