Throughout the ongoing process of planning and building a tiny house, we’ve received practical inspiration from two primary sources.

First, there’s tinyhousebuild.com, where we bought our house’s plans from. We were interested in the couple’s story of both embracing a minimalist lifestyle and living in their tiny house with two teenage children. While other tiny homes are only suitable for two people or are intended for short-term stays, we felt like these plans could be adjusted to fit with our overall goals.

As our project has gone from planning into practice, we’ve received more help from Steve, who has graciously allowed us to build our tiny house at his beautiful workshop in the KwaZulu Natal Midlands. Steve is one of few people with both the vision to appreciate communal, off grid, minimalist, beautiful and movable dwellings and the audacity to build several of them at once. When we found out about his venture through a mutual friend and expressed our interest in building on a trailer, he quickly ordered a trailer and got to work building. Our (nearly identical) trailer arrived about 6 weeks after his, and we’ve based our construction techniques almost entirely on his, electing to begin with a steel frame and carry on with wood framing and cladding techniques uncommon in South Africa.