Tiny California Home Offers Solution for Economic Hard Timeshttp://www.voanews.com/english/news/a-13-2008-12-05-voa23-66737557.html
MALE, MALECNE KUCICE, ZA ZHIVOT PO MERI VREMENA!
Thinkingsmall
By John Waters Jr.FOR THE STARThursday, November 20, 2008
Ask Bill or Sharon Kastrinos about the home they now have in Calistoga and they’re likely as not to describe it as cozy — really, really cozy.
The custom-built Tortoise Shell home is about 98 square feet in size, or almost one-eighteenth the size of the 1,800-square-foot home they also have in the Southern California resort community of Lake Arrowhead, in the San Bernardino Mountains.
Sitting on the porch of the tiny house — which, from a distance, looks like a child’s playhouse built to resemble a classic red barn with white trim — Kastrinos relaxes beneath the trees, and reads a book with the title, “The Way of the Turtle.”
The title seems almost comical since the name of Kastrinos’ new business is Tortoise Shell Homes, and he builds homes that are compact, mobile and can be taken virtually anywhere, but the book is about investing in the stock market.
For now, Kastrinos’ future seems to lie in creating lovely, complete, tiny homes or just framing them up and letting do-it-yourself-types finish them — choosing the siding, roofing, interior walls and appliances at prices that range from about $7,500 for the finish-it-yourself “Naked Galapagos” model. (A nicely finished version of the same model goes for about $21,000.) A second variety home, the Box Turtle, goes for $17,500 — and two Box Turtles can be connected to make a larger 260-square-foot home.
Kastrinos learned from experience not to build the 98-square-foot model anymore; it was just too
small. The models are now about 150 feet and larger. Since moving north from Lake Arrowhead, Kastrinos has sold the homes he builds from a small shop he rents in Rohnert Park.
“When the economy started crashing about a year ago the housing market was drying up” - said Kastrinos, a builder of custom homes.
“As credit was getting harder and harder obtain people stopped building new homes. That’s when I began to think about building these tiny homes, and downsizing.”
Sharon was a little less than enthusiastic about the whole idea at first, according to Kastrinos, but eventually she warmed up the idea and now shares her husband’s enthusiasm for the minimalist lifestyle.
“We started in January of this year after being hammered by successive snow storms in Southern California” - Kastrinos said. “My daughter had delivered our new grandbaby here in Calistoga, so we decided to move things up here.”
They started moving to the area, just up the road from Graeser Vineyards on Petrified Forest Road in March and built their first tortoise shell home. They started advertising the tiny homes then too, and by the end of April or early May, sold the first home.
Since then he’s sold about a dozen of the homes, which can go for about $17,000 and up. He still uses the prototype 98-square-foot home as his own (29, 78 sqm / 1 sq.foot = 0.3048 sq.meters)
“We were playing around with names for the new business and the term -
“tortoise” just came to us” - he said.
“The homes we were proposing at the time were kind of like a tortoise because you’re carrying your home where ever you go” - Kastrinos said, adding -
“The whole idea about having a smaller carbon footprint and being more mobile —
minimalist.”
The homes are classified as RVs or recreational vehicles, but they’re built like custom homes in every way, Kastrinos said.
“They would pass code if they were bolted to a foundation” - he said.
“The electrical, the plumbing, everything is what you could expect if you had a custom-built home.”
The model Kastrinos has on his daughter’s land in Calistoga has a pine shiplapped wood interior throughout. The small living room holds his moveable computer stand and there’s room for chairs. Around the corner is a full bathroom with a working commode and cabinet and a window that opens. There are cabinets in the kitchen with secure latches that stay closed when the homes are in transit.
For anyone who’s ever appreciated sleeping in a tent or bunk bed as a youngster, the sleeping loft may well seem the favorite. It’s tucked away above the kitchen and bathroom and features a queen size bed.
There are electrical plugs for a light and a window at one end of the loft.
Even though the homes are built to be transported over the road, Kastrinos said that at 5,500 pounds and with a height of about 13-feet, six inches — the homes, built for someone who’s active and likes to move around — should stay at one place for a while before moving along.
“These are perfect for the person who lives an active outdoor life, or one person who maybe works for the forestry department or in the vineyards who needs a place -
to come back to, take a shower, make a meal and go to bed.”
Or they can be used as a guest home on your property; they’re cheaper and just as private and attractive as building a second, so-called “mother-in-law house.”
On Saturday, the Kastrinos’ tiny home was parked behind some trees and a fence maybe 60 feet from the traffic-filled Petrified Forest Road. The ebb and flow of traffic bracketed short periods with the hum of tires and the roar of exhausts. In short, it was noisy.
The windows are made of high performance thermal pane, doubled, but when Kastrinos closed the windows and the door the world went completely silent.
The floors, walls and ceilings are fully insulated. The floors and walls are made with pine tongue-in-groove construction — bamboo is also an option — but there’s none of the plastic stuff.
The house is also equipped with propane and has a 125 watt electrical pane.
“You plug it in pretty much like you do any RV, but we also have a full off-grid option that adds about $7,000 to the cost of the house making it about a $29,000 mini home.”
“If the whole planet is really heading for a global warming crisis and New York City is going to be underwater in a few years, changing your light bulbs isn’t going to help at all” - Kastrinos said.
“But the size of the energy footprint this house leaves, with its tiny air conditioner and tiny heater, which is all you need for the house
(he does have battery chargers and florescent light bulbs and a thermos),
is significantly smaller than the kinds of homes Americans are accustomed to living in.”
A lot of people have told Kastrinos they just want to simplify their lives, that they’ve grown weary of being slaves to their homes.
“For what you pay in rent for one year you could buy your own house” - Kastrinos explained. “You can park it in an RV campground or a mobile home park” - or if you have a friend - in my case, I have my daughter - you can park at their home, and the homes look nice enough that it doesn’t take away from the natural environment of the community.
Some people just want to minimize their lives, according to Kastrinos, and some just want to have a second home on the property where their friends can come visit and stay there. Relatives can come visit and stay in the tortoise home and not have to find a hotel.
Adjustments
Moving from a 1,800 square foot floor plan to a 154 feet can be something of a squeeze. For example, one night the Kastrinos tried to include their dog as a house companion.
“It was a little tight for the two of us, but when we added our full size German shepherd that was it . . . no way” - he said.
“He ended up sleeping outside.”
Living small isn’t without its challenges, Sharon Kastrinos told a CNN television crew not lot ago, adding that the feeling of no longer having -
to “keep up with the Joneses is ‘exhilarating’.”
“There’s a tremendous burden that’s off your shoulders” - she said. “Small is OK, and it might even be better.”
In the original 98-square-feet model they have a 56-square-feet that holds their queen size bed, and they have to use a ladder to get up there.
There is no closet space — no room for 50 pairs of shoes or scores of outfits, or boxes of books.
The definite upside, though, is that the house cost them about $15,000, and their utilities are a scant $15 a month;
and their daughter -
isn’t charging them rent for staying on the property.
Contrast that with paying about $1,500 monthly on rent or a mortgage on a house that, in this neck of the woods, ran a median $725,000 in 2007.
Then, there are the electric bills that could run another $160.
Renting a space at the RV park at the Calistoga fairgrounds with partial hook ups — electric and water —
costs $33 nightly, but with a two-week maximum.
Sebastopol tiny homesKastrinos said while he was researching tiny home building, he came across a Web site owned by Jay Shafer of Sebastopol, who makes tiny homes from between 65 and 774 square feet.
Shafer was, according to published reports, an art teacher-turned tiny house building pioneer when he decided he wanted -
to escape the rat race - and not be chained to a lifelong mortgage.
Today Shafer runs the two-person Tumbleweed Tiny House Co.
He built his home with $18,000 in materials, and 500 hours of labor.
Featured on the same cable news network program as Kastrinos, Shafer cited many of the same issues linked to the tiny houses - affordability, mobility, a minimalist therefore simpler lifestyle -
and peace of mindBoth are also part of an international cadre of tiny home builders, which can be explored on the Internet Web site “The Tiny House Blog” at http://tinyhouseblog.com/. Both men have links on the Web Site. The Blog also has several pictures of small houses of many elegant styles that look like homes for hobbits, to hermit homes to one home called the White House, built on a mountain side in Colorado.
Legal issues
According to one source, laws governing the construction and size of small homes were developed in the 1970s and 80s by lobbyists from the housing industry as conventional housing industry builders became concerned that the smaller homes could actual negatively impact the housing industry.
The result was that federal laws were passed — and adopted by states and bankers — to provide loans for homes that were large enough to justify the cost of the land the homes would be built on, so land cannot be subdivided into lots proportionately small enough for the tiny homes.
The Wilderness Cabinhttp://www.sheldondesigns.com/
