Jay Shafer and the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company make small… BIG
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It is impossible to do a search for small houses and not turn up Jay Shafer and the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. He is in large part the inspiration for the small house movement and Small House Style. It seems that one person has not done more to put the small house on the map than Jay and this is our homage to him…
Jay built his first small house (for himself) in the early ’90s and has been living small ever since. He founded the company in the mid ’90’s because people were expressing real interest in his small house. It seems that other people wanted to live simpler, cheaper and smaller - the Tumbleweed way too.
Jay appeared on Oprah last year and small houses officially hit the big time. You can view the Oprah Tiny Homes, Big Ideas slideshow and video on Oprah.com.
Jay has also made appearances in the San Francisco Chronicle, on CBS (w/ 2 great videos to watch), on NPR, and on countless blog posts and beyond. Keep your eye out for Jay - according to the San Francisco Chronicle he is dreaming up a small house community - shared land, connected by walking paths, on a small piece of land. A sexy, small house development instead of a trailer park? Sounds good to us.
Thanks Jay for being such an inspiration to small house lovers everywhere!
Here are some great video clips and slideshows that feature Jay and Tumbleweed Tiny Houses:
The Hour’s Hilary Doyle finds out if Jay has a good idea:
Tumbleweed Tiny House Company slideshow:
Tumbleweed Tiny House Company Lusby model slideshow:
Tumbleweed Tiny House Company - building the WeeBee:
Learn more about Tumbleweed Tiny Houses and Tumbleweed Tiny House Plans. Jay hosts workshops all over the country if you are interested in learning more.
7 Comments, Comment or Ping
Michael
Jay is definitely directly responsible for inspiring me to build my tiny free house, as well as freegans and Henry David Thoreau. Even if we don’t fully embrace any of these three we can still take away a lot of good life lessons applicable in a lot of ways. Living light, choosing freedom over debt, etc.
Sep 11th, 2008
Kate M
It is time we break away from the debt trap and live simply. Free from the slavery of indebtedness. I feel like I have lived my whole life making the bankers/realtors/etc. wealthy. Jay has inspired me to build my tiny house on my land in NH.
Sep 12th, 2008
Valter
I’m about to build mine in my vacant rural land here in Brazil. I’ve always been a fan of smaller and efficient stuff, like small trucks, Linux distros, etc. I’m also a fan of Walden’s philosophy and, that puts me to think about this subprime crisis on economy,,,
Sep 22nd, 2008
Cindy Painter
FYI - Your website is overloaded…can’t get through to http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com. Message reads:
This Account Has Exceeded Its CPU Quota
Please contact this site’s webmaster.
Wait a few minutes and use your browser’s “Back” button or click here to try again.
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If you are the webmaster, your account may have gotten this error for one or more of the following reasons:
Your account has used more than its share of the cpu in the past 60 second sliding window.
Your account has too many concurrent processes running simultanously.
Your account has consumed too much memory.
Your site was recently very busy trying to run inefficient scripts.
The solution would be to optimize your applications to use less CPU.
Adding appropriate indeces to your SQL tables can often help reduce CPU.
Using static .html documents instead of painful .php scripts will practically eliminate CPU usage.
Dec 24th, 2008
frankie
I would like to know the cost in purchasing one of these cool little homes and if a married couple can live inside with pleasure?
Dec 24th, 2008
Bob
Wow, $45′000 for that!? I could of done the same thing for $2000!
I would of bought a nice little Toyota truck and camper for under $20′000…and used the other $25′000 to travel the country.
Dec 25th, 2008
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