Micro-Homes
The idea behind these micro-homes is to create spaces that combine simplicity and pragmatism to give you a strikingly minimalistic place to feel at home. Not just a place to feel at home, but a place to be at home! A micro-home!
This is our first design. Once it's in production, the frame of the roof and the fold-out side-room would be covered with canvas. This is approximately 8 feet tall, so a person can comfortably stand up in it. The fold-out "side-room" is four feet wide, and seven feet long, so it is more than enough room to fit a single-person inflatable mattress, but it would be a tight squeeze to fit two people.
Once it's folded up, it's slightly more than three feet wide. A bike lane is supposedly about three feet wide, and this came out to about three feet and four inches, so it's small enough to bike along the side of the road in most situations. If you don't have room to safely ride off to the side, we recommend taking the full lane so that you don't get hit by someone trying (and failing) to pass you. Pull over periodically to let traffic pass.
What's a Micro-Home?
The goal of a micro-home is to fulfill all the needs that a home should, while using very few resources and taking up very little space.
Most of our micro-homes will be mobile, usually towed behind a bicycle or pushed around like a large shopping cart, but we are not limiting ourselves to mobile homes. The unifying theme of our micro-homes is that they are just so darn small they can't even be called "tiny houses".
A micro-home can be used as a weekend getaway, or as your main living space, and for every micro-home we get paid to make, we'll make one for free for someone who can't afford it!
Our Mission
Our mission is to house as many people as possible. Since people without a home generally don't have a lot of money, we hope to sustain this pursuit by selling these to campers, cyclists, and hobbyists, and for each one we sell we will give one away to someone who can't afford it.
Pricing
Right now, I can't promise that they'll be less than $2,000 - although our dream goal is to get the price down closer to $1,000. But we're still ironing out the kinks and trying to get the price down without using any toxic building materials.
We also plan to continue designing new types of micro-homes to strike a different balance for different people depending on their needs. For instance, we're working on a design right now that is all canvas walls - this may feel too unprotected for some people, while other people would be happy that it is more light-weight, and possibly less expensive.
So far, all of our building has been out-of-pocket, and we're out of money, so stay tuned for an indie gogo campaign. However, we are determined enough that this project will continue with or without funding - it would just help speed up the process.
Making these very inexpensive will be challenging, since we're trying to make them healthy to live in, as well as environmentally friendly. So any suggestions are appreciated. My email address is at the bottom of the page.
Buy It Now!
If you really want one, right now, you will have to pay up-front. Since we have no money right now. For details, email me at the email address at the very bottom of this page.
If you buy now, it will be the second one we ever made, so you'll have to help us decide what changes to make, what materials to build from (the plywood we used on the first one turned out to be toxic), and the price can be negotiated based on the cost of materials. But we do need at least enough money to build a second one for a homeless person - that is non-negotiable.
Since this would be only our second micro-home, it's hard to say how long it will take to build it. I would ask for at least two months, just in case.
Our Progress
Check this section for updates.
So far our milestones are:
- We made our first prototype.
- We found a zero-VOC eco-friendly varnish to use.
- The varnish is expensive... we're considering offering the option of buying one without the varnish for a lower price. You'll have to decide how you weather-proof it.
- We discovered plywood is toxic, and we're looking into different materials to use for the walls and floor.
- We have many designs on paper! We plan to continue experimentation.
- Aaannd we're completely out of money now, so we might try to kick start this with an indie gogo campaign or something, stay tuned...
Why Micro?
There are many reasons to downsize all the way to micro-living. The things you own end up owning you. The more space you have, the more things you end up filling it with, and the more complicated your life becomes. The smaller your home is, and the simpler your lifestyle, the less resources you use, which helps spare the Earth.
Another obvious advantage of a micro-home is that you don't have to pay rent! Living in a van, or a tiny house towed behind a car, still requires you to pay a toll to the oil-barons (unless you have a particularly eco-friendly engine). You may not be paying rent, but you're still paying the cost of fuel and parking tickets. A micro-home, on the other hand, lets you circumvent those complications by allowing you to get around for free using the energy from your own body (or energy from the sun), and frees up some of that time that you would have otherwise spent working for money to pay rent. That way you can spend your time working on more meaningful work, (which rarely pays well..).
They're Just Awesome
The mobile micro-homes are quite versatile. They are incredibly small and lightweight, so they can usually be moved around on foot, or towed by bicycle, which allows you to easily travel wherever you want. They can easily be biked down the side of the road, or along a bike trail, until you reach your favorite campgrounds. They offer a cozy space whether you park overnight in a parking lot, or you tow it out into nature for a week of solitude. And because they hold their shape, unlike a tent, they give you a greater sense of continuity and comfort, even if you're always on the move. They allow you to insulate yourself from the world when needed, but also prevent you from completely shutting out the world since you're both visible and approachable while you're moving it around. People love to see how they fold and unfold!
Working Towards a Humane Society
While these micro-homes make an ideal home for a long bicycle journey, or provide a neat way to bike to a campground and still have the creature comforts of a home with you when you get there, these micro-homes are also particularly ideal for someone who doesn't already have a home.
Precarious housing situations can be quite bewildering, especially if you've been raised to believe "you get what you deserve". But often times, for reasons beyond our control, people slowly but surely find themselves living in abusive or otherwise unhealthy living situations, or find that their time "between jobs" drags on longer than they thought it would, until one fateful night they have no options left but to sleep on the ground outside without any shelter. For people in this situation, a micro-home can be their salvation.
The Plight of the Homeless
These days, homeless people are constantly being harassed by security guards and law enforcement. If they are ever found sleeping anywhere, they are rudely woken up, and kicked out. They are constantly being told to leave, even though they have nowhere to go. Life becomes a constant march to the next spot, where you might be able to get off your feet for just a little while, before inevitably the next security gaurd or police officer approaches and once again tells you to move along.
At the same time, homeless people have to put up with harrassment from each other, and from the endless foot traffic of people walking by. There is nowhere to hide, and you're constantly forced to engage with everyone, their looks, their comments, and their perceptions of you.
Once you've fallen into this situation, it can be incredibly difficult to get out of it because all of your time and energy is spent just reacting to the constant demands to move along, as well as the physical demands of your body: you try to sleep, get woken up and told to leave, try to sleep, get woken up, gotta find water, gotta find food, gotta find a bathroom, gotta move along, move along, move along... This cycle acts as a sort of torture chamber that follows you wherever you go, and puts you in a frenzied survival state where you are unable to think clearly or improve your situation in any way. These are also the circumstances which directly lead so many people to using stimulants to stay awake and stay on the move, which means there's homeless tweakers everywhere that never sleep. The majority of housed voters therefore become even more disdainful of the homeless, and enact more "homeless laws", which makes the homeless even more desperate and further inflates the meth epidemic. It's a feedback loop of social stigmas and hostility which everyone loses.
The Homeless are not The Problem
"The Homeless Problem" is often used to generically refer to the fact that there are a whole lot of homeless people. However, for people who have never been homeless, and who have little compassion or understanding of the situation, they might think of it as their "problem" - the problem being that they have to see and interact with homeless people. This disdain for the homeless is reflected in "homeless laws" which have been passed by majority vote, such as the "No Sit, No Lie" law of San Francisco which has made it illegal to sit down or lie down on the sidewalk. Meanwhile, the real problem for homeless people is this disdain for their existence, and their lifestyle, because it directly translates to increasingly hostile laws that relentlessly punish them for being in a situation they didn't ask for to begin with.
This misunderstanding of the plight of homelessness has heartlessly plunged the homeless into a downward spiral where neither the homeless nor the voters are going to get what they want. The problem is the myth that homeless people can somehow just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and get off the street, if only they wanted to. These "homeless laws" are therefore supposed to act as the incentive for the homeless to get themselves off the street. However, by now it should be obvious that this approach is not working. An increasingly hostile environment does not solve homelessness, because it does not take into account other social and economic factors that are at play. Instead, by making the lives of the homeless worse than they already are, homeless people will have an even harder time with finding bathrooms, staying clean, staying off drugs, or even staying sane, and may eventually give up on re-entering society altogether. Whether you're homeless, or trying to avoid the homeless, these laws will only make things worse for everyone.
A Solution to the Homeless Problem
The micro-home is a home for the homeless. It is a very immediate and direct solution. It allows you to take breaks from the outside world, and find some peace of mind. It gives you a place to work on projects without being disturbed, and a constant bedroom that gives you some sense of continuity while you continue to move from one place to another.
This is another reason these micro-homes are so small. They can be easily hidden, behind bushes or dumpsters, down alleyways, or out in the woods. This gives someone a much better chance of being left alone and allowed to sleep overnight, and their mobility allows them to easily move when asked. In fact, if moved often enough, and parked in well-hidden places, the resident may be able to avoid conflict altogether for days at a time. And if you wander far enough, you might even find a place that no one minds you parking it for weeks on end. All the while, you have your whole home with you, and always get to sleep in the same bed.
Design
So far, we have only one design. More coming soon.
The floor of the "side-room" that folds out is just as stable as the main floor, and can hold the weight of one or two people standing or walking around on it. The legs swing out under their own weight as the floor is folded out, and since they obey gravity they align with the ground as the floor comes down, and always rest flat. (Although, you should probably double-check that they're resting flat if you're at a campsite and you're on uneven ground.) They swing back in on their own as the floor is folded up, so that they don't stick out of the side, and so that they leave room for the roof to slide down flush with the bottom of the floor.
The roof is held up by a peg on the left side, and would be held up by a peg on the right side as well, although pictured here it is just held up by the frame of the "side-room". When the roof folds down, it slides down flush with the bottom of the fold-out floor, which is what keeps the fold-out floor from swinging out on it's own. In the final model, there would probably be a wing-nut somewhere securing the floor from folding out on it's own, as well.
The frame on the "side-room", made to hold the canvas in place, is at such odd angles because this was also designed to swing out on it's own. The canvas wouldn't be at such an odd angle, the canvas would just hang straight down and wrap around the bottom of the floor. As the floor is folded up, the angle collapses, until it rests flat against the side of the camper. No assembly required. It rests so flat against the camper that the roof folds down around it in such a way that it gets squeezed into place, flush with the bottom of the fold-out floor. (video coming soon...)
The whole "back wall", which includes the door, folds in as a single piece, and fits snug inside the camper. This allows the roof to fold down around the whole thing, and it helps make the camper bottom-heavy even when it's empty - despite the heavy fold-out floor on one side. The door is also designed to fit in the "open" position when the whole back wall has folded down. This is only the prototype, but the vision is to have a lock on the door, and that the lock can lock the door when you're using it as a door, and lock in position when the back wall is folded in and the door is folded down. This would essentially lock up whatever stuff you had to the left of the door while everything is folded up.
This is looking at the "back wall", the closed door, from the inside. First, the cupboards are shut. Then, they are open. Each cupboard has a shelf one third of the way up, and extends all the way to the bottom although the cupboard door doesn't extend to the bottom. The cupboard doors can be secured for folding in the back wall, so nothing falls out, even if it's a bunch of heavy books.
These two ledges jutting out under the cupboards are housing the wheels, and were measured to make a bench by just laying a fitted piece of wood across them. This bench is NOT close enough to use for the desk. Someone could be sitting on a stool at the desk, while someone else sits on the bench, for instance. This bench seat is one of the great upgrades from a tent, because you can lean on any of these walls, unlike the walls of a tent. And since the cupboard doors don't extend all the way to the bottom of the cupboard, they can open and close even with the bench in place, even if there's a large foam cushion on the bench. The big entryway door, of course, is basically locked shut as long as the bench is laid across these ledges.
Challenges
We are making these micro-homes to house the homeless. So, currently our model is to sell one for about the price it takes to build two of them, and then give one away. We're also trying to inspire people in need of a home to set out to build their own micro-homes. Both of these goals require us to find a way to make them really inexpensive. However, we also want to keep in mind that a growing portion of the homeless population are people with chronic illnesses, or environmental sensitivities, so we can't cut corners and provide a product that doesn't provide what they need. People with environmental sensitivities in particular often find themselves forced to remain on the move, always looking for an environment where their symptoms are reduced, and are frustrated to find that almost everywhere they go has the same environmental factors that they're running from to begin with. Imagine if we offer them such a wonderful solution, only for them to find that the materials we used are so cheap that they make them sick?
Building materials aren't cheap, especially if you have a high standard for the health and well-being of the occupant. An infamous example is the portable housing that FEMA provided to Hurricane Katrina victims. There are people living in these toxic shelters to this day, because they feel that it's still their best option - a mistake we do not want to repeat. This is a counter-example to the standards we hope to hold ourselves to. However, sadly, we're off to a rough start because the first micro-home we've built, pictured below, was made from plywood, which as it turns out is typically glued together using a fermaldehyde glue. I wouldn't consider myself "chemically sensitive", but I couldn't sleep in it for even an hour before I started having difficulty breathing. Headaches, dizziness, and asthma, are just some acute symptoms of fermaldehyde. In the long term, it could contribute to cancer. Live and learn... Alternatives include a fermaldehyde-free particle board of a similar price, and a fermaldehyde-free plywood that is about five times more expensive. These still contain some kind of glue, though, so I'm not sure if they will be satisfactory. We are still researching alternatives to our toxic plywood. Any information on building materials would be helpful. My email address is at the bottom of the page.
This prototype was built with toxic plywood, and I couldn't make it through the night without breathing difficulties, even when it was so well-ventilated.
We won't repeat that mistake.