As part of the materials Greg Johnson provided to the writer for Flyp Media, he created a new video introducing the Small House Society.  I’m really impressed by how well it’s put together and the amount of information Greg was able to cover in under ten minutes.

This is the best introduction to the tiny house movement I’ve seen.  You can check it out below.  The video is also available on Blip.tv, Vimeo.com.

Additional information on the Small House Society can be found on ResourcesforLife.com.  If you are interested in becoming a member, the annual cost is $5.

As part of their most recent issue Fly Media has just released an interactive article on the Small Home Movement by Amy Van Vechten.

Greg Johnson from the Small House Society and ResourcesforLife.com and Tammy from RowdyKittens.com are both featured  in the article.  (I spent several hours being interviewed as well but apparently landed on the cutting room floor.  Them’s the breaks.)

This is the first interactive article I’ve seen on tiny homes and I think they did a wonderful job putting it together. It includes some wonderful photography and media content.

Please take a moment to check it out and also forward it on to people you think might appreciate it.

Over the next week Coming Unmoored will be featuring a series of articles focused on shipping container homes…

There are a lot of architects and builders that are beginning to wake up to the idea of using cargo containers for building. There are a lot of reasons that this idea’s time has come. I thought I would take a moment and outline why I like cargo container construction.  Sure, I don’t exactly feel “girly” discussing this topic, but the more I learn about cargo container construction, the more I like it!

First, due to the current economic slowdown, there are a lot of cargo containers piling up.  By a lot, we are talking about tens of thousands of them just sitting at docks all across the world.  A very large percentage of them are in Asian ports.  It may now be possible to get a better deal than ever on a cargo container.

In terms of prices, cargo containers can be found as cheaply as $1,000, or may cost as much as $6,000 or more.  Using a cargo container that has already been manufactured and is currently on a dock somewhere getting rusty, seems like a great eco-friendly idea.

The second reason to consider building with cargo containers is that they are very strong and durable.  After all, these containers are designed to be stacked on top of one another, while full of goods.  This fact speaks volumes about the strength of these containers.

This durability translates into other benefits as well.  Insects, vermin and mold have a tough time with steel.  There are few insects that find steel worth the time. Therefore, if you live in a termite populated area, your termite problem is basically solved.

Safety is another major point in favor of using cargo containers.  Due to the material from which they are constructed, cargo containers are going to be very safe.  Since the cargo container is built out of steel, it gives a homeowner an additional layer of physical safety from storms (and potentially intrusions as well).  Replacing wood and brick with metal also makes container homes resistant to fire.

Transportation is a big plus in favor of cargo container construction.  The largest piece of your housing puzzle can be delivered on a truck directly to your housing site.  This compares nicely to having to bring out every single piece of wood and brick that you will use for your project.

If building with cargo containers sounds like something you might be interested in doing, we recommend that you find an architect that has already tackled a project in your area.  Every year more and more architects are “taking the plunge,” and building with this strong yet flexible building option.

For those of you who don’t happen to follow me on Twitter, I flew Rumi up from Albuquerque to Portland this past Tuesday. It proved to be a bit of a day.  For both of us.

Just in case you’ve missed the references in the past, Rumi is my one-year-old, bat-eared, Balinese cat. He’s quite spoiled and he has all the survival instincts of a developmentally-challenged lemming. He’s also quite the character, as my friends in Tucson and Albuquerque can attest to.

The beginning of the adventure was when I discovered that the ticket to stuff Rumi under the seat in front of me costs $15 more than my own. My friend Amber pointed out after-the-fact that I should have just bought Rumi his own seat. (Which, in fact, he ended up having anyway because the plane was so empty.  We had a whole aisle to our self.) I have no idea why an airline feels compelled to charge $115 for the right to stuff a cat under a seat. I can’t imagine they have much additional costs involved with having a cat there rather than a purse.  Admittedly, they do have to track how many on-board pets they have so that they don’t inadvertently set one of their allergic passengers into an asthmatic fit.  However, I suspect the pricing is a lot more about lets-take-advantage-of-a-captive-market situation.

Anyway, the next step in the adventure was getting  Rumi into his carrier the morning of the flight. Charlie recently had to drop Rumi off at the vet to get his teeth cleaned and the process took him 45 minutes. It was not at all pretty. (Believe me, I heard about it from both the boyfriend and the cat after the fact.)

So, needless to say, Charlie was dumbstruck when I simply scooped up Rumi, dropped him in the carrier, and smoothly zipped the thing up on the first try. I, of course, attributed this feat to my remarkable rapport with animals. The truth of the matter, however, is that Rumi is less awake at 4 AM than most caffeine-dependent humans I know.

You better believe he woke up in a hurry after that, however.  In his world, little black cat carrier = nothing he’s going to like as a next stop. By the time I was ready to load the carrier into the car, it was busy bouncing around the living room as though I had the Tasmanian Devil packed inside, and the wails of dismay issuing from the carrier were fluctuating over a three octave range.  I swear I could have opened the windows on my Mini and been mistaken for an emergency vehicle we were so loud.

Rumi finally settled down about the point I reached the airport.

Checking him in was uneventful and even a little amusing when they issued him his own little kitty boarding pass.  The security line was another story entirely.

I just want to go on record and say that whatever nimrod at  Homeland Security who wrote the requirement that all pets now have to go through the metal detector with their owners has never had to stuff a hysterical seven-pound cat back into a carrier when they are quite clear about the fact that they didn’t want to be there in the first place.

I normally try to wear comfortable clothes when I fly. Based on my experiences this week, I don’t recommend this approach for anyone traveling with a cat.

Tuesday morning I was wearing a pair of yoga pants, a white tank top, and a hoodie.  Nevermind that I’ve been allowed through the Albuquerque metal detector wearing the same hoodie on multiple occasions before.  This time I was asked to take it off.  Because, God knows, on top of my Weapon-of-Mass-Destruction Balinese, I might have explosives or some such nonsense in the zipper of my hoodie.

Long story short, I normally only wear white tank tops under another piece of clothes in lieu of a bra, so I was showing a lot more skin in the security line than I felt comfortable.  And then I had to pull Rumi from his carrier.  Rumi clung to me for dear life as we went through the metal detector together.  So there I was trying to cradle my cat to me with one hand and keep my tank top from being yanked down to my bellybutton with the other.  I was only about half successful on both accounts.

Things only got worse on the other side, when it came to trying to get Rumi back into his carrier.  He was hanging on to my shirt for dear life and I just about lost my top entirely trying to peel him off my body, much to the amusement of the security guards–none of whom were willing to offer any sort of assistance.

I’ll be eternally grateful to the Texan businessman in the line behind me who helped me save what little was left of my modesty by helping me disentangle Rumi from my shirt and get him back into his carrier.  He kindly explained to me he had a cat back home he really missed but whom he suspected would be even less acomodating to flying than my “little treasure”.  (Ladies, anyone who doesn’t think knights in shining armor can show up in Stetsons has never met this guy.)

Thankfully, the rest of the trip was fairly uneventful. Rumi eventually reached the conclusion that things inside his carrier were far less scary that things happening outside.  And by the second flight he’d recovered enough of his equilibrium that he worked his usually charm on the stewardesses.  They actually offered to bring him his own beer when they caught me letting him sneak sips off mine and, at the end of the fligh,t they awarded him plastic wings.

Suffice to say, by the time Rumi and I reached my place in Oregon, all either of us wanted to do was take a long nap which probably helped ease the transition somewhat to the floating home.

(To be continued…)

One of my favorite books on the subject of small home living is Greg Johnson’s Put Your Life On a Diet: Lessons Learned from Living in 140 Square Feet.

What I love about this book is that it describes the journey Greg took to arrive in his 140 square foot home.  It also provides a series of chapters and workbook pages to allow the reader to consider different aspects of their own life and what would be the most meaningful lifestyle for them.  This is one of the best resources out there on how one might downsize to fit into a tiny home.

Below is an interview and book reading conducted by Prairie Lights in Iowa City that was part of the launch party for Greg’s book. In it he reads an excerpt from the book and also answers many questions on small home living.

Make yourself a cup of tea or coffee, sit down, and enjoy.

Greg Johnson is the co-founder and current president of the Small House Society.  Additional information on him and the Mobile Hermitage can be found at ResourcesforLife.com.

Each Friday Coming Unmoored runs a weekly roundup of tiny homes featured on the web and recent news stories that may be of interest to small home enthusiasts.

This week, in particular, has been a bumper-crop of news stories.  Make sure to check out some of the ones below!

Enjoy and have a wonderful weekend!

Tiny Houses Featured in the Past Week:

• Bedford Trucks: Traveller Homes
• Tiny Earthbag House
• Narrowboats
• Shed-Boy Mini-Home
• New Tortoise Shell Home design
• NextGen House
• Sustain Solo miniHome
• Weather Station
• Multifunktioneller Glühweinstand
• Travel Cottage
• C3 Cabin
• WoW Pod (Warning! Don’t show to your S.O. who’s addicted to World of Warcraft)
• Tiny Texas House videos
• Clayton i-House (mid-size but interesting)
• 100K House Pictures (mid-size)

Recent News Stories and Essays on Tiny Homes and the Small Home Movement:

• Downsizing the Carbon Footprint with Tiny Texas Houses (Consumer Energy Report)
• Little Boxes: The New Movement to Seriously Downsize Our Homes (eMagazine.com)
• The “Tiny Houses” Movement (7×7)
• Is Living in Small Spaces Cruel to Children? (Treehugger)
• Backyard Living (NPR)
• Why Downsizing to a Smaller Home Can Make You Happy (Millionaire Mommy)
• The Pros and Cons of Downsizing Our House (Digerati Life)

New Small Home Websites and Blogs to Check Out:

• Small Living Journal Issue #4
• The Scrap House
• Mini Mobile Cottage
• Little House Living

With a footprint of 332 square feet and interior space of a little over 900 square feet, the Penguin House in Japan might better be categorized as a “small” rather than “tiny” home. (And by Japanese standards it’s quite expansive.)

However, this home provides some great ideas in terms of how one might be able to design a small space to feel larger by creative use of light, sight-lines, and varying ceiling heights depending on room size.

Alright, dear readers.  I happen to have an extra, shiny, brand-new copy of Jay Shafer’s lovely Small House Book on hand.

As wonderful as this book is, those of you who’ve been following my story will understand that the last thing I need in my life is a duplicate copy of a book.  (Especially when I actually have two other copies of my own.)

So, for the next week, I will be running a contest to find a new, appreciative home for this book.

In order to “enter”, all you need to do is leave a comment on this post giving me your wish-list of what you would like to see on Coming Unmoored.  (For example: more info on how to build your own home, more personal anecdotes, less personal anecdotes, more pictures of Rumi.  What have you.)

I’m in the process of planning where my blog will go from here and I really want to make it something that is both entertaining and useful to our regular readers.

Next Wednesday, I will randomly select someone from everyone who’s taken the time to comment and mail the book to them.  (So please make sure to leave an email address where I can reach you!)

I look forward to hearing your feedback.

(And if you don’t happen to win the copy of the book, it can now be ordered from the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company website.)

Sustain, out of Canada, is really onto something with their innovative approach to tiny homes.  In fact, the overall end result of their work can safely be called “breakthrough.”

The miniHOME by Sustain is a series of different home concepts that really pack a lot of punch into a small space.  The concept behind their homes is that each model can stand up to extreme climates.  This is part of the reason that the miniHOME’s all have high r-values, meaning that the homes will make the most out of their heating and cooling dollars.  With those heating and cooling dollars in mind, Sustain has designed their miniHOME’s with an eye toward being off the grid.  They have incorporated high-efficiency light fixtures and appliances.  Their goal is to make their miniHOMEs energy efficient enough that they can easily be run off wind and solar.

Following this environmentally aware theme, Sustain has taken some substantial effort into making sure that they use healthy materials for all their construction materials.  These materials have an eye toward virtually eliminating indoor air pollution, as well as being highly durable and easy to maintain.  The materials employed have been used in a very stylish and hip fashion that, like all great tiny house designs, makes the space feel much larger.

The SOLO SE model incorporates all aspects of Sustain’s mission to build environmentally friendly, healthy homes that can be transported easily across North America.  This 350 square foot home uses one-tenth the water, and a truly remarkable one percent of the energy of a traditional home.  This makes the SOLO SE something of a superstar.  A home that uses one percent of the energy of a traditional home is nothing less than extraordinary. Sustain has lived up to their company name.

With the SOLO SE and the rest of its homes, Sustain has accomplished something that is rather impressive.  Reducing the energy cost of the SOLO SE down to one percent of a traditional home is a breakthrough, and hopefully hearkens to what is in store for the entire building industry.

The C3 Cabin is designed by Vandeventer + Carlander Architects.  The cabin is has a footprint of 16 x 22 feet, with 352 square feet on the main floor and 128 square feet in the loft.

The C3 makes lovely use of light and is designed with doors opening on three sides to better connect it with the outside.  Both of these features help to make the space feel much larger than it actually is.  The main floor hosts the main living space, kitchen, and bath. The sleeping loft sits over the kitchen and bath area and has a view of the floor below.  Windows are also thoughtfully positioned throughout the house to promote cross ventilation.

The C3 has also been designed with low-cost, easy-maintenance external materials (fiber cement and metal panels) and also easy construction in mind.

Plans are available for sale for $850  Additional information can be found on Vandeventer + Carlander’s website.