Are you already planning roadtrips for your future tiny house? Well, listen up kids, because I have a few tiny house design ideas for you! Read on for 5 tips on how to design your tiny home for travel.
5 Tiny House Design Tips for Travel:
1). Think about your overall weight
Seriously, think about it. My tiny house weighs 10,100 pounds when fully loaded with fresh water and my belongings. That’s 4.5 tons! The average tiny house of my size weighs about 8,000 pounds, so my girl is a bit chunky. I won’t go into why she weighs so much (a girl has her reasons), but it’s impossible to put her on a diet now. My trailer axels are rated for 10,400 pounds, so I am cutting it close. That being said, 10-15% my tiny house weight rests on the hitch of my tow vehicle.
My tow vehicle is a Ford F-250 diesel
If you are building off of a set of reputable plans, be sure to follow the materials list. Or, if you like to live dangerously, at least consider the weight difference between your chosen materials and the materials typically used in tiny house construction. The lighter and smaller the tiny house, the easier and cheaper it will be to tow.
2). Think about your weight distribution
The overall weight of your tiny house design is important, but don’t ignore your weight distribution. Tiny houses tend to be tongue heavy. This is due to the fact that many designs have the loft and kitchen over the tongue. Make sure your tow vehicle can support the overall weight AND tongue weight of your trailer. This is very important. I purchased a weight distribution system, which I suggest doing regardless of your tongue weight. It has helped immensely with towing.
The sweet spot for tongue weight is between 10-15% of your total weight. My tiny house tongue weight is 1500 pounds. Again, cutting it close. For more towing gear, check out the “towing” section of our materials list.
3). Create a space that is easy to secure for travel
Who wants to spend more than 30 minutes setting up every time they park? Not me! I designed my interior to have shelves with ledges, hook & eyes, or bungie cords. All of my belongings can be secured in 30 minutes or less. Consider your light fixtures carefully – will they swing? Hanging plants, sports gear and musical instruments should have clamps or bumpers to prevent damage or spills. See the clasping surfboard rack (which we use as a snowboard rack) and uke bumpers in the photo below for reference.
Thinking ahead before hitting the road will save you a few headaches. . . (and broken possessions)
Click here for more interior shots of my tiny house
It’s also a good idea to design your tiny house to be both off-grid and on-grid. This will increase your flexibility when finding parking options. For example, because my tiny house design can be off-grid, I parked on Crown Land in Canada and at BLM campsites in the USA. Thank you very much: composting toilet, fresh water tank, grey water tank and solar power.
4). Build within highway restrictions
Make sure your tiny house design does not exceed 13’6″ tall and 8’6″ wide, including fenders, solar panels and chimney pipes. As far as I know, there is no restriction for length. If you build wider or taller you will be forced to get a special permit to tow in many states. Also, you may end up with a convertible tiny house.
Even if you build within the parameters, you still need to keep an eye out for low bridges, wires and branches. I’ve also seen many tiny houses built on very low trailers to increase living space. While this is a great idea, it will make towing more difficult.
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5). Attach outdoor lights for night driving
Aside from the standard lights required for towing, I suggest attaching a few mounted solar lights to your tiny house. Not only will this make your home look super cool on the road, it’s a safety factor.
One other thought for weight management; one of our hosts’ colleagues at Tumbleweed made his tiny home out of SIPs, which are “structural integrated panels” , more or less a sandwich of chipboard and styrofoam. Doing this more or less allowed him to eliminate almost all of the studs in construction, saving about 25 cubic feet of wood or half a ton of weight. It adds up.
Love it! Saw the TV episode when you had it built, you should be so proud of yourselves. Great Job! Going Tiny is not for everyone, but I do hope to join the ranks once I retire. I would love to travel around the U.S. and visit all our beautiful sites. Your both so fortunate and daring.
Here’s a list of overall limits courtesy of “Good Sam” camping.
http://www.goodsamcamping.com/plan/sizelimits.aspx
Let’s just say that in any state, you can get pretty big, to the point that one would question whether it was a tiny home anymore. One would also need to do some fairly stringent weight control methods to use a pickup to tow it, or else risk using a semi tractor for that purpose.
Good stuff–big contributors to weight as far as i can tell are siding, roofing, and framing. If your siding can double as sheathing (I did this with my sauna), or if you can use steel instead of asphalt roofing, or if you use lighter framing appropriate to an RV (2x2s are very common in buildings of this size, as are 2x3s), you save a lot of weight. Big beams are beautiful and dramatic, but are also heavy.
Loved the post and advice. Did Guillaume help with the design, too?
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Of course! He was a huge part of it all.
That is not just over 1 ton…its over 4 tons. 🙂
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True. Whoops!