Where It Starts - The Planning

I have spent the last two months creating my Mini Mobile Cottage plans, I have looked at every tiny house blog on the planet, studied floor plans and revised my more times then I can count. I expect to start the build in January some time.

I have set some goals for what I want my house to contain or be built from. It will be a hybrid of good technology and gently used or recycled parts, stuff bought at a steep discount. Where need be I will buy new (framing wood, insulation, fasteners, technology). I want to be as off grid as possible while being connected to web. Having both a solar foot print and being able to attach to the grid when and if I want and the location provides, is a good thing in my mind.

Living in the Pacific Northwest also provides for ample free water so a catchment system is in the plans. I have lived on Craigslist, Ebay, and local recycling stores for the past month looking at options, changing plans and at times going back to the original idea. I am under no time constraint to get this project done so that is helping me make good decisions (I hope).

I am using propane for heat, hot water, cooking stove, and boat BBQ. I am going to use all LED bulbs but run them through an DC/AC Inverter so they will be wired as AC. The solar system which I will go into in detail about in a later post will have 400 amp hours of battery and the inverter is 1500 Watt which I am hoping meets my needs. As I have planning out my usage it should work fine but time will tell.

Part of this journey is the blog. It will be interesting for me to see how faithful I remain to keeping up my posts and describing the journey to the level of detail I hope will be a benefit to others. I have tons of material and drawings I have done, I just have to figure out how to get those to the web. Should be fun.


So in summary, I want the house to be very woodsy, lot of character in lightly stained interior wood, plenty of shelving, it will have the open great room effect with lofts on each end. A full DC power plant fed by (2) 135 watt solar panels and 30amp AC service. DC water supply with a propane water heater and stove, AC refrigerator (mini), A fresh water catchment system, and LED lights. The dimensions are 8ft wide by 22ft long of living space and 2 ft of front porch deck.

My Floor Plan

I found a guy in Molalla, OR who is building me the trailer at a great price and excellent quality. MS Metal Works - http://www.ms-trailer.com/ Mike is a good guy and has been really helpful with my expectations. This was a lot better deal then buying a new trailer off the lot. I will have pictures next week as I pick it up on Saturday the 18th of December, 2010. My original plan was to pick up a trailer on Craigslist, which I did. 10K, 18ft Flat Bed. I used it to haul my wood around. It works great but I decided that since I am living in this trailer and may potentially build another for sale that I wanted something bigger and rather then weld an extension on the trailer I would buy new and then found Mike. Can't wait to post the pictures of the new trailer!