Custom Homes 220 SQFT Micro Home

-Good morning. Welcome to our tiny house custom homes. Our tiny barn on our tiny farm here in New England was built last year by a group of students from Yestermorrow Design Build School up in Warren, Vermont. We love it. -The students that designed it and built it, they didn't go crazy trying to pack a million little things in. It's open, it's airy. So when you're living in a very small house, you don't feel constricted. The kitchen and the dining room and the living room. One of the things that the students were trying to achieve was, even though this is a custom home it is still somewhat small house-- 227 square feet-- it still feels pretty big. I've been in here with 15 or 20 people, and believe it or not, it's not that crowded. The light fixtures are pretty interesting-- salvaged plumbing parts. I don't think that water comes out of those. I hope not. It's got a full oven set-up, salvaged steel backsplash. There's a nice set of drawers. There's cabinets above. Routed directly into the shelves above the sink are drainage holes, so we can put our clean dishes there, and they drain right into the sink—a nice way to save space. The bathroom. We've got a little sink, shower. The floor and bench where the toilet are are all made of rot-resistant wood, and there's a floor drain. So the whole room is actually the shower. The bedroom— I think it's just a classic small house bedroom. The bed is up a little bit higher, so you've got plenty of storage underneath-- drawers and a big hatch in the back. But it's not up so high that you have to climb up to get it. Again, this is one of those choices that they made that I think is so wonderful. It's a generous space. There's plenty of headroom, and you feel comfortable in there. This is an old Japanese technique for finishing the exterior of the building. Take cedar boards and, using a blow torch, char them until they are black. And then, scrape off the residue. And then, put a light coat of a natural oil on it. It gives it an amazing, rich brown color. Also, that charring seals the wood in, and it makes it essentially weather-proof. We've been really curious about creative ways to heat our custom homes. Inside the hay bales is wood chips and sawdust and a little bit of manure. We've got a pipe going in. It loops around and around and around. There's about 600 feet of pipe in here. And then, it comes back out again. We haven't hooked up the pump yet, but we hooked it up temporarily the other day, and the water that came out burned me. It's 150-degree water coming out of this thing. So we think a pile like this could easily heat a tiny house. We were looking to make an investment in energy for our custom homes. What we've bought, in a lot of ways, is people power. And that means having family and friends come, people come to help out on the farm and visit. For us, it's this energy of being able to host people, to have people come and participate in our little experiment here. Custom Homes