What Makes Small and Tiny Homes Sustainable

Not all Small and Tiny homes are sustainable; they actually range in a broad spectrum from achieving high sustainability to not being sustainable at all… Many are sustainable because they use recycled, upcycled and minimal amounts of building material; with small space comes a smaller internal envelope, making heating and cooling less energy intensive; and by living the Small-Space lifestyle occupants generally consume and waste less store-bought products, further helping to reduce the planet’s overall carbon footprint. Sustainability in Small and Tiny home culture is a spectrum of principles and ethics based on the idea being mindful in how we interact with our personal and global environments’, which hopefully carries forward to our interactions with others.

The issues that work against Small and Tiny home design is that the Small-Space lifestyle does not suit people who have a lot of stuff, or are not in a financial position to make life changes, it is not reasonable to ask or expect people get rid of stuff or change their psyche to live in a small space. Additionally the cost of permits to legalize Trailer (Tiny) homes and Shipping container homes by California building codes is so expensive that the investment building these places is usually not worth the return. Other states are different and have more permissive building codes. For people who want to live mindfully of environmental issues not everyone needs to live in a small space. There are numerous options in larger types of architecture that allow an occupant to live by sustainability principles.

However, building-out small and tiny livable space can be a labor of love! To work with steel and convert an old shipping container into an appealing, attractive industrial looking guest room; to craft wood and colorfully paint a delightful Tiny home on a trailer frame; or construct an endearing artsy cottage from cob, cord wood, glass, or earth bags, these buildings have a charm and value separate than improving property values and wholly separate than living by ethics of environmental mindfulness, rather they can evoke a sense of artistic pleasure and are a form of interactive art that inspires awareness of how we relate to our surroundings.

Sustainable Spectrum - Design Ideals for Small or Tiny homes

1) Uses an Independent energy source, solar, wind, geothermal, etc. (off the grid)
2) Has a high insulative total R- value, design has a low energy intensive foot print.
3) Lots of recycled and upcycled materials used. Minimal new building material used in construction and maintenance.
4) Any building materials used are non-toxic (or minimally toxic) to environment as they break down over time.
5) All materials used are locally built, manufactured and acquired. Materials used are manufactured with sustainable philosophies as much as possible. (No stuff manufactured in China)
6) Reduced square footage, which creates a low potential for occupants to consume large amounts of household products.
7) Waste water recapturing systems (grey water) and organic methods of processing black water.
8) Food garden, either indoor or outdoor integrated into the home’s design.
9) Positive feel and character, pleasing aesthetics, which creates a wholesome ambiance for the occupant when interacting with the living space.

Back into Foreclosure

I was very depleted after five years of so much effort to manifest the Home of the Future. I took a break. Last week I decided to come off break. I made a list of pros and cons regarding making the effort to keep this project going in this incarnation, and what actions I would need to take in order to sustain it.

The pros outnumber and outweigh the cons.

As if to reward me for pulling my head out of my navel, I got a Notice of Trustee Sale taped to my front door yesterday. The timeline is super short; December 13th. I'll call the bank and see what's up.

I'm in a pretty good mood about it. I really feel God's love and support. The "right" thing is going to be the thing that happens. The right thing is already happening. I'm feeling His presence within me. With Him as my center, my heart, my shelter, my shield, whatever happens out in the world cannot undo me.

A House in Transition

In typical Bob fashion, I am casting a possible negative as a positive.

My housemates are moving out. What I imagine happened is that a former housemate "poached" my current housemates. She's avoiding me, so I haven't asked her.

What is in fact happening is that Karl, Nini, Liz, and Renee have found a home to share together on the other side of town. Karl tells me it's a big gorgeous house, not requiring the amount of work this house requires, but having a large south facing backyard ready for planting.

It sounds great.

The new landlord called me while checking referrals. The thought did cross my mind to tell her that these were terrible renters; perhaps then she'd turn them down and I could keep them! But I didn't do that. I told her the truth, that they are great people and great tenants.

Years ago, before I even started this blog, one of my goals was to forge a community that spawned other communities. Here it is! A houseful of people who have lived together under this roof, now going off to be their own collective, propagating the dream, and bringing it to a new neighborhood! Yay! Amazing! As I described this vision to people years ago, they all looked at me askance... yet now this is exactly what is happening.

I really enjoyed getting to know these folks. I'm daunted at the prospect of finding new good folks. The word is already out a little, and people who are looking for bargain basement living costs have already begun emailing, "I have $300 a month I can spend, do you have room for me and my kids?"

I really wish you well, people who need to find out how to get by on even less than I have. I don't know how you'll do it. However, I'll be looking specifically for housemates who are on the Abundance train. I've got to take care of my own basics before I can be of any help to others. I've got to keep building my connections within community so I have the support to do the bigger works as they are asked of me.

Long Delayed

When we moved in three years ago, Mariposa Grove members danced with joy: "Take down your fence! Become part of our community!"

"Great!" we said. "What does being a member of the community mean?"

"We don't know, but it's part of our mission, to be a community center. We'll figure it out later!"

Cut to today. It's SO much later. I haven't blogged in three months as I drive all over the state getting trained on my new job, and it's been a about a year since the "Bridge Committee" got tasked with figuring out the thorny issues facing opening the existing HOA into a larger collective.

Today we retreated.

I was on the Bridge Committee, but I shirked my responsibilities. What I notice now, is that I was unable to successfully represent myself in committee. The mission felt to be: "Let's find a way to charge for the common house." I identified some assumptions and called philosophies of power/ownership/equity into question, but I allowed myself to get steamrollered to an extent.

Today, the remaining committee members presented the work we'd done. We still don't have a methodology for distributing costs. But other voices in the community listened to the proposals, acknowledged the immense effort that went in to getting us even this far, and frequently noticed assumptions and questioned those.

One of our community works in a co-op as well as living here in our cooperative. "At Rainbow Grocery, it's clear: we are either members or on the membership track. That's not an option here."

Another noted: "Renters will not have the same opportunity of ownership, so will we ask them to be paying the same amount as an owner?"

A direction appeared to coalesce from the work of today, so that's huge and good. We also did a very good job being with each other. There was only one segment that got ugly as some talked over and above others. A few minutes later we acknowledged that wasn't how we wanted to behave, and we were respectful and engaged the rest of the time.

Sure there were some near meltdowns and soem tension, but we are handling a really difficult task: how to convert a a closed system into an extensible one. We are dealing with money, with property, with liability, with privacy and with beliefs around generosity and community.

It's cutting edge stuff; other cohousing communities are closed, or new developments. Ours is one of the few retrofits, and perhaps the only one that combines affordable housing with market rate housing.

I give us a big "A+" for today.

Now I'm going out dancing.

Growing produce and protein in an urban setting

Many people are aware these days of how far their food travels, becoming less fresh and using up petroleum to get to their table. The Suncurve is a demonstration project growing produce and protein in a very small footprint. It could be integrated into the side of a multi-tenant residence in an urban center, providing fresh greens and berries and even legumes year-round in many parts of the United States.

Renewable solar and wind energy powers a pump to circulate water through the 1" thick biomat, bringing fishwastes to the roots of the plants. Some organic matter falls from the vertical bed into the fish pond, feeding the fish. A more robust system could even be imagined, processing human wastes back into food.

The engineer in me thrills at this system of massive intervention and resource allocation. The permaculturist in me recoils at the embodied energy this system represents. The urban permaculturist in me rejoices at how many "green" jobs this sort of infrastructure could create while leveraging our current relative abundance of resources into a system that ensures a steady supply of extremely local food for years and years.

In Which I Find Another Project and an Answer, too.

We were hanging out in Karl and Nini's kitchen. I excused myself to use the restroom. This is the water closet that I did all that extensive work to run a 4" waste line that didn't go up and through the footing like the one that came with the house, and I love how great the new plumbing and fixture works.

My eyes wandered about the little room, and I noticed the ceiling in the back looked sort of water damaged. "Hmmm," went the little curious part of my brain. I picked a likely looking spot and poked the ceiling. My finger pierced it easily and water ran out. Now the rest of my brain had something to do, so the curious part took a break.

Karl poked his head in. "Whatcha doin'?"

"Making a problem."

"Oh, Bob. What did you do?"

"I found a leak." Karl started to laugh. "It's not funny, except in the most tragic way. Do you realize this means I'm yet another project behind?"

"Or," he says, "maybe you've caught it in time and it's still a small project."

Yeah, that's likely. I went upstairs and pulled the toilet up. A little sleuthing, and here's what I found:


The previous owner installed the retention ring without actually attaching to the drain. In fact, there is a 1" gap and here you can see a bit of downstairs through the gap. It had been filled with material from several wax toilet seals, but this eventually failed. In order to attach the ring in this manner, they had to take the mounting adapter off the ring and drill through the tile in 6 places with a masonry bit to attach it to the floor (when it should attach to the pipe).

Of course, the floor is rotting. Water does that to wood. I should probably mention the squirrel nest I found between the joists, too.

On the plus side, I caught this before anyone doing their business fell through the floor onto someone else doing their business below. While that would be a funny story, the liability just makes my flesh crawl.

On the other plus side, finding a problem like this in the first couple of months of living here would have been very demoralizing. Now, two years after replacing nearly every door, fixing plumbing left and right, laying carpet, finding compatible housemates and all the other challenges, a job of tearing up the floor and subfloor, replacing the rotted wood, plumbing in the correct kind of fitting, and installing some sort of pleasant marmoluem floor and finally putting the toilet back seems like a task I can get done in a day.

Being supremely unwrecked, I went to work today and had a great day.

The previous owner stopped over next door for a visit. We chatted about the election's big winner. No, not Obama, but all the rest of us who don't sit on a board of directors or happen to be CEOs of a large money-lending institution.

"Say, Hussein, tell me about the downstairs toilet."

He said, "Are you ready to sell the house back to me?"

"No, of course not. We're having too much fun. But I am curious why you ran the waste line up and through the foundation."

"Oh, I did that for earthquakes. You won't have any trouble with that toilet."

"Except that it didn't flush. The water just swirled around and slowly drained down, never actually flushing."

"Y'know," he non-sequitered, "I didn't put up an Obama sign in my yard. I didn't want to provoke the neighbors."

First Rain of the 2008/2009 Season

We've worked out why Karl and Nini's bedroom floods. We can chalk it up to the previous owners, again, just like all the other inanities we've found so far. In this case, they installed a french drain... right up against the foundation.

Roof run-off, channeled through downspouts, emptied into the french drain, which would quickly fill and slowly release water into the joint between the footing and the slab. A high-water mark on the footing, outside, showed quite clearly where the top of the slab was, inside. The low point of the drain was at the corner of the house (the sump pump, 10 feet away, was uphill by about a foot). This was hiding under a 12" cap of good Bay Clay, making the problem invisible.

Karl and I started, and then Jori continued, digging it all out. It goes down a good 3 feet. We'll pour a little concrete skirt to drive the water lens well below the foundation, and then replace the french drain to be between the two houses and slope towards the sump pump.

I also rerouted the downspouts. We clearly haven't finished this project, yet the nearly 2" of rain that just dumped on us didn't get into Karl and Nini's space, so we've already made an improvement.

Sustainable parts of this job are we'll be reusing the drain rock, so the embodied energy is very low, and we're working by hand, and we're preserving the habitability of an existing asset. We will have a concrete pour, so that's not as good, but I am sure any CO2 release from the manufacture of the concrete is offset handsomely by not having to run heating fans on a wet carpet three or four times a year.

They said it couldn't be done...

Or, rather, two contractors and a plumber told me that in order to "repair" the downstairs toilet, I'd have to hire them to tear out the wall, break through the foundation, bust out the old sewer line, and then rebuild everything correctly. I thought they were all wrong. Surely the correct course of action would be to leave as much of the house intact as possible and simply tunnel underneath the foundation? Notice the asbestos tiles all over the side of the house? C'mon, aren't you guys professionals or something?

Yep, we are, and the right way to do the job is demolition and reconstruction.

Hmm, I thought. How hard can it be?

So here's the problem that we bought with the house: a sewer line through the slab that for some reason effluent flows back up through. Room full of flies year-round. Note the "vent" that vents into the room. Sweet. Previous owner stuffed a plastic bag in it to cut down the odors. Maggots lived under the carpet. Ick. Way, way ick.

My first "solution:" put the toilet up on a pedestal. The extra drop provided the necessary pressure to force waste through the line. Unintended benefit (that's a permie term) was that I didn't have to aim at all; the bowl was that much closer. Not-so-good was the increase water use. This toilet takes 5 gallons or more to flush. A year later I am ready to tackle doing the project as correctly as I can.

Outside the house, the 4" line appears to pierce the footing, and has this odd "step" poured around it. "You know, Bob," said Karl, "You have to assume that the people who did this job in the first place were at least as smart as us. So if they did it this way, there had to be a reason. Maybe there's something big in the way, or the geometry of the curve is all wrong in order to make a straight shot to this outside line."

I dug a hole.

I busted off the concrete block. Nothing big was in the way. I saw that they'd completely broken through the footing. They plumbed the 4" line uphill. Small wonder that toilet wouldn't flush. Water and waste doesn't flow uphill so very well. I dug some more, up under the house. The soil is heavy compacted clay, so a cave-in wasn't high on my list of worries, but it was there nonetheless. I worked on pulling the old cast iron pipe out.

Here's the part of the job that nearly wrecked me. Pounding through the slab as I was feeling like God has given me too big a job resulted in 4 hours of work to chip out an area you couldn't pack a quesadilla into. Devastated, I took a time out, got my head right with my heart, and suddenly the pick started finding all the weak spots in the concrete. 30 minutes later, I had this nice hole. Thanks, God. Sorry about that whole despair moment.

Of course, a hole under your house, aligned with a break in the foundation by a previous owner, is a bad thing. So I quickly glued up the new 4" ABS sewer line (complete with a vent on the outside, set to go past the roof line), connected it to the outside pipe, ran it into the watercloset, and started re-packing the earth. My practice with cob and rammed earth came in handy here! Pound, pound pound. Mix clay and water and sand. Pound, pound, pound. Pound until the ground is shiny. Then add another 2 inches or so and pound again. Pound, pound pound. 4 pound sledge and 8 pound sledge. Pound, pound pound.

Shape the hole to provide the form so the new concrete I pour will tie the old foundation back together. Pound, pound pound.

I am really tired of pounding. I think that's the part that all the professionals were trying to avoid, with their massive intervention strategy. I can report, however, that this corner of the house is better supported, now. And no asbestos got introduced into the environment. I filled not only voids I made, but voids I found, too. Cleaning up, I caught a glimpse of myself as I came out of the shower. "Hey Xena, lookit! I've got muscles!"

"No honey," she corrected me, "You're just swollen. Muscles do that when they get overused. Four days of effort isn't enough to build them up like that. They'll go back down."

Dang.

The capstone to the project? Installing this new, ultra low flow toilet! Yay! We qualify for the EBMUD $150 rebate, now! Well, and also, we have a toilet that a 4-year-old won't fall behind in the middle of the night.

And I have a physique for another 24 hours or so.

Caitlan's Zone 1 (or Zero)

In permaculture, Zones are numbered from 0 to 5, and can be thought of as a series of concentric rings moving out from a center point, where human activity and need for attention is most concentrated, to where there is no need for intervention at all. Zonation is a guide to for how much human input, or energy, is used within each tier. My friends and I have defined Zone 0 as care of self, so Zone 1 becomes your immediate environs.

Sectors are a way of considering a place's external energies: sun, wind, underlying geology, or in the case of urban permaculture, roads, neighborhoods, and municipal ordinances. These forces are mitigated or utilized, depending on what you're designing. By definition, you can't modify a sector (the sun is going to rise and set at a certain time each day no matter what), but you can modify the effects of sectors.

Caitlan's new home (zone 1) is in a mobile home park (small lot sector, HOA sector). The owner has made it one giant art project; the underlying geology of this fabricated home has been modified with hundreds and hundreds of mosaicked items, from bottle tops and hubcaps to broken tiles and cutlery and other artworks. "It's like living in an art car," she says.

Putting energy (time, materials, money) towards modifying the effects of sectors is a great way to improve the quality of life in your zone 1. Humans have been doing this for a long time. It's fun to see someone converting their dwelling into an art paradise. It's a great fit for Caitlan.