Home Building Blog - Eco-Friendly and Green
Small houses challenge our notions of need as well as minimum-size standards
April 27th, 2007 by Ryan JohnstonPosted by By Carol Lloyd, Special to SF Gate (Friday, April 27, 2007).
Down a rambling residential road on the outskirts of Sebastopol, the dream house sits like a testament to discriminating taste.
This dream house is the love child of artist-builder Jay Shafer, who lovingly hand-crafted it. The stainless-steel kitchen, gleaming next to the natural wood interior, is outfitted with customized storage and built-ins. From his bed, Shafer can gaze into the Northern California sky through a cathedral window. In his immaculate office space, a laptop sits alongside rows of architectural books and magazines — many featuring his house on the cover. And from the old-fashioned front porch, he can look out on a breathtaking setting: an apple orchard in full bloom.
But in an era when bigger is taken as a synonym for better, calling Shafer’s home a dream house might strike some as an oxymoron. Why? The entire house, including sleeping loft, measures only 96 square feet — smaller than many people’s bathrooms. But Jay Shafer’s dream isn’t of a lifestyle writ large but of one carefully created and then writ tiny.
Shafer, the founder of Tumbleweed Tiny Houses, began his love affair with diminutive dwellings about 10 years ago when teaching drawing at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. “I was living in an average-sized apartment and I realized I just didn’t need so much space,” he said. “I always envied people who had smaller homes, because they didn’t have to do as much housework.”
He bought an Airstream trailer, remodeled it and spent two years suffering the long, bitter winters before conceding that insulation was one amenity he was unwilling to forgo. “So I started from scratch and built myself a small house,” he told me. He built the 100-square-foot home on wheels and parked it on a friend’s farm outside of Iowa City. Eventually, he moved back into town but not without some difficulty. “I wasn’t allowed to put the house on a city lot, because it was too small,” he explained, referring to the minimum-size standards in the codes of many cities and counties across the country. So he bought a house, put his little house in the backyard and rented out the main house.
Read the rest of the story on how to live comfortably in 96 square feet.
Tagged as: small homes, green, living with less, minimalism, architecture, design
Unfair Trade
April 26th, 2007 by Ryan JohnstonUK ministers, who claim to promote sustainable development, are part of a push to force developing countries to sign away their environment. Found this morning at The Guardian.
During the course of this month civil society organisations and social movements worldwide are holding actions against unfair trade deals that the European Union is forcing on 76 African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries, of which 39 are among the least developed in the world.
These so called Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) (pdf) are comprehensive free trade instruments that are set to force ACP countries to eliminate trade barriers to almost all EU imports. This will expose family farmers and fledgling industry to direct and unfair competition from powerful European corporations - driving farmers off their land and causing mass unemployment. The EU claims that these deals are pro-development but even the European commission’s own impact assessment (pdf) has highlighted that they could lead to the collapse of West Africa’s manufacturing sector.
Yet it is the agricultural sector that is set to suffer the most as the current proposals will fling open markets - mainly throughout sub-Saharan Africa - and pave the way for the dumping of cheap, subsidised European goods such as cereals, processed meat and canned vegetables. This threatens the livelihoods of millions of farmers who simply cannot compete with cheap imports.
Read the rest of the article on unfair trade.
Tagged as: green, trade, IMF, africa, environment, unfair trade