Tiny houses take simplifying life to a new level (+video)

The tiny-house movement is starting to be felt in a tiny way in Wichita. But will it – or can it – take off?

This week, the Metropolitan Area Building and Construction Department received its first question about whether a tiny house on wheels would be allowed as a residence in Wichita. If it’s on wheels, director Thomas Stolz says, it’s considered an RV, and the answer is no.

“You can’t park an RV in the backyard and live out of it for more than four days in a row,” Stolz says. The department is already receiving complaints from neighborhoods about people living in RVs because of the economy, Stolz said, and people in the RVs have to then be told about the city’s ordinance.

“We’ve been watching this nationally,” where some of the places that tiny houses are in demand are college campuses, Stolz said. “We’re going to have to do some review. … This is the first request; we’ll look at them case by case.”

The person who made the request about the tiny house is Catherine Johnson, the spearhead of the Eco-Festival happening this Sunday at Bartlett Arboretum in Belle Plaine. There, a couple from Hillsboro will be displaying the tiny house on wheels that they just built and hope to move into next month, potentially on farmland in Hillsboro. Johnson and her husband, Matt, are interested in building their own tiny house in Wichita.

“Tiny houses look fun,” said Catherine Johnson, who works in community development for SoCe Neighborhood Action Foundation in south-central Wichita. “It’s intriguing. It’s interesting. How do you deal with that space, how do you get that organized, how do you be that minimalist? It would be a learning experience for the two of us.”

The Johnsons and the Hillsboro couple, Kyle and Danae Schmidt, are tapping into a movement that takes simplifying life, saving money and downsizing a household to a whole new level. Tiny houses are generally only a few hundred square feet and can be either on a foundation or on wheels. Zoning – and availability of utilities – can be different for each type. Stolz thinks that a tiny house on a foundation and hooked up to utilities would be fine in Wichita.

Many people are familiar with the minuscule structures from watching the “Tiny House Hunters” show on HGTV. The really tiny ones, like dollhouses, beckon with a charm inherent in miniatures.

Among the draws: affordable home ownership, portability, simplicity, saving on natural resources.

Among the challenges: connecting to utilities, claustrophobia, lack of space for such commonplaces as a washing machine and dryer.

Those pioneering the idea of tiny houses in the Wichita area have other reasons for going small as well. For Catherine Johnson, “the tiny house is not the end goal in itself.” Hers would be off the grid and create a smaller environmental footprint than a regular house. “The tiny house is the means to an end, and the end is freedom, freedom from having a mortgage, freedom to travel, freedom from utilities.”

For the Schmidts, the reason is primarily religious, though it initially sprang from Kyle’s dream to construct one himself.

“I’ve always been interested in building things with my hands,” said Kyle Schmidt, who works in construction for a general contractor. “I had a friend talk to me five years ago, and he showed me a website that had tiny houses, and I was really intrigued about the idea, like ‘I could make one of those.’ I did a lot of research, thinking, ‘How would I do this, what would I incorporate if I were to build one?’ Whenever the idea would come up, my wife would say, ‘I couldn’t live in something like that. There’s no way,’ so I always just had to put it out of my mind.”

A few things happened that made Danae Schmidt, who works for MB (Mennonite Brethren) Mission, change her mind. One was living in Thailand for several months among people who lived without many things but with great joy and faith. Another, back home, was Kyle getting involved in an accident while driving Danae’s car. Danae became distraught over the resulting damage to the car.

“My stuff had become an idol, and that was more important to me than God was,” Danae Schmidt said. “I’m more concerned about my car than I am about God’s providing for me.”

The Schmidts made their decision around Christmas 2013 and have been getting rid of things since, layer by layer. They visited the pioneering Tumbleweed Tiny House Company in Colorado. They taped a floor plan to the floor of their house to sense how it would be living in the space.

Kyle started building the 172-square-foot tiny house – with two lofts, atop a trailer – in spring 2014 in the backyard of their rental house in Hillsboro. It’s just recently been completed and will be on display at the Eco-Festival that goes from noon to around 6:30 p.m. Sunday at Bartlett Arboretum. The festival will feature talks on permaculture and green building either from scratch or retrofitted, as well as several musical acts – powered by a bicycle generator – and food. Students will compost the waste on site. Admission is $5 at the gate – unless you bicycle to the event, and then it’s free. (There will be a group ride setting out from the Johnson’s Garden Center on 13th Street.)

In a wild coincidence, a builder who lives across the street from the Schmidts in Hillsboro, Jim Jantzen, showed up at their house one day in the summer of 2014 to tell them that he’d noticed their tiny house and that he had been commissioned to build one on wheels – for a Wichita woman who planned to use hers as a hermitage in the Flint Hills, while not giving up her house in the city.

“It just blew me away,” Kyle Schmidt said of the eventual proximity of the two tiny houses, one viewable from the other.

The Wichita woman who ordered the hermitage, Kathryn Damiano, said she’ll see how a rhythm develops determining long she’ll be staying in the tiny house at any one time. It will be off the grid, relying on solar power, propane – and a composting toilet, just like the Schmidts’.

But Damiano has run into another question about owning a tiny house. So far she has not been able to get insurance for it, she said, because it doesn’t seem to fit existing classifications. Bob Hanson, director of communications for the Kansas Insurance Department, said that people in the office that he talked to had not run into the question before. He said that the fact that the building is mobile and might be kept in a different county from the one in which the owner lives could be a factor in getting coverage.

“We need to start looking into that in more detail,” Hanson said, advising people in similar situations to contact the insurance department if they have trouble.

Wess Galyon of the Wichita Area Builders Association said his son who lives in Colorado is looking into getting a tiny house as a mountain getaway – a vacation use that Galyon foresees being more common than the tiny house as a full-time, year-round residence. He does know of young people thinking about living in tiny houses on their parents’ land, where they could hook into a well or septic system. In most cases, tiny-house residences would be a transition to a larger residence, he said.

“I think there’s a lot of interest, and I think what will probably happen is the tiny-house movement will revolve to 500 to 600 feet, to little homes,” Galyon said, where residency still would be limited depending on the size of a family.

While tiny houses have been mentioned as answers for low-income people, there could be problems with safety in putting many tiny houses in a particular area, Galyon said. That’s because of a lack of garages and storage space could make it hard to keep such an area looking neat and secure, he said. Another safety aspect is being sure that a tiny house can take wind shear of as much as 90 mph in Kansas, Stolz said.

“You have to want to do that and be a minimalist,” Galyon said of people who seek life in a tiny house.

The Schmidts want to do that. Their house is less than 7 feet wide inside, and 24 feet long. It has an RV-size bathtub, no washing machine or dryer – though Danae will be able to use a hand-crank machine and separate spinner for washing clothes – and two lofts, one that will be used for sleeping, the other as a guest room or storage. Every other drawer going up to the guest loft has a drawer in it, and there are pull-down storage hatches in the kitchen ceiling.

“Really through this whole process we want to challenge people: What are you holding on to so tightly that you can’t let it go?” Kyle Schmidt said. “We want to cling to God like that. We found out we had so much stuff in our way, our life with Jesus was being hindered by that.”

Environmental considerations are inherent in learning how to live in a smaller space and in a simpler way, he said.

“I feel like we’re pretty unique as Christians, trying to live a life that is honoring God, being a steward of our things rather than a consumer of our things.”

But as for many who set out on tiny-house living, it’s an experiment. Danae Schmidt is careful to emphasize “they say” when talking about how a cup of sawdust is supposed to absorb the moisture and kill the smell in the composting toilet.

“I’m excited to see if we can do it,” she said. “I think we can, and we’re committed to it: the adventure of living in 172 feet.”

Back in the city of Wichita, the ripples from the rolling of the tiny-house wheels already are being felt.

If someone puts a structure that’s, say, 200 to 400 feet on a foundation with utilities, that should be fine, Stolz said. If it’s prefabricated, the owner probably wouldn’t need a building permit, but just a permit to hook up to utilities. Such owners should get in touch with the city’s building department, he said. Catherine Johnson was wise to approach the city before building, he said: “Don’t spend money on something that would be illegal in Wichita.”

But that doesn’t mean her case is closed. The city will be looking into tiny houses further. “We may have to modify the code to allow them. … If they’re safe, why not?”

This story was originally published October 15, 2015 at 9:14 PM with the headline "Tiny houses take simplifying life to a new level (+video)."