Buy a tiny house at IKEA

I do think that “Tiny Homes” tend to be better designed than traditional mobile homes and have clever built in storage and the like making them much nicer places to live in (although Buckminster Fuller’s failed “Dymaxion house” anticipated many of these things).

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IKEA parking lot?

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Yup. Trailer parks are the real estate equivalent of payday lenders. A dreadfully underegulated and predatory industry that keeps poor people poor.

I have to respectfully disagree on that point. For me, RVs are the high point of design for efficient use of space. They are obscenely clever in how they use every inch, while maintaining a high standard of living and using lightweight, affordable materials. Meanwhile, every tiny home I see is a cramped box full of heavy mahogany wood, has a lousy chemical toilet, sleeps one, and the cleverness is limited to a cupboard under the ladder to the loft. I encourage anyone who gets excited by tiny homes to take off their hipster glasses and go take a serious look at modern RVs and how much real utility they build into something that can still pull itself over a mountain pass at 60mph.

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RVs do have some different considerations from Tiny Homes that go beyond space though.

An RV has to dedicate a big part of its engineering and layout to staying drivable and street legal. A well-designed one also needs to account for mass in order to keep the thing more fuel efficient, whereas a person in a tiny but stationary home doesn’t need to worry about things like how much their furniture weighs.

Different sets of pros and cons for different use cases.

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Or put some sofas in an old bus. I used to live in a bus, it was great. Guy I knew had an old showman’s trailer; he had an Alvis Stalwart as his tow vehicle. The cops were all fucking terrified of Carlos’s rig :grinning:
ETA for reference:

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Good choice.
(I’ve been wanting a Fuchs as my second car ever since 1986. The recon version is amazingly quiet.)

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An RV is not a mobile home, at least not in the US sense of the term. Mobile homes are inexpensive prebuilt trailers that are towed into position, such as the picture KathyPartdeux provided. They are “mobile” in the sense that they can in theory be towed somewhere else, but despite the word “mobile” they generally stay in one place. RVs are luxury vehicles that many people dream about buying in their retirement.

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What happens if you buy one of these from the Infinite IKEA?

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That strengthens my argument, not weakens it. Even with all these additional constraints, RVs still deliver a better experience.

Besides, you think mass doesn’t matter in a tiny home? What do think is the weight rating on those axles of the trailer that most of them are built on? You bet weight matters. In fact the one pictured is a ball hitch without even equalizer bars, and what look like light duty axles. So that thing has to weigh less than even a three horse trailer. It is much more weight sensitive that an average RV in that size range, which would typically be three axle, fifth-wheel hitch, or a dually-pusher configuration on bus axles.

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I cited manufactured homes multiple times as distinct from RVs in my posts above. My family has lived in both, so pretty sure I know the difference.

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is a mock-up that would never work that way, for all the reasons you’ve stated, and probably some more.

Clearly not for everyone.

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My original point was to have people ask themselves why that is. I believe it is because RVs and manufactured homes are stigmatized so people look past them and miss the lessons in designing for sustainable small living that they contain.

People are seduced by a cute little box made of fancy wood designed by someone with a lot of Helvetica on their website. When you get pragmatic though, and really look at the construction, lifecycle, and land use implications of these hipster boxes that reinvent the wheel, they don’t hold together well. People just really like small boxes of fancy wood sitting on beautiful land. We used to call those cabins. :woman_shrugging:

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Looking at this from a European perspective, I think what is inspiring the Swedish behemoth is that the Tiny Home phenomena is something for markets where the mobile home* is too Trailer Park Boys-ey, too American and impermanent. And I am not against it at all, as I grew up in the USA, and my earliest memories are of living in a trailer park in the 1970s. I have nothing against the “traditional” mobile home, except for the fact that it’s mostly metal, and crap in the winter.

I personally find the Tiny Home idea intriguing, but for different reasons. I imagine them being more akin to apartments, located close together on terraced land, like smaller row houses that have no need for a cellar. Take the pressure off of more arable land, let people live closer together yet still air-gapped.

*Apparently named after Mobile, Alabama. Some BBS’er pointed this out to me a few years ago!

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For someone who thinks we shouldn’t stigmatize others for their choice of domicile that feels like an awfully broad brush you are using there.

I say if you prefer the pros and cons of an RV, live in an RV. If you prefer the pros and cons of living in a stationary tiny house, live in a tiny house. Saying one is an inherently better experience than the other is like arguing whether it is better to live in the city or the suburbs. The answer is different depending on who you ask.

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I’m from the Mobile area (Fairhope) and never knew this! So, instead of being pronounced “mohbuhl” homes, they should more properly be pronounced “mohBEEL” homes. Crazy!

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At nearly 268 per square foot you might as well hire a contractor to build a custom one for you…

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Now there was a housing bargain! provided you knew a lot of contractors.

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