TINY: A Story About Living Small

The film follows an overly optimistic guy with little to no construction skills as he builds a tiny house on a trailer base. For most of us tiny houses are a curiosity and escapist 'what if'. For some it is a way of life... but then, some people sleep under bridges. While I didn't quite hate the movie, I also didn't come away with anything new from it.

What could have been interesting - how are tiny houses designed to suit their inhabitants, what features could be applied to 'big' houses, how much stuff or space do you need... wasn't covered in any debt. Some other people talked about their tiny houses, which was a redeeming part of the film, but you never even glimpsed a layout blueprint of the house being built.

What might have been engaging - the person, his struggle to build and furnish a home for himself, to find his place in the world... was a superficial, jittery montage. The mess he made and the trampling through the wheat field actually made me angry; so much for having a small environmental impact. And he never cleaned up... just hauled the thing to his own pristine piece of land. Issues of plumbing and power were not even addressed.

What might have been thought provoking - the idea of home and why we want/need one, where we find home... ended up being lost in trivial musings on where one might want to live.

To me the biggest shock was the price tag. That dinky shed on wheels cost him $26000, and he did all the labor? You can buy a decent travel trailer for that, heck a nice older house trailer with appliances, and be done. I can't see how it is better for the environment to build 'tiny, new', when there is 'small, used' available for much less. He could have used the difference to make his new home more environmentally friendly.

I base my jugement on the fact that I designed and helped build our regular sized home. We re-used, reclaimed, integrated old and new (out of necessity). We also cleaned up, changed our plans, compromised, and most of all we live in our house, and finally made it a home. I got none of the feelings associated with designing/building/living in a home from the guy. None of the pride, the frustration, the love, what he intended, what worked, what didn't, what he would do different had he known...

In truth, I had the feeling that they probably just spent a week in that cabin and then hauled it off and sold it. In the end there seemed to be no connection to the space, no homey feeling.

Even as someone with sympathy toward the 'tiny house' movement, I struggled to have sympathy for this movie. The commentary grated as they spoke of people who apparently have houses too large for them to sustain, and spend all their time working to keep up the mortgage. They call those 'normal' people.

It's a pretty show, but ultimately the main guy is woefully unprepared for what he's taking on; props to him for showing this and he makes no apologies about it. In several places they show some really great work that was done by some of the other people in the film, and I wish it elaborated on what they had done. Overall it was weak, with some bits that seemed like advertising but most that seemed like sloppiness. The house itself seemed really nice at the end and that honestly seemed like a surprise - show me that happening!

This is an interesting documentary, which has two themes. Much of it follows the building of a "tiny house", which is mounted on a trailer, caravan/motorhome style. These "houses" don't look much like vans, but more like what you would expect from the title, and are very clever in their use of space to achieve this. The other theme of the film is the motivation behind living in such small spaces (nearly all less than 200sq.ft.) in a world of ever-growing house sizes. It is clear that, by and large, the people who promote this kind of living, are committed and engaging. We meet quite a few owners "at home", and a cat seems to play an important role in many of their lives. We saw this film in Melbourne (Australia) and there was a actual-size floor plan on the floor just outside the cinema entrance, of the main tiny house in the film. The screening was unusual too in that quite a few folks stayed in the cinema after the film, to chat about what they had seen. If this topic is of interest, you will enjoy this film.