A home ready for a Canadian winter with proper amenities can be around $125,000. The price will depend on size and options chosen. For example, making  it off-grid capable adds about  $15,00 to the price of the home. Building the tiny house out out of steel studding (to make it lighter and able  to be pulled by smaller vehicle) adds about $10,000.

The model home we are building, The Millenial, has been designed to feel as big as possible. The living room has 11’ ceilings, the kitchen 8’, and the bathroom 6’-4”. The loft is four-feet, five inches high which feels spacious. At True North Tiny Homes, every trailer will be unique, and built to the needs and wants of the individual buyer - from specific layout to the number of beds to the types of finishes.

The fastest way to cut down on weight is to build out of steel studding instead of wood. However, this vastly limits the structural capabilities, and also conduct cold. There are many other ways to be weight conscious throughout the build. Putting studs on 24” centres to minimize the amount of wood framing is one idea. We had the shiplap for the walls planed down 1/8”  thinner, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but saved 700 lbs on the entire weight.

On our model, we also used a Shou Sugi Ban siding, which is the ancient Japanese art of preserving wood by burning it. Another upside to this is that burning removes all the moisture in the wood, thereby making it weigh half as much. Of course, if the weight of the siding were the biggest concern, a commercial steel siding is your best bet.

This is about living with what you need, and not with a lot of extra things. We have partners that will help you organize and get rid of the things that you don’t need.

Our model home has solar panels, a bank of batteries, water tanks, and a composting toilet.

Actually, the cost will be very similar. The advantage to a foundation, however, is that you can build it square instead of long and skinny. Of course, the advantage of a trailer is that if you don’t like the neighbours, you can move!

Yes. Anything that you can have in a large home, you can also have in a tiny home. It comes down what you want included.

While we don’t have all glass homes (think of the curtains!), the average width of the windows  in our model home is 60”, We have more glass area in our tiny home than most 1960’s bungalows have in a footprint that’s five times the size.

The bathroom can be wherever you want. For a trailer unit, having a bathtub would simply mean the unit would be two feet longer. However, since it takes a lot of water to fill a tub, you would not be able to make this home completely off grid.

We have a wall-mounted ductless mini-split that does our heating, and our cooling with the help of an air conditioning condenser unit mounted to the front  of the home.

We have opted for a galvanized steel roof for The Millenial. Our roof top patio is covered with Duradek. Both surfaces will last 30-50 years. Other than that, maintaining or renovating is very similar to a regular  house.

If you are building a permanent tiny home on a foundation, then the options are whatever the main house of the property has, since zoning by-laws will require you to connect to city services through the main house. On a trailer, you can’t hook up to natural gas, but you can convert everything to propane. What isn’t propane, you make electric, which can be run from renewable sources such as wind and solar.

There are different ways to do it. We have opted to have the solar charge the 12V batteries, which then run through a converter to 115V, and can then run everything that you can plug into a regular house  outlet.

This will depend on the final  weight of your specific trailer, but you can assume you will need at least a 3/4 ton truck. For best performance, we are choosing to pull this one with a one ton dual wheel diesel pickup truck. The extra width on the wheels will give us better stability on the road.

For a typical  24’ long trailered tiny home, you are looking at an average of 12,000 lbs. Again, this depends on many things including overall length, how much tile was used, what other sorts of finishes were used, etc.

It is legal to live in a tiny house year round in many states, BC and Alberta, and even some Atlantic provinces. Currently, it is not legal in Ontario but individual municipalities are stepping up to change their bylaws to allow year-round use.

The city of Hamilton, for example, is investigating changing its legislation to permit trailered tiny homes in sections of the city to ease the city’s shortage of affordable housing.

Municipal governments in places such as Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Stony Plain Alberta , Keewatin, Ontario, Whitehorse, Yukon and Nanaimo, British Columbia have modified their bylaws to allow tiny homes and more communities are coming on line all the time.