Tiny House Design: Not So Tiny in the Legal World

The Tiny House progress has taken another sharp turn into a brick wall.

I received the plans for the larger build back from the architect and he met the expectations of the expansion: The house is now 1120 sq ft. 500% Larger than the average tiny home and 50% larger than I had planned to pay for. So it should have been unsurprising to see $160k contract price for the plans from the builder (and that’s not including the lot), but alas, I lost my shit all the same.

I wasn’t angry with the builder – it’s his estimate on how much the house would cost to him and his company build, and I can understand that. I was just irritated that this felt like a trap due to the zoning requirements. However, due to this heavy-handed slap in my face, two very important pieces of information surfaced from subsequent conversations with my broker and my lender.

1) The variance, for which I had been whole-heartily pursuing, had faltered due to the pressure of the looming closing deadline and, up until that point, the lack of having a legal version of the house plans. When I spoke to my broker about this, he brought up the point that I would not be able to apply for the variance at all, as the lot was not in my ownership.

….Duh?!

Wow, that just flipped this whole thing on its head. Here I was thinking that I needed the variance before closing in order to get the right plans used for the loan. But if I wasn’t going to be able to get the variance until I closed on the lot, then no matter what, contract had to be based on the larger build. This brought me to my next conversation with the lender.




2) Would I be able to sign a contract with the builder for the larger plans of the house, close on the Construction-to-Perm Loan and the lot, apply for the variance, and THEN back up to the (hopefully) approved smaller plans of the house – refunding the left over funds back to the bank? This was the million dollar question (or really, the 190k dollar question) and my lender gave me a solid, yet cautious answer:

Yes, this could be a possible solution for me to get my tiny house.

They would declare the larger build as the ‘worst-case scenario’ and would need the copy of the new zoning permit if the variance is approved before using it, of course – but there you have it. I would still need to close on a larger loan, but with respect to how much less we would be using for the smaller build, all that I would be really doing is putting down a larger down payment. This felt like I just cleared the last hurdle and all that was left was the finish line. The only thing that could trip me up now is the variance.

2 thoughts on “Tiny House Design: Not So Tiny in the Legal World

  1. Saw your plans page. 1120 sq ft! Nice SMALL house, getting real close to a medium house actually. But definitely not close to a “classic” TINY house (usually 400 sq ft or less). Usually over 400-450 is small and larger than your house size is medium for customary classifications (even with many realtors I’ve read). I’ve considered at times building a small house at 550-650 sq ft but feel that is a lot more than I need, but not enough for my wife. I am an advocate for tiny living in any sized house. Anyone can live the tiny life even in a 3000+ sq ft house. But there are some somewhat standard measures to make it a tiny house, small house, medium house or large house. Otherwise I could say my current house (which my wife is very much in love with and won’t leave for anything else… yet) could be considered a tiny house at 3200 sq ft I guess. And that would tend to dilute the meaning of the term and make it meaningless as a definition relating to house size.

    But as I said at the beginning, yours is a very nice house. Very inventive to make it angle around like you have. Makes for a very nice court yard. I like that.

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