Today’s post comes from Clyde of Mankato.

I was born too late. Just too late. Too late for the “Tiny House” craze. It all starts with my childhood and ends with my daughter.

My childhood had two tiny houses in it, more like cabins, but they could have been homes. Even then I dreamed that one day I would live in a small one-room house. I did not think that I would meet a wonderful big city girl who had no such dream.

The first of the cabins in my childhood was along the otherwise uninhabited road to our farm. It belonged to an old man who lived in town. His outhouse did not bother me; our house, at that time, had only an outhouse. What happened to it, you ask? His grandson tore it down and built a large 1970’s era split-level house. I cannot blame him. It has a view of Lake Superior from its higher floors. (The header drawing is of that cabin.)

The second of the cabins had only one twelve-by-fifteen room. “The Shack” we called it, built by my brother and a friend on the edge of our fields 600 yards from our house. My brother and his friend went off to the Navy, thus ceding use of the cabin to me and my best friend, the younger brother of the man who helped my brother build The Shack. Dennis and I often slept there, after peddling into town to buy a load of sugar for our night’s pleasure. It had no outhouse, simply lots of nearby brush. What happened to it, you ask? In reality nothing, by which I mean it has melted itself into the ground. In my imagination it is the primary setting of my second novel. However, for the demands of the fiction, I tore it down and replaced it with a modern small home, but not a tiny house.

Our house on the North Shore was small, barely 1400 square feet. We did not find it lacking, in part because of our view over Lake Superior. Today we live in an apartment of 650 square feet, which we find cozy and perfect. When Sandy and I watch the TV shows on tiny houses, she always exclaims how small they are and how she could not live in one. I always dream the tiny house is mine. My daughter and her husband have plans to build a tiny house as their only home when they retire.

The tiny house fad, it seems to me, says something about our culture. We rush to the extremes: 4000 square feet or 400 square feet. Why not something of 900 to 1200 square feet, for example?

Could you live in a tiny house, say 400-500 square feet?