[0.05] Should I try living in a tiny house? How? Why are tiny houses so popular right now? Why are more and more people living in tiny houses?
Welcome to this second episode of ShiftEnglish. My name is Joseph and in this podcast there are no grammar lessons, no exercises. Here, I speak to you in English, about real subjects, real life, real ideas. That way, you can learn English the natural way.
[0.46] I hope you are doing well, wherever you are in the world. Right now in New Orleans it is still a little toasty, that is to say, hot outside. And that makes it a little difficult to do anything too active outside. I am someone who likes to play a lot of sport. The sport I have played the longest is football, or soccer as we say in American English.
[1.15] Some words I accept to say in American English now instead of the British English I learned when I was growing up. When I was a kid or child. But this word – football, I still only want to use the British definition, even when talking with my American friends. And that’s because, for me, it makes more sense to call a sport in which you use your feet, football. But hey, maybe that’s just me.
[1.42] In any case, the hot weather here makes it a little difficult to play any sports outside. At least, we have to take a lot of water breaks – pauses during the game to drink water and rehydrate. There are some other consequences or effects of the hot weather. In the south of the United States, hot weather can lead or result in some very high energy or electricity bills. Bills are letters you receive every month. They tell you how much money you need to pay — for electricity, or for the internet, for example. How much you need to pay, or owe changes if you used more or less energy. And if you are like many Americans, you may have a big home. And if you have a big home, you may have higher electricity bills.
[2.49] With electricity becoming more expensive, and for other reasons, many people are moving to smaller and smaller homes. We call this process from moving from a big home to a smaller home, downsizing. Would you like to pay less for your electricity? Of course, yes. So maybe you too could be interested in downsizing – moving in to a smaller home. And it’s exactly what we will be talking about in today’s episode of ShiftEnglish. Are you ready to explore this topic? Then let’s go!
— transistion–
[3.31] What is a tiny house? To begin with, we must first understand what is a tiny house or tiny home? I say the two, tiny house and tiny home because in English we use the two terms interchangeably, meaning for us they are the same thing. I also noticed that when I travel and talk about this with people in other countries and speak in their language, or at least try, they often use the English word directly. For example, in France in the French language, they will say something like “j’habite dans un tiny.” Literally I live in a tiny. As in, I live in a tiny house, or I live in a tiny home, same thing.
[4.30] So it is interesting because this shows that the idea of tiny houses is widespread, you can find it across the world now. People refer to this increasing popularity of tiny houses generally as the “tiny house movement”. But is the European idea of a tiny house even the same as the American idea of a tiny house? Well, in my experience the answer is – not really. My experience is that Americans would call even a small house or a small apartment a tiny house. And a European would just call a small house, well, a small house.
[5.25] And that is because in America everything is bigger. A normal car here looks like a monster truck in Europe. A soft-drink, like a coke for example, is served in America in what looks like a bucket. A bucket is something you would normally use for building sand castles at the beach. I don’t even know how it is possible to drink a bucket of coke and then get a free refill. You can literally in most American restaurants keep filling up your cup sized bucket of coke for free. Insane. Anyway, and so even a tiny house in America is, naturally, bigger. The generally accepted rule in Europe is that any home less than 400 square feet, approximately 40 square meters, is a tiny house. In America it’s about double that. A home less than 800 square feet, 80 square meters, is considered a tiny house.
[6.41] And another important thing to understand about tiny homes is they can be either mobile or stationary. That is to say, they can either be able to move, mobile, or they stay in place, stationary. I used to think that all tiny homes had wheels and were thus mobile. But that’s not true apparently! A tiny house can also have a regular concrete, stone foundation and thereby be totally stationary.
[7.19] To me, I prefer the European definition of a tiny home, it feels more authentic, more truthful to what a tiny home truly is. A space big enough to live, without excess, or waste. Without rooms that are rarely used. It is the European definition of a tiny home I decided to use when I made my own tiny home. That’s right! I made and currently live in my own tiny home, of 375 square feet, approximately 37 square meters, right here in the city of New Orleans. So you can imagine this subject is one that is close to my heart, it is one that I feel passionate about. Of course I have my own personal reasons why I decided to move in to a tiny home, why I decided to downsize. And there are also other reasons why other people decided to move in to a tiny home. In the next part we will have a look at those reasons. What are the reasons that motivates people to downsize and start living in a tiny house? What are the reasons that motivated me to do the same?
— transistion– Why are tiny houses growing in popularity?
[8.51] It is likely you have already heard of tiny houses, it is even possible you know someone living in a tiny home. Maybe you have even considered it yourself. And you wouldn’t be the only one! As of last year, 2024 the global market for tiny homes was valued at 5.81 Billion US dollars. Not million. Billion. And by the year 2032 the estimates, the predictions, are that the global market for tiny homes will be 7.64 Billion US dollars. I’ll put a link in the official transcription at ShiftEnglish.com for any geeks like me. People that like to get in to the details and want to see that report. But basically, tiny houses are only going to keep growing in popularity. More and more people are going to be living in them. But why?
[10.12] The big, obvious answer is cost. Buying a traditional, “normal” size house is very expensive. The average house price in the USA right now, in 2025, is over 420 000 US dollars. And the average tiny house price, or cost? It is around 50 000 US dollars. That’s a huge difference. What I see, in my friends, in people around my generation, is that people don’t want to have a big mortgage. A mortgage is the money you must pay to the bank every month when you buy a home. Most people don’t have 420 000 dollars lying around, so they borrow the money from the bank, to buy the house.
[11.12] The general word for when you borrow money is a loan. But when you get a loan specifically for a house – that is a mortgage. Lot’s of financial words, sorry! When you borrow money that is called a loan. And when you get a loan for a house, that is called a mortgage. There it is. And a mortgage of 420 000 dollars would take a very long time to pay back. About 20 or 30 years. Most young-ish people really don’t want this. It is a bit the same with jobs, or work. Most young people don’t want to work the same job or be in the same place for 20 years. They don’t want to feel tied down, to feel stuck. They want to feel free to move around. To change their job, and to change where they live.
[12.23] It is connected to their sense of freedom. And tiny houses are a possible solution to this. They can allow you to own your home much more easily. And even better if you have the type of tiny home that moves or is mobile. That type of tiny home you can take with you wherever you go. But as I said, not all tiny houses have wheels. My tiny house for example has no wheels, it cannot move. It is a stationary tiny house, because I knew I would stay in New Orleans for a long time.
[13.07] So a tiny house is cheaper to buy, or to make. And that gives people more freedom. But it isn’t just cheaper, or less expensive at the start. It is also cheaper in the long run too. Smaller spaces like tiny houses need less energy, like electricity, to heat up in winter or to cool down in summer. This makes the monthly bills for energy cheaper. We pay less every month, so we have more money to spend on other things. With electricity and oil getting more expensive everywhere in the world, this point is becoming more and more important. Not being scared of what the electricity bill will be the next month is really a liberating feeling, I promise you!
[13.58] So, there are these very rational, very reasonable reasons why tiny houses are going to keep becoming more popular. They are cheaper to buy. They are cheaper to run. And you are more free to move. But these rational, reasonable reasons are not why I personally decided to turn to a tiny house. Or not the only reasons at least. There is one other big one for me. And you may think I am a little silly. But I hate cleaning. There you go, I admitted it. It’s my confession. Sorry mum. I used to live in a normal sized house, and I had this feeling I was spending so much of my time cleaning it. I don’t like cleaning, but, I do like a clean house. And to keep a normal size house clean, especially when you have a child, it is a lot of work. At least for me. And so I thought to myself, what is a solution to this endless cleaning? How can I change my life so I clean less? And you guessed it, my solution was, I’ll live in a tiny house! I’ll explain it in the next part how I made that move to a tiny home. How I built my tiny house. But I can confirm, I clean SO much less now, and I am happier for it.
— transistion – How to live in a tiny home?
[15.34] So let’s imagine you decide to make that move. You are convinced to downsize to a tiny house. How do you actually do that? I think social media can make it look a bit too easy. The image of a tiny house in the forest, everyone smiling. It’s possible – but there are some real challenges. Some real practical difficulties to overcome. Before to even buy or make a tiny house you need to know where you are going to put it? Where will the tiny house stay? This usually means you need to have some land, or at least a good friend with some land! And even then you need to careful, to pay attention. Because depending where you live the local government may be more strict or less strict. They may or may not allow a tiny home to be placed on the land.
[16.50] In New Orleans for example the city government is very relaxed. As long as you follow a few rules they more or less leave you alone. But in other places like New York for example, the city government is much stricter. They are much less likely to let you stay in a tiny house, even if you own the tiny house and the land. But maybe somewhere more remote, more rural, in the forest, in the mountains for example, maybe there you could hide a tiny house. Put it somewhere that is hard for someone else to find. Hey, I don’t want to give any ideas, I just think people should be allowed to live where they like.
[17.38] So that’s the more legal side. The side that has to do with the law, with what we are allowed to do. But how do you get a tiny home? Do you buy one? Do you build or make one? That is a personal choice. For me, I wanted to know how to build a house. I was interested, curious, how a house is made. I had, like most people, lived in houses my whole life. But I had no idea what was even on the inside of a wall. Or what was under a floor. Or more generally, how they were made. So I decided to make a house, to understand. I had a little bit of land so I decided to build it there. And then how did I begin? Well, I watched a lot, I mean a lot, of YouTube videos. I bought from the hardware store some tools. Like a saw to cut with. Like a drill for the screws. I bought from the lumber yard some wood.
[18.57] In Louisiana there are a lot of pine trees. Pine trees are a type of tree that grow easily in Louisana. So I used pine wood so the wood was local and not imported from far away. And I started. I had very little construction experience, and I made a lot of mistakes. The floor is not even level. You could put a ball on the middle of my floor and it would roll all by itself. Ok, I am exaggerating a bit there.
[19.35] Anyway, at first I was hard on myself. I wanted my tiny house to be perfect like the ones I saw on YouTube. And when I made a mistake, I was mad at myself. I regretted the mistake I made. I used to think I would only see the mistakes, even when the house was finished. But you know what? After 100 mistakes, some big, some small, I stopped remembering where the earlier mistakes were. Yikes, where and were in the same sentence, best check out the official transcript on ShiftEnglish.com to see how those two are written differently! Anyway there were simply too many mistakes to remember! And even with all the mistakes that I thought were so serious, I was making progress. And even more importantly, I was learning.
[20.33] By the time I got to the last wall I was constructing it looked so much better than the first wall. And by the time I was totally finished, nearly two years later I understood how a house was made! How to do the construction, the plumbing, the electricity, the air-conditioning, everything. And you know what also? I think my tiny house is beautiful. The mistakes are what make it my home. Many of the mistakes I transformed, I changed to be part of the home. I was talking to my friend one day who is a master carpenter. Someone who has a lot of experience in construction. I told him I keep making mistakes when I’m building. He told me that he does too. He told me that never changes. But he also told me, he just gets better at turning those mistakes in to something that looks good. Which is something I try to remember when I make a mistake now in construction. That, and I also remember that if it’s really an ugly or bad mistake, I can just throw a rug on it later to hide it.
[21.53] I think I could talk a long time about construction and the science behind it. After I built or finished my tiny house it has really became a passion of mine. So if that’s something you would like to hear more of, please leave me a message in the comments or send me a message on ShiftEnglish.com and I will with absolute pleasure do another episode going in to more details.
— transistion—
[22.21] However, if you are less interested in building a tiny home and just living in one, what are some options for buying one. Of course, where you live will depend what the options are. The important point here is to first define what do you want from a tiny house? What features? Do you need it to be mobile, something that can move? Do you want to live in it off-gird? That means without any access to normal connections of electricity or water like in a city. Be really, hyper specific. The size, the features, everything. Make a list of the features you need and a list of the features you would like. Take that list and contact several tiny home construction people. Search specifically for people and companies that specialize in tiny house construction. They will understand the challenges and solutions.
[23.37] For example they may use lightweight materials when mobility is important. My advice is to search for companies or people that have several high ratings but are not a big company. These are the people that will do high quality work and will be more flexible to accommodate your wishes, your desires. An example of a company like this in the USA would be tinymountainhouses.com and I’ll put a link in the free transcription on my website ShiftEnglish.com for anyone interested in checking that out for an example.
[24.18] And what if budget or how much you want to spend is the most important part or factor? In this case I would really encourage you to have a look at the second hand marketplace for tiny homes. On Facebook marketplace there many good groups and again I’ll put a link on the ShiftEnglish.com transcript for an example. My suggestion is do not buy a cheap, new tiny house. A cheap, new tiny house is cheap because the materials they used are cheap. Trust me, you do not want a house made of cheap materials! It won’t last long and it will cause you a lot of headaches. For example there will be problems with humidity in the house and there will be problems with the insulation – it will feel too hot in summer, too cold in winter. And in addition, cheap, new tiny homes are made fast. And making something fast? A sure way to make mistakes. For these reasons my advice is to buy a second hand home that is made of more solid, higher quality materials. It will last longer, and it will be more comfortable. And the good news is that with tiny houses becoming so popular, there is a big second hand market for tiny houses now. There is a lot of choice for second hand tiny homes.
–transition– conclusion
[25.55] And that’s it for today! Hopefully you have a clearer idea of a few of the reasons why tiny houses are popular. And also some of the practical considerations of tiny houses. Of course there are other reasons that I didn’t have time to discuss. So maybe I will do a follow up episode in the future. I hope you found this topic interesting and as always if you have any follow up questions on either tiny homes or the vocabulary you can always head over to ShiftEnglish.com and send me a message. I would be happy to share what I know!
[26.38] Next week we will tackle a different topic. An issue a little more serious perhaps – “Is America Still Safe to Visit?”. Every year, millions of people visit the United States. But with the political situation and violence regularly in the news – is America still a safe place to visit? In the next episode of ShiftEnglish, we’ll look at the reality behind the headlines. Until then, have a great week!
Links
Tiny house market study
Example of a tiny house contractor in the USA
Second hand tiny house marketplace