We love tiny homes. The average new home is 1,000 square feet larger than homes built in the 1970s, topping 2,700 square feet! That’s a lot of square footage to heat, cool, light, and fill with stuff. The environmental impact of larger homes is staggering, and many are abandoning their huge house fantasies for a smaller, simpler way of living.
Recently, we wrote about a family of 5 who gave up the big house life for a tiny home, and even how Oregon is leaning on tiny homes to help house their unhoused population.
Ana White is a self-taught carpenter, a stay-at-home mom, and a well-known DIY blogger. What makes her blog so unique is the ease and availability of all of her projects. Being a self-taught carpenter, she’s keenly aware of the need of making things simple and available for all.
Ana got her start a few years ago helping her husband finish a few do it yourself projects around their home. Building things became a big interest for her, so she set out to design and build a few different things. She started with building a few pieces of furniture, but today, her blog features more than 1,000 different DIY projects, all of which are free.
But quite possibly her biggest project yet is her tiny home, which she designed and built herself. Now, she’s making her tiny home plans available to the public for free with women and working families in mind.
“I needed to be able to provide plans for free so women could look at it and it would create confidence in them that ‘I can build this’,” White wrote on her blog.
“I knew that for me, as a mom with a single income, a really limited income, at home all day, it needed to be free because I myself couldn’t have afforded to pay $10 a plan.”
Her tiny home, which she’s nicknamed The Quartz, is mobile, built on a 24 by 8.5 foot trailer. The cabin doesn’t have running water connected to it, as extreme low temperatures could cause some serious damage to the home if pipes froze.
