Building Your Tiny House Dream by Chris Schapdick

Screenshot from tinysiesta.com

I find the concept of tiny houses fascinating.  I love the idea of being to manage with less, and I really love the idea of being decisive enough to choose a minimal list of earthly possessions.  When I visit my parents in Sarasota, FL, I frequently walk by a strip of rental tiny homes, and then I daydream about living in one of my own.

But I basically need a clothes and shoe closet the size of most tiny houses, so a tiny house lifestyle really just isn't for me.

I could probably make a tiny house vacation work. I'm getting really excited about the idea of seeing some national parks, and I follow some people on social media who convert vans to houses on wheels for their travels. (Check out this video! So cool.)  So the idea of converting a van and taking that to see the national parks?  Let's just call that an awesome daydream while we're all grounded during this pandemic.

With that daydream in mind, I requested a copy of Building Your Tiny House Dream by Chris Schapdick from Net Galley.  I was given a free advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for my review. (Here's a link to a review of his first book The Joy of Tiny House Living.) Chris is the owner of a tiny home manufacturing company.  And the pictures of his builds look so cool.

One of the author's builds.  Pic from: https://www.tinyindustrial.com/i-build-stuff.html

Chris's first book focuses on how to decide if a tiny house is for you.  As the title suggests, this second book is about how to build one. Overall, I found the book to be very thorough. Possibly even too thorough for me as it contains basic information on nominal sizes of lumber and safety tips that I'm already familiar with.

The book has step-by-step instructions with clear pictures included, but I did think that that occasional illustration or an annotated picture would have served the author's purpose better.  The book is meant to be accompanied by a code that will give the reader access to video tutorials, and I think those are going to be amazingly helpful. 

(I assume.  I haven't seen them.)

(Also worth noting--advance reader copies frequently have formatting errors that get corrected before the books go to press, and many, many of the pictures in the book loaded upside-down in the copy I downloaded which was super frustrating. I assume that will be corrected when the book goes to print.)

For me, because I'm so interested in camper van builds, the sections on electrical and plumbing were the most helpful.  The author has great descriptions of sink and toilet options.  (Who knew I'd every type that sentence?). I also liked the finishes (walls and floors) that the author chose, and I appreciated the information about how to choose good, lightweight options.

Overall, if you're fascinated with tiny houses and consider yourself a bit of a DIY-er, I think you'd enjoy this book.