Tiny home village...

Tiny homes are trendy.  If you watch any of the home & garden type channels, you have seen shows about these.  It started as a build-it-yourself movement, and has grown into commercial ventures.  The fact is: park homes have been around for several decades.  These are built to RV standards, with interior square footage of 400 sq ft or less.  There are scads of them all over the sunbelt.  Often, an additional room is built onto them once they are set in place.  We see them all around our island and where we stay in Arizona when we go to visit Steph and Dan.

The RV park where we are currently (I have an appointment at the Vespa dealer tomorrow for service) has a section for "tiny homes," and as I mentioned yesterday, bills itself as "Austin's first tiny home village."  Here are photos from a walk around last night...

These are all commercially built.  Most have a cute little front porch, some with a two-person seating area.  It is very apparent that none of these are made to move around, like an RV.

So, what is the appeal?  They are small and efficient.  Very little upkeep with nice siding on them like those pictured.  Certainly less $$ than a typical small home.  You might be surprised by how expensive they can run, though.  Some people like the idea that their home is using less resources, both in the construction and day-to-day living.  In a park like this, there is the monthly lot rent, which may be in the $500 to $600 a month, plus electricity.  For that, you get resort-style amenities; a swimming pool, a clubhouse, cable TV.  What you lose: no garage, not much of a yard, not a lot of storage space.  You are certainly close to your neighbors.

Can you live in 400 square feet?  Well, we have done that successfully for months at a time in our RVs or onboard a boat.  Lots of people live in park homes.  Across the sunbelt, there are all kinds of parks and resorts that are more park homes than RVs.  If you had a lot on a lake, and zoning allowed it, how nice would that be to plop one of these on it, connect the utilities, and welcome home.

Will we be doing it any time soon?  No.  At 850 square feet, our house is small.  I don't see where we'd be content with anything smaller at this time, even though we do go out for several months at a time in the motorhome. 

This is a solution for some people.  An alternative to being in an apartment, with others living on all four sides of you.  Plus, these are cool... and in Austin, cool counts.

The rest of this park is for RVs.  I posted photos of our site yesterday.  We are in what looks to be the first built part of this park.  The sites have plenty of length for big rigs (or our smaller rig, long over-all length), with nice grassy area between, but the paved portion is pretty narrow...

In the newer section, near where the tiny homes are, the RV sites have more paved width...

There would be room to park your vehicle alongside the RV, instead of in front or behind.  That would be better for us, since we could put the trailer in so it is easy to get the scoots out. 

No matter, we are only here for 3 nights, not the whole summer.