In November 2016, Monique van Orden and I gave our very first workshop “Realize your own Tiny House”. We had rented a room in Utrecht in which we worked with twenty students for a day. After having given fifteen workshops across the country to about 300 students, we decided to turn it into an online […]
How to finance a Tiny House
The attention for Tiny Houses is steadily growing as more people decide to go for this form of housing. One of the challenges they face is financing their small dream home. This especially plays a role if you have a temporary or no residential location yet, as the option of taking out a mortgage is […]
How do we come out of this perfect storm?
There are so many things so terribly wrong at the moment, I am torn between two mindsets. Part of me feels it is my duty to keep me well informed about these intolerable situations and to inform other people who are not yet aware of them. But that gives me a lot of frustration. And […]
Sun protection in a Tiny House
When designing a Tiny House, a lot of thought is given to the heating of the house. It is sometimes forgotten how the house can be kept cool. This is at least as important. Especially now that our planet is warming up. The prediction is that we will have a dry and hot summer again […]
Happy bee flower mix offer
Sometime in March, I sowed my own Happy Bees flower mix in some of my vegetable garden boxes. I didn’t really know what else I wanted to put in, so I sowed generously — as a kind of experiment; I would see what would come out. Now I regularly walk past my house and see […]
Tiny House offers a view of nature
One of the things that makes living in my Tiny House so pleasant is that I have many windows in it that allow me to look at the surrounding greenery. That makes it no problem at all to live small; many windows gives a spacious feeling to the house. You bring the outside inside to […]
Call: more room for citizen initiatives in the housing market
I publish this message on behalf of the Tiny House Netherlands foundation. Over the past few days, we have formulated a letter to the House of Representatives of the States General with a group of leaders of civil society initiatives on the housing market. Below, you can read the message about this letter, which can […]
What would I have done differently?
I think it is the most frequently asked question when people visit my Tiny House or come to one of my lectures: “what would you do differently if you had to do it all over again, if you would design and build your house anew?” In short: very little :) But I will explain that. […]
The road forward is best taken on foot
The latest documentary by Michael Moore “Planet of the Humans” is stirring up quite some dust. It is responded to with indignation. We feel cheated. How despicable is it if companies, under the banner of the transition to clean, green energy that is supposed to mitigate our massive impact on Earth, end up doing just […]
Less is the new more
Minimalism is often seen as a way to simplify your life. Fewer belongings means less stress and more free time. It does indeed work that way. But that explanation is very focused on the “me”. Minimalism is also a dire necessity. If we want to survive as a species, we must drastically reduce our consumption, […]