Derek Diedricksen, AS’00
Little footprints
Why tiny housing?” is the question I get asked the most. I guess my love of small structures and micro-architecture arises out of my childhood fort-building, a hobby that just carried onward.
And it didn’t hurt that my father taught woodworking at the high-school level in Connecticut, or that I was an Eagle Scout who liked exploring the woods nearby.
But, really, my question is “Why not tiny housing?” Why spend so much of your life paying off a mortgage on something that’s beyond your needs in size, and requires so much time and money to heat, furnish, clean, and keep up?
Small living offers a lot of freedoms. Most tiny shacks under a certain square footage can be built without any permits. You want to build a microhome shaped like Yoda eating a doughnut? Go for it—you can.
Up in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, my brother Dustin and I have been building a get-away home (shown in the photo) since 2001, using a lot of recycled and salvaged materials. So far, we’ve spent something like $4,000 on the project.
I didn’t stop at just designing and constructing small houses. In 2010, I wrote and self-published a tiny-house design book I describe as “a carpal tunnel–inducing architectural barrage of dimestore pen sketches in mad-scientist form.”
Humble Homes, Simple Shacks, Cozy Cottages, Funky Forts, Ramshackle Retreats (and Whatever the Heck Else We Could Squeeze in Here!) is a collection of my housing designs, all small and affordable in scale.
To my shock, it’s sold a floor joist–collapsing amount of copies worldwide. I still pinch myself that so many people have taken an interest.
The story gets even more involved. The book went on to be featured on NPR and Boston’s WBZ-TV News; in Make, ReadyMade, Pulse, and Coastal Living magazines; on Tinyhousedesign.com and BoingBoing.net.
Now I’ve branched out into video. I host, direct, produce (and write the music for) the Tiny Yellow House series, available as a YouTube channel.
Episode one of Tiny Yellow House focused on a mobile shelter I built named the Hickshaw (or, a rickshaw for hicks). It nabbed eight thousand views in its very first week on YouTube. As I write this, it’s now surpassed fifty-five thousand views.
To further illustrate how fast things are moving—and how deep the micro-architecture interest is—the most recent episode attracted more than forty-five thousand views in only twenty-one days. Also: In late February, my work was profiled in the New York Times.
In July, Dustin and I plan to offer our first hands-on micro-architecture workshop in Massachusetts, complete with guest lecturers, a wild collaborative building project, an open house of the tiny structures I’ve built, and anything else we can stuff into a death wish–paced day. Oh, and it will all be filmed. (Speaking of which, I recently inked a TV production deal with a Los Angeles–based company, which may someday take us mainstream.)
Finally, later in 2011, the Lyons Press will publish an expanded edition of Humble Homes, Simple Shacks.
My longtime “hobby” seems to be making its way toward full-career status. And the tiny-house juggernaut keeps on gathering steam.
Derek “Deek” Diedricksen, lives in Stoughton, Massachusetts. His website is Relaxshacks.com. In a past life, he was a full-time disc jockey at Boston’s WBCN-FM.