teeny tiny micro mini

We're building right? (Not really, an Option C was discovered (options A and B)but let's pretend that we're still planning to build for the sake of this post and I'll update at a later date what Option C is - the current plan.)
I stumbled across Tiny House Blog which lead to Tumbleweed houses and ideas started flowing.
At first I was convinced we could live in a house less than 100 square feet. The secret?
The loft!



Eureka!
The kids could share the loft and we could....well, we can add a bedroom onto that little house. So maybe we could do it for 150 square feet. It's doable, right? Right?

Okay... so three rooms would really be better.
What about less than 1,000 square feet... Say 800-900 square feet?



I'm in love with the cuteness, the eco-friendliness (really? do we need 2000+ square feet? No, no we do not!), the potential for expansion if necessary, AND we know it's short term. Yes, short term could mean 10 years but as I said, there's room for expansion if needed but also a great challenge to live within a smaller space. Besides, as it is now, the kids are always in the room, preferably on top of us literally (their preference, not ours) so why would we need more than one 5 rooms?

ICF

When I discussed shape choice I mentioned (again) that we're going to use ICF.

ICF stands for insulated concrete forms. The forms are made of two pieces of insulation connected by webbing. The two pieces of insulation remain in place after the pour (of concrete) to act as insulation for the structure.

 

When we first considered building and we were thinking seriously about a dome home we thought building an ICF basement and placing the dome on top made sense (I was insisting that a full basement is necessary in New England). We then started thinking about doing ICF for the whole structure. We briefly debated using SIPS but ICF are not as heavy to manipulate (in fact our children enjoyed pushing a form around the house that we were given as sample from AMVIC, the VT ICF company we are working with). This increases the aspects of the job we can complete ourselves - something that is very important to us.
ICF seems more "green" - AMVIC is a small local company shipping in very lightweight product, 2/3 of the concrete material is coming from VT or nearby Canada, and the resulting structure will be very very well insulated.