Tiny houses have become the rage lately, and it makes sense.
Since the Baby Boom generation was born, buying stuff has become an international preoccupation, leading to a proliferation of big-box stores replacing the little shops that used to line our streets in towns and cities across North America.
Many people spend their weekends shopping for the many items we feel we need to make our lives complete, such as furniture, books, toys and kitchen gadgets.
With more things in our lives, we want more space. In neighbourhoods around town, you’ll see people who park on the streets and sidewalks because their garages are so full that they can no longer fit their vehicles inside. And some homes are so packed with furniture that it’s difficult to move within them.
North American families typically move to larger homes as they get older – partly for status, but mostly because they need space to store all the things they have acquired over the years.
But now, thankfully, there has been a change. Many are rejecting the materialist lifestyle, purging the clutter that has filled their lives and moving into tiny homes. Some are living in spaces of less than 300 square feet where they have to fold up the bed every night. They own fewer things and shop carefully.
For society, it’s a positive movement. Tiny homes use fewer resources, as they have fewer lights, usually need less heating and require fewer materials for repairs and cleaning.
Because they’re more affordable, tiny homes are particularly appealing in Squamish, where real estate prices are rising dramatically, and the district’s recently relaxing of minimum house size requirements makes the small abodes possible. This Saturday, the Squamish Tiny Homes Movement will hold its first meeting at the Brackendale Art Gallery at 10 a.m.
But living in a tiny home is not always cheap or easy. A Squamish couple who intended to live in a trailer for the winter ended up abandoning it because of the expense of maintaining and heating it during the snowy months. Several other local people are having trouble finding land to rent where they can place their mini-homes.
The dream, it seems, is to locate on a secluded wooded property, not in a trailer park.
And only occasionally does someone point out that a good part of the population already lives in tiny homes that share walls with others, making them more energy-efficient. They’re called apartments.
Still, we applaud anyone trying to conserve energy by moving to a smaller space. In the end, we all benefit from the energy savings and conservationist approach to life.
