Tiny Houses

The New York Times is obsessed with tiny houses (and tiny apartments). They may as well have a subsection of the Home & Garden section called TINY HOUSES. Instead, they have gone with the less endearing HOUSE PROUD for their latest tiny house article, “The $200 Microhouse.” The house in question is a 24-square-foot Massachusetts dwelling made out of “shipping pallets, castoff storm windows and a neighbor’s discarded kitchen cabinets.”

The house is one of four such buildings that sit in their creator Derek Diedricksen’s backyard, behind his (also relatively small) 950-square-foot house. One of the structures is called the Boxy Lady. They all appear to have different functions. They all contain artwork. The reporter notes that the structures are cold (Diedricksen’s backyard is covered in hard mounds of oldish-looking snow, struggling to melt). They might not even be big enough to house space heaters.

It is irritating to keep finding new, yuppie words on the Times website, but at the same time, I want one of these “microhouses.” You can learn how to make such things by watching Diedricksen’s YouTube series “Tiny Yellow House” (the first episode is above, and in it he teaches you how to make a “hickshaw — a rickshaw for hicks”). He also has a book called Humble Homes Simple Shacks Cozy Cottages Ramshackle Retreats Funky Forts, which is being re-released by Lyons Press next year after a self-published printing sold quite well.

In the meantime, it’s not like our current apartments aren’t already stretching the limits of man’s tolerance for claustrophobia. My desk, for instance, is actually a bench measuring 15″ x 10″ x 18″.

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