This post is dedicated to problems that I see arising while trying to build my tiny house, and some solutions I've come up with. Let's start with the obvious...
1. Money
I'm poor. I've been poor all my life, and I will probably be poor until I die. It's something I've come to terms with, and it doesn't bother me all that much. I don't judge my worth based on wealth. What does bother me is that when you lack money, you lack the security of a roof over your head and food in your belly. This is the primary reason I want a tiny house. I need to be safe in the knowledge that if I don't have money for rent I'm not going to be homeless.
Unfortunately, being poor means that I don't have money enough to finance a tiny house anyway. My tiny house build isn't likely to start for at least a year--maybe two, depending on outside influences. On the plus side, this gives me time to save up. Not nearly enough to save up the $20k I need for my budget, though.
Which leads me to
Tiny House Lending, where you take out a loan that other people fund and use it for your tiny house. If I can manage to save up at least $6000, I'll have enough money for about 10 months of payments, plus I think there's a grace period before you have to start repaying your loan (I think about 6 months, though I may be mistaken). My rough time period for building my house is about a year, which means I'll have enough to cover payments until the house is done, then enough time to get a job to continue the payments.
2. A Place to Build
While there's no guarantees about anything at this point, I have a couple ideas for this. The first is seeing if I can build on the land that belongs to my extended family members. The second involves talking to some of the people in my local community to see if I can build on their land. Alternately, I could build at the site I'm going to park, though I'd like to avoid this so I don't anger the neighbors. And lastly, I can look into renting somewhere to build.
3. A Place to Park
I'm fairly lucky with this one compared to most. A friend of mine is going to buy a house with a decent bit of land, and I'm going to park my house in the backyard. I know a lot of people are skeptical about doing things like this with friends, but every time someone's warned me off about these things they've usually turned out for the better (i.e. 'don't move in with your best friend; it will ruin the relationship.' We've been besties for going on 10 years now, and living together for 3).
The house will be somewhere in Indianapolis, and my friend is against places with a Home Owners' Association, which works out great for me. And after some digging I was able to find out that (at the time of writing) in Indianapolis you're allowed to park an RV in your backyard (though you can't live in it), and you can have two ADUs in the back. I'd prefer to get my house accepted as an ADU, but I'll take what I can get.
4. Transportation
I don't drive. This isn't a problem for towing the tiny house to the final destination, because I can just hire someone for that, but what about getting materials during the build?
The only solution I have for this is to learn how to drive, which is unlikely because I have panic attacks just sitting in the driver's seat of a car. I'll have to figure something else out.
5. The Build Itself
I'm alone in this. It's depressing, and more than a little discouraging. I don't have many friends. Only one of them seems willing to help at all, and they all think I'm either crazy for wanting this, or doubt that I can do it. This means that I'm going to be building everything by myself. I don't doubt that I can do it, but it's going to be difficult getting around the mental roadblocks.
So there we have it. The biggest hurdles that I need to overcome. I need to do some thinking on the last two, but at least I have a plan for the majority of them, right?
