HARTSEL
— Some homeowners prefer the sprawl of suburban McMansions. Others opt for cozy
old bungalows near city centers. Not too many opt for a 133-square-foot home — you
read that correctly — that on first glance looks not much larger than a Great
Dane's doghouse. But Christopher Smith and Merete Mueller did just
that. The Boulder couple built a 7-by-19-foot wooden house whose foundation is
a two-axle trailer bed. Last week, they towed it to a 5-acre patch of isolated
hillside 20 minutes outside this town, which sits on South Park's eastern edge.
Smith and Mueller are part
of the "tiny house" movement,
a coterie of urban and ex-urban thinkers experimenting with super-scaled-down
living. While the couple will use the pint-sized house as a getaway cabin for
now, thanks to jobs in Boulder, living in it full-time is a future possibility. "People ask us why we
didn't buy a single-wide trailer, but we wanted something that really felt like
a home," Mueller said on a recent afternoon at the house. "It made us
really pay attention to good design, the use of space and how it sets the mood
of a place." Smith, 30, who grew up around Washington, D.C., is a
graphic designer and programmer who does video projects on the side. Mueller,
27, and a Boston native, has a background in writing and business management. The impetus for building the
house came last spring. Smith was set to graduate with a master's degree from
the University of Colorado-Denver and his 30th birthday loomed. "I wasn't so much
freaking out as figuring out what to do after grad school," Smith said.
"It felt like time to do a bucket list. I always wanted a cabin in the
mountains. Why should I work all my life and wait to do it when I'm
retired?" He began doing Google searches for cheap Colorado
land. Hartsel always came up. The couple found the lot and swung a deal. Construction began in May. Smith and Mueller brought
little in the way of contractor skills to the project. So plenty of Internet
consultation and talks with people who had done similar projects ensued. "And we spent a lot of
time at Home Depot," Mueller said.
The result is a charmer, a
good thing in a small package, even if its size would make Laura Ingalls Wilder
feel that her little house on the prairie was Windsor Palace.
The house's interior and
exterior walls are made from beetle-kill pine. The flooring is recycled timber,
and it's insulated by soy-based spray-foam insulation. Seven windows afford a
360-degree view. You can see the gleaming, corrugated steel roof from miles
away as you wend your way across the valley to the house.
There is a sofa and
bookshelves, and a sleeping loft accessed by a ladder. The loft is snug: Sit
bolt upright in bed at 3 a.m., you'll see stars on a cloudy night, guaranteed.
The house, supplied with
electricity from solar panels, features a composting toilet. They have to truck
in water by the jug, since the land has no well yet. A two-burner alcohol stove
serves the kitchen. A propane-fueled stove, the kind found on sailboats,
provides heat. Bathing will be done under a sun-heated camp-style shower. "It's meant to be kind
of Spartan," Smith said. "We will really have to pay atttention to
how much water we need and how much waste we generate. "But building it makes
me want to live in it full-time." The tiny-house movement arose several years ago,
fueled by the confluence of interest in "greener" living and the
economic crash. There are perhaps 1,000 such houses in the country, all under
150 square feet in space. Jay Shafer, who heads the Tumbleweed Tiny
House Co., is a movement leader. He built his first such house in
Iowa in 1999 — it was 89 square feet — and sells plans for several styles of
design-and-build homes. His YouTube following is vigorous, thanks to his blog
and virtual tours.
Some tiny-house owners seek
to live off the grid, or at least lightly. Others, often younger and footloose,
are lured by the novelty. All are drawn by the low cost, although cheapness
isn't reflected in square-footage costs. Smith reckons they spent between $20,000 and $25,000
on the house, with the trailer/foundation accounting for $5,000 of that. Even
if you factor in the 50-square-foot sleeping loft, the house cost roughly $110
to $138 per square foot to build. Industry averages for standard homes run
$80-$110. "You don't get an economy of scale in a tiny
house," Smith said. There are obvious limits to living in such spaces.
Many towns regulate how small a domicile can be. Park County,
home to Hartsel, requires a 600-square-foot minimum for a home. But a temporary
structure on land, essentially an encampment, is exempt. So a house on a
trailer qualifies. While Smith and Mueller support the simplicity
aesthetic, they aren't waving a "be like us" banner. Tiny homes, for
example, pretty much preclude couples with children. Or claustrophobes. But Smith and Mueller were
driven by the urge to have a cabin in the great outdoors. Now they do. The house is perched on the
faint slope of a windblown hill east of Hartsel, off a minor maze of dirt
roads. Sitting on its front porch, you gaze out at the Tarryall Mountains
rising 10 miles to the north. Squint hard, and you might be able to glimpse the
back of beyond. Save for a handful of neighbors scattered around the valley,
it's a study in isolation. "The point of building this was to spend time
on the land," Mueller said. "Being from the East Coast, this
landscape still blows me away." The couple is also making a documentary on the
tiny-house movement, with their own in a starring role. "We've talked
about holding an open house," Mueller said. "Everyone can come up
here and stay in tents."
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