Tiny Houses

In case you're in Gosford and wondering where all that smoke is coming from, it's coming from the old Froggy's ice rink site on Baker Street, across the road from the Gosford Leagues club. When I went past, at about 1.40pm, the flames were licking the timber hoardings along the fence and a policeman was standing on his tippy toes peering over the hoardings, aiming at hose at the flames. A firetruck passed me on my way to Erina, lights and sirens going, Gosford bound.

On with the first of today's pages.

Not everything being built in Gosford right now is big. This is a “tiny house”. That’s what aficionados of these little houses call them. It’s an accurate description: tiny houses have all the mod cons of a full-size modern house, just shoehorned into a much smaller space. I’m informed the heating costs are smaller too, and the power bills. That would be nice.

I’m so glad I found this tiny-house site at last. It’s on the corner of Racecourse Road and Showground Road, opposite Gosford High School. I stumbled across it on the weekend and took some photos. As you can see, the site is quite far along but not yet finished. However, I don’t think it would take very long to finish such tiny houses.

Here we can see all but the tiny house right at the back. That’s it in the photo above this one. I like the ice-cream colours. They remind me of the 1950’s house colours.

The tiny house estate plan was published in a local newspaper last year. In that article, 4 tiny houses were planned for the site but I counted 5 yesterday plus space for a washing-line area.

This tiny house is the size of two shipping containers. The others are the size of one shipping container. I think this double-sized one must be intended for a family and the others for singles or couples. The original drawings, published at the same time as the article, were 2-storey but all the tiny houses on this site are 1-storey. They have a decent bit of veranda and enough space for a nice little garden.

They have few windows and small ones at that but they do all have those big glass double doors to serve as both front door and main source of daylight. Most have their doors facing north but the big one’s doors face the space for washing lines so there must be a fence to go up between it and the washing lines.

The front tiny-house, the one on the Racecourse Road street frontage, has quite an extensive view past the high school and across the valley of Wyoming to the lovely tree-covered hills and ridges behind Wyoming.

Some people, myself included, could not live in a tiny-house. But the article said it will be very low income people who are to given leases in these tiny houses so they’ll be focussed on the housing aspect not on the tiny aspect.

Yesterday, August the 10th, the water run-off tanks had been installed and so had whatever that other grey thing in front of this tank.

Tiny houses are slowly becoming popular in the western world, especially with young couples and singles who want to be mobile so they can move from one city to another for a good job without losing money on expensive rental housing and moving costs. They can also be parked in a relative’s backyard or on a block of land that can later have a full-size house built on it, when the money is there for a full-size mortgage.

Some tiny houses are more equal than others. Since I read the article about the plan for this tiny house estate, I have been watching American tiny house programmes on (Australian) channel 94. I like the one in which the tiny houses are made bespoke, custom-made for the individual customer with all their particular needs and likes and dislikes. There was even one with a fold-up bedroom for the kids. There is some lovely work done in that programme and the makers seem to really enjoy their work. My favourite so far of the bespoke tiny houses was the one with the little iron deer head on the front. It looked especially good parked at a ski resort so it’s snow-mad owners could get out and enjoy themselves on their snowboards.

There is a tiny house builder in Victoria and I’ve heard rumours of one in New South Wales. Google will provide.

Stick around. I'm going to publish another page or two today.
 

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