garage apartment
The kitchen is deceptively spacious and contains everything the couple needs, including a dishwasher, a Miele oven with built-in meat thermometer, enough dishes and glassware for 16, and “all the necessary cookware to have a nice dinner party,” Skip says, thanks to Euro-style cabinets that are deeper than usual.
The living and bedroom areas share the vaulted ceiling space. A tall custom cabinet serves as more than a room divider. On the living room side, it houses a lamp and a TV, and offers open shelf and drawer storage. The TV can swing out 3 feet, making it more visible from the sofa or the kitchen. A queen bed fits into the space on the other side. The compact sofa folds out to become another bed.
The bathroom includes a 20-inch vanity, a toilet and a 3-by-3½-foot shower (not shown). This space, because it’s enclosed, allowed them to deviate from the style of the rest of the loft, giving the owner some of the gray color he likes. They took the tile all the way up to the trim to make the space feel higher. “If we stopped halfway, it would have broken up the space,” Strom says. “Plus, it’s not a huge space, so the cost wasn’t a huge factor.”
The shower needs to drain into either the home’s graywater system or a French drain, consisting of a large pit filled with several feet of gravel that filters the water as it returns to the soil. (Expect to replace the gravel every five or six years.) Needless to say, you want to direct the drainage away from the foundation and basement, and if you plan to use soap in the shower, away from plants as well.
Resourceful companies like Lilypad Homes, which launched the nonprofit Lilypad FHI (Flexible Home Intiative), have begun to propose new model ordinances to address these permitting hassles. The Junior Accessory Dwelling Unit (JADU) exempts many of the costlier build requirements and simplifies the permitting process. The JADU essentially allows for the conversion of a bedroom into a self-contained living unit with relatively few (inexpensive) additional amenities.
For example, you may not be able to convert a garage into an ADU if it doesn’t meet current setbacks. Or your current garage may meet the setback requirements for garages, but the dwelling unit you want to convert it to may be subject to more stringent setback requirements. Determining the specifics of what square footage counts toward your maximum allowed is especially important. Some jurisdictions count decks as part of the total, while others don’t.
There are minimum and maximum size limitations that need to be verified with local authorities. The 2015 International Residential Code (IRC) allows an accessory dwelling to be as small as 88 square feet. Maximums of 800 to 1,000 square feet are common and depend on the existing lot size and type (ADU or DADU).
For more information, consult the in-depth, immensely helpful Accessory Dwellings website, based in Portland, Oregon. Be sure to check out the ADU break-even calculator to help with budgeting. There’s also a helpful PDF compiled by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban development available for download.
Tumbleweed tiny houses
In most of Shafer's previous tiny houses, he's been completely off-grid, collecting his own water and generating his own electricity. But for this particular house, Shafer has opted to hook it up to another power source with an extension cord. Water is gathered from a nearby spigot. "I'd do something more elaborate, but my local building codes and zoning prohibit a structure this small from being permanently connected to utilities."
The great room of the tiny house is the ultimate multi-purpose: living room, dining room, media room, guest bedroom, and yoga room. Lots of natural light brings the outside in and expand the feeling of space. Photo: Eileen Descallar Ringwald
The skylight was nonnegotiable. “I always wanted to watch the stars from bed, so cost didn’t matter,” she says. She paid $1,000 for the skylight. It’s fully operable, and it can act as a fire escape too.
loft!
Butcher block countertops from Ikea provide more than enough workspace. A pantry is to the right of the sink. Lustado also keeps her clothes hamper in there. She has a small refrigerator under the counter without a freezer. “I really thought about what I need, and for the amount of space that a freezer takes up, it wasn’t worth it,”
kitchen
Inside are a built-in desk, loft and sofa. Lustado’s carpenter friend did all the cabinetry, siding, floors and millwork. The built-ins are all made of FSC-certified wood.
All the electricity comes from four batteries fed by three solar panels. A 7-gallon propane tank provides a fuel source for a fireplace, stove and hot-water heater. The only utility she pays for is water, fed to the house by a garden hose.
Lustado constructed the home on a trailer rather than on a concrete foundation, which is a way of getting around many states’ requirement that any permanent living unit must be at least 600 or 700 square feet, depending on the location. The wheels technically make it a temporary housing unit and not subject to most building codes. (Lustado still followed most building codes as a safety measure.)
love the design of the roof and the patio
love the design
interesting design
swing out garage doors
acrylic roofing infill (the same material used on the veranda) open up at the corner to create the feeling of more space. A cantilevered roof allowed Broe to avoid using a corner column.
7 foot kirtchenette
Less than 9 feet wide, this kitchenette packs lots of options for cooking and food storage into a very practical footprint. It includes a counter-depth 24-inch refrigerator, a sink, an oven with induction cooktop, a microwave and a mini dishwasher.
microwave drawer
kitchen
cabinet for around the toilet
Q