This episode of brain Stuff is brought to you by Linda dot Com. Linda dot com offers thousands of engaging, easy to follow video tutorials taught by industry experts to help you learn software, creative and business skills. Membership starts at twenty five dollars a month and provides unlimited seven access. Try Linda dot com free for seven days by visiting Linda dot com slash brain Stuff. Welcome to brain Stuff
from house stuff works dot com where smart happens. I am Marshall Brain with today's question what is a tiny house? And how can you build a house for thirty five dollars? Houses in the United States have been getting bigger and bigger for decades. If you go back to nineteen fifty, the average single family home in the United States was about a thousand square feet. Today it's more than twice that big square feet. The tiny house movement is a
radical departure from this trend. Houses in this category get as small as sixty five square feet more. Typically, they fall somewhere in the hundred to two hundred square foot range. The idea is to create a very compact space so that you can simplify your life and greatly reduce expenses. The interior of a tiny house often shares some features with boats and r vs. For example, if you're compressing a house into a hundred square feet, the kitchen and
the restroom are going to be very small. Boats and r vs work with this same kind of constraint, and a lot of times you can find appliances or bathroom fixtures from boats and r vs that work well in tiny houses. Right now, I'm looking at the floor plan for a tiny house called the Popomo. It is eight and a half feet wide and twenty ft long, about a hundred and seventy square feet. It has four rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom, and a great room.
There's also a coat closet. The great room is five by nine or forty five square feet, the bedroom is seven by five or thirty five square feet. The bathroom is only fifteen square feet two ft wide, and the kitchen and the closet take up the rest of the space. As tiny houses go, this one is pretty spacious, but you can see how compact a tiny house usually is.
Tiny houses often run a foul with building codes. For example, a typical building code might require at least one room to be a hundred and twenty square feet and all other rooms to be of a certain size. To get around these requirements, most tiny houses are built as trailers with wheels so they're easy to tow around. But to create a towable trailer, there are usually width restrictions. This is why most tiny houses are less than nine ft wide.
Many people who build tiny houses pride themselves on the low cost of construction. One video on YouTube shows a tiny house complete with trailers and wheels, built for only three thousand five dollars. How is this possible? The answer is recycling. If you get on Craigslist or free cycle, visit demolition projects, and look for building material recycling shops, you can find us stuff like lumber, windows, doors, and cabinets at very very low prices or even free. These
materials greatly reduced the cost of a tiny house. For more on this and thousands of other topics, does that house stuff works dot com and don't forget to check out the brainstuff blog on the house stuff works dot com home page. You can also follow brain stuff on Facebook or Twitter at brain stuff hsw. The house stuff Works I Find app has arrived down at it today on iTunes. Audible dot com is the leading provider of
downloadable digital audio books and spoken word entertainment. Audible has over one hundred thousand titles to choose from to be downloaded to your iPod or m P three player. Go to audible podcast dot com slash brain stuff to get a free audio book download of your choice when you sign up today.