Actually Tiny, Portland, OR (2026)

05/22/2020

I want to take a moment here to thank everyone who contributed to the GoFundMe that I put up at the beginning of this year to buy a trailer for my homeless friend Thomas, who has been living in a tent for the last year.
Competition for small travel trailers is absolutely insane right now and what we thought was just going to take us a couple of weeks ended up taking five months. By the end we were literally dropping everything and jumping in the van within minutes of a possible candidate being posted on craigslist just to have a chance at buying it. We saw plenty of tired water damaged trailers but I always just asked myself if I would live in it and if the answer was no we kept looking. In the end we managed to land a 2008, 16 foot trailer with all appliances working and no leaks. Liz, myself, and Thomas are all incredibly appreciative for the full funding of our goal because without it we wouldn’t have had a chance to get anything decent.
As a solar enthusiast from way back I was able to piece together a simple solar battery charging system for lights and small devices from a dusty old 100 watt panel and various bits and bobbles from the recesses of my electrical bins. This was really fun and reminded me how much I miss building off grid systems both big and small.
Whether you contributed $20 or $1000 (we had several of those, thank you), today Thomas has a safe, clean place to live that will hopefully help to restore a sense of dignity which is so crucial when you’ve been through hard times. Thank you everyone who donated, and if you’d still like to help out I’m going to leave the fundraiser up for a few more weeks to see if we can get a little bit of money for garbage service, plug in electricity, and propane. You can find it by searching “A Trailer for Thomas” on GoFundMe.

04/13/2020

First outdoor shower of the year. A 4’x6.5’ solar collector hinges up off the southwest corner of the house forming the roof of this beautiful shower space (see previous posts) and feeding a 30 gallon tank on the inside of the house, which is also fed by the wood stove chimney pipe heat exchanger. The pair create an abundance of free, renewable hot water with no electric or propane inputs.

03/25/2020

Cozy.

03/19/2020

Sound on! We are mostly absent from Actually Tiny this year as we focus on our other business, but I couldn’t help but take a moment to share a peek at our unique off-grid system.
This hybrid wood-fired/solar passive hot water system provides year around hot water for us with almost no electrical inputs.
This type of system is design, location, and climate zone specific, but here in the Pacific Northwest where something like this actually makes sense, it allows us to harvest heat from the woodstove that would normally just be going out the chimney and use it to knock out the second highest energy load in most houses, the hot water heater.
Small woodstoves can be a carbon disaster or at least reach carbon parity with other common fuel sources depending on the overall energy efficiency of the structure. Using solar whenever possible for cooking, heating, and hot water, combined with stove pipe heat recovery and cooking on the stove top helps to make small stove ownership as energy/carbon responsible as it can be.
Safety note: PLEASE do not try to reproduce this system based on what you see here. I promise that at some point I will put up an online course on how to design and build these types of systems safely and effectively.

02/29/2020

Saturday morning in the tiny house.

02/05/2020

Check out this absolutely amazing metal roofing installation video that we just found on the Internet from .
As a professional woodworking instructor and video producer I’m obsessed with quality instructional materials and a big part of Actually Tiny is not only producing videos but finding and sharing the best resources that we can find so others don’t have to wade quite as deeply into all of the misinformation that’s out there. Metal roofing install it is actually quite a bit of fun but it can be really intimidating to get familiar with all the processes and pieces. This video from ASC roofing products is the densest, clearest explanation of the subject I’ve ever seen. If you’re installing a metal roof on your tiny house, definitely go to YouTube and check this out.
-Brian

01/24/2020

Second time’s a charm for the Actually Tiny bedside table. I started out with a lift top coffee table on casters that was intended for storage, eating, seating, and desk. The reality was we never sat on it, the casters dented the floor, and I never really used it as a desk either.
It’s replacement is a fairly ordinary bedside table that I actually do use as a desk, storage, and breakfast/coffee area. The three IKEA kuggis bins give us a quick place to toss keys and phone chargers and all the other little things that you don’t want cluttering up your tiny house.
I built the tabletop with the last remaining chunks of our hard maple countertops. The legs are 1 inch black pipe screwed into pipe flanges. (to do it again I would’ve stuck with 3/4 like I did for the rest of the furniture) They are drilled at the height for each shelf, and then I push 7/16 allthread through the holes and through a piece of half-inch pipe to act as a spacer and shelf support. I used square nuts on the ends of the allthread and used a dab of gun blue to darken the ends. The shelves are made from scraps of 3/4 Russian birch plywood finished with Rubio Monocoat.
It’s a pretty simple way to make a table but there are a couple of important details that can trip you up if you don’t know to watch out for them. We put up a how-to video on our Actually Tiny YouTube channel showing on all the steps.
-Brian

01/16/2020

Winter mornings in the tiny house.

01/14/2020

New kitchen means new glamour shots! We added a broom closet and decided to double down on the black pipe details with a pipe and rod over counter shelf. (We just posted a video for how to build these on our YouTube channel by the way).
We are incredibly happy with how the space has come together both in terms of aesthetics, energy efficiency, and livability. Despite only being 7 1/2‘ wide x 19‘ long inside and single story, it feels much bigger, and even with two of us living, and often working full-time in the space, it doesn’t feel crowded.
Of course there are a zillion little things that I plan to change before we produce a plan set but overall we’re pretty stoked. As soon as we can get some reliably sunny days I’ll try to get a walk-through video made to show off a bunch of the cool features of the Actually Tiny house.
-Brian
@ Portland, Oregon

01/14/2020

Actually Tiny house kitchen remodel number 3 incorporates a built in open broom closet which breaks up the hard plane of the bathroom wall and adds an extra little storage shelf up top as well as a perfect spot for plants. I was starting to feel like maybe I need professional help for obsessing as much as I do but now that I see it all in place I’m so glad we went for it. With this last change we finally have all the storage we need without losing the wide open feel of the interior. The whole space feels different, better, dare I say complete?
I’m totally in love with the new Makita cordless track saw. In the short time I’ve owned it I’ve used it 10 times as much as I thought I would. The other day we installed a door in the big house in a finished frame that was out of square and couldn’t be changed. Every edge was a custom cut with the saw and installed it looks dead square. Yesterday I used it to cut inch and a half hard maple slabs for glue ups, and today I used to break down plywood, cut the corner out of a cabinet to fit over the wheel well, and also to cut the line that I scribed off the slightly out of plumb wall for the face of the built-in broom closet. It’s still slightly gutless compared to a Milwaukee tool, but it’s half the cost of the festool and seems reasonably well built.
-Brian

01/09/2020

Today’s installation of this 24 sq ft AET solar hot water collector adds a roof to our outdoor shower area and completes our hybrid solar and wood-fired hot water system.
This is a miniaturized version of a larger system that I lived with for 10 years off the grid. It uses a water jacketed stove pipe and a flat plate collector to passively thermosiphon hot water to a 28 gallon hot water heater tank that sits above our bathroom at the end of the house. The geometry of this setup takes careful planning, solid plumbing skills, and direct sun for at least half of the day, but with those requirements met it provides a huge amount of free hot water after the initial investment.
I decided to incorporate some selective shading on this one, using an oversized collector but also placing the collector slightly below the porch shade so it doesn’t produce hot water early in the day which should help to keep the house from overheating (from the hot tank inside) in the middle of summer.
To keep things simple and also due to a lack of availability of certain products, this is an open loop system so draining the panel on cold nights and a freeze protection valve as a back up protects the panel.
The feed and return lines are left deliberately uninsulated so they will bleed off heat if the system gets too hot. This is important when using ordinary water heaters as solar collector tanks because they aren’t designed for the high temperatures that can occur in a well insulated solar loop.
You would think that a system like this would leave you pi**ed off in the shower from time to time, but at least in the larger version this happened so rarely that we never even bothered to install an electric back up. It will be interesting to see how well it works in the tiny house. I’m on the edge of my seat waiting for a sunny afternoon to watch it work!
-Brian

01/08/2020

Clearing some branches for the new solar hot water collector. Don’t try this method at home, I’m a professional idiot!

Actually Tiny

05/22/2020

04/13/2020

03/25/2020

03/19/2020

02/29/2020

02/05/2020

01/24/2020

01/16/2020

01/14/2020

01/14/2020

01/09/2020

01/08/2020

Address

Website

Alerts

Contact The Business

Shortcuts

Share

Category