The tiny house movement waxes philosophical about all of the benefits of downsizing into a home no bigger than a backyard shed, placing a particular emphasis on how liberating it can be to have a customized home of your own without the burden of a mortgage. Stories about DIY tiny houses costing as little as $1,300 to build go viral on the internet, leading thousands of people to wonder whether they should try their hands at constructing a dirt-cheap minimalist domicile, too.
But, most people don’t have carpentry and construction skills and aren’t necessarily up to the task of completing every little detail of a miniature house based on instructions from a YouTube video. A DIY tiny house with an ultra-low price tag requires untold hours of free labor on the builder’s part. Meanwhile, prefabricated tiny houses can sell for up to $100,000 ? not exactly a bargain for less than 300 square feet. And what, exactly, is the difference between a tiny house and a shed, anyway" Often, it’s not much more than the name.
Skeptics of the tiny house trend are quick to point out these similarities, noting that many of the scaled-down homes on the market are overpriced shacks, similar to what you can purchase at a hardware store. They’re not entirely wrong. Take a stroll through the shed aisle at your local garden center and you might be surprised at how much potential some of them have as envelopes for a tiny house ? and that’s where you can start s...