Designing a Tiny House (Part 1)
Designing a tiny house isn’t easy at all. You have to think two or three times about every square inch and how you can get the best usage out of it. But at first I have to think about my goals I want to accomplish for the tiny house.
For me, the most important goal would be a highly energy efficient house. There are some important rules you have to follow:
1.) Reduce the windows on the north side of the building to the lowest level possible. Because there will be the highest energy loss through the windows.
2.) Try to get the most and biggest windows on the south side, the gain of passive solar heat in the winter time will be huge, because of the low standing sun in this time period.
3.) Avoid as many power outlets and light switches as possible in the exterior walls, because each one of them will be a possible risk for a leakage and therefore a possibility for energy loss.
4.) Try to get the floor plan as square as possible; each corner you add to the house will add another risk of a leakage to the shell of the house. That’s the most difficult part for me, because I love Victorian houses.
5.) Another important point in my eyes is dividing the house into different climate zones, which I made in different colors in the plan below.
Zone one would be the entrance. Try to place a mudroom between your front door and your living area to avoid getting all the cold air into your living room which has to be heated up again and again each time you open the door. You can see on the plan below that the interior walls surrounding the mudroom are all insulated, so you can keep the temperature on a lower level than in the living area.
The second zone would be the bathroom. When you are taking a shower or a bath or getting ready in the morning you like the room warmer than the rest of the house. To keep the bathroom warmer and not heat up the rest of the house too, all of the bathroom walls should be insulated; as you can see in the following plan.
The last zone is the bedroom. To have a good and restorative sleep, the bedroom should be cooler than the rest of the home. Here again, all the walls around the bedroom are insulated, so you can even sleep with an open window without cooling down the rest of the house.
6.) And last the insulation of the shell of the house. A highly efficient house doesn’t need only exterior walls with a high R-value, also the roof and the main floor (because I don’t want to add a basement) need very strong insulation. There are many different options available to insulate the house. Most of them don’t impress me at all. All the loose insulations have one common problem. They try to settle down and a gap will appear at the top part over time; same with batt insulation if it isn’t installed right.
My choice would be spray foam insulation; it has so many advantages against all the other kinds of insulation on the market. It will fill the smallest gap and after drying out will not settle and guarantees a tight shell with a high R-value.
Part 2 will follow in a few days. Then I will talk about the floor plan design.
