all 15 comments

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (14 children)

Looks pretty solid! Nice work. The solar panels are a nice touch

[–]yetanotherone_sigh[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (13 children)

Thank you.

A little info on the cabin: 192 square feet if you don't count the loft. My county allows buildings up to 200 square feet without a permit. The loft is another 96 square feet, which makes the actual square footage 288. Some of that has very low ceilings because of the roof pitch of the upper story, so call it 250.

The solar panel mounts are made of Kindorf, which is what the electricians and trades use basically as Tinker Toys or Legos. It's handy stuff, but expensive. Most of that was salvaged when it was removed from a building that was being demolished. Need to lengthen this one by another 3 feet and add the last 100W panel. Then the next one will take two 320W panels laying the long direction, so it'll basically be the same size.

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (12 children)

Nice job staying under the permit limit. Is there a limit to how many 192 sqft buildings you can build? Lol

I like the solar panels, and it's especially feasible now that 100W panels are only about $90 each

[–]yetanotherone_sigh[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (11 children)

As far as I know, seriously, there isn't a limit as long as you obey the property setback regulations. This is far enough out in the woods that nobody is ever gonna care. Of course, you aren't supposed to be using them for habitation, but whatever. There is an old guy who lives in a cabin directly on the gravel logging road and he has a bunch of ramshackle outbuildings and shacks and lean-tos everywhere. There is a guy who build a real, bona-fide, actual house with permits and everything. The inspectors would have had to drive right by the other cabin repeatedly to go to the inspections on this real home. So I guess it's not a big deal if we make some effort to keep it just slightly on the down-low.

When I started this project the solar panels were around $175 with shipping. This was way before Amazon would ship them to your door for free. The shipping from a solar company just about doubled the cost of the panels. Now it's trivial to get your foot in the door. Between cheap solar, free batteries, and the advent of cheap LEDs, we're in a golden time of getting off grid. Seriously, it would have cost 5X to 10X this much 10 years ago.

Now that it's been up there a while, I think the Kindorf mount for the solar panels is a little overkill. It would have been pretty expensive to build from scratch. When I built it, I didn't have a good road to the property and I didn't want to deal with schlepping bags of concrete in. So I built it out of heavy steel without any kind of foundation. I didn't want it to flip over in high wind. My next one will be similar to this, but I'll probably just dig four post-holes and fill them with concrete, and put the corner posts in those. That will eliminate 3/4 of the frame members, because it doesn't have to have a frame to hold itself together. Just has to have cross members to keep the panels in the right position and keep them from blowing away.

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (10 children)

That's pretty interesting, thanks for sharing. I wonder if it'd be possible to make a complex of like ten 196 sqft buildings and live in them. I like the idea of concreting the post holes for the solar panels

[–]yetanotherone_sigh[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (9 children)

I saw a very early article on tinyhouses in Fine Homebuilding Magazine, of all places, maybe two decades ago. It was before they started calling them tinyhouses. Guy lived up on an island near Seattle and he did just that. I think he built three. One for bedroom, one for bathroom / kitchen / laundry, and one for a living room area. It wasn't an attempt to be off grid per se, but it was an attempt to get out from under some square footage restrictions of one kind or another.

Getting an occupancy permit to live in a small building is the hard part. That's why tinyhouses are usually just glorified trailers. If it's not permanent, it's not permanent... and you don't need an occupancy permit to live in it. A lot of people do it unofficially and fly under the radar, but the trick is to disperse the buildings around and don't have too many of them. We have two buildings and a tool shed, and another temporary tarp garage.

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (8 children)

Interesting, thanks for the info. It would be interesting to claim to sleep in a trailer on the premises, but then you could have a guest building that you "sometimes" sleep in. Sounds like a good way.

Although I've heard a lot of buildings in the deep country don't ever see an inspection anyway, so you could build beyond the 200 sqft limit and it wouldn't necessarily matter. I'm not sure the fees if you built a building that was bigger than that and didn't register it, and got caught.

[–]yetanotherone_sigh[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (7 children)

There are a couple of zoning issues that I've come across. If you camp out in a trailer or RV, a lot of places allow you to do that on your own land for 9 month per year. Then you have to "move away" for 3 months and then you can move back. Not clear on a few details. Can you leave the RV there and just move yourself? Can you own two adjoining properties and move back and forth between them? How much enforcement does this see, or is it just treated as a nuisance law so that they can get rid of someone they don't want, but normally don't enforce it? Can you sometimes sleep in a permanent building without an occupancy permit (cabin or shed)?

My own interaction with the county went like this.

We bought the property. It's located in a backwoods county that is pretty sparsely populated and only has a big city (20,000) at the county seat. (That's not really a big city, but it's the biggest one there.) The county is fairly large and spread out, and we're a long way from the county seat.

I started out wanting to build a "tool shed" that would be the max size allowable without a permit. I found the county building permit office and emailed them that question. To my surprise, they emailed me right back with a PDF handout showing all the pertinent data. In this county, you can have a building up to the following:

Up to 200 square feet

Wall height up to 10 feet

Foundations up to 4 feet deep (!) Couldn't believe that one.

Roof overhangs must be less than 2 feet

There were several other specifications but those were the pertinent ones. The flyer basically said that if you built anything smaller than that, they didn't want to hear about it because they didn't have the manpower to do permits and inspections on small structures.

It was interesting to me because I'd always heard that 100 square feet was the max, not 200. I was prepared to build a 8x12 tool shed but we ended up with a 12x16. The cabin ended up being that size, too.

Pushing your limits: The big bugaboo now is satellite and aerial photography. With software, they don't even have to manually look. They can run the software and do a comparative before-vs-after analysis and see if anything changes from year to year. They can estimate square footage pretty accurately from good photographs. I have heard that some counties (with more money than ours) are starting to use drones, following automated paths with GPS. Good photography, cheap, and on-demand. So I am hesitant to try pushing their boundaries. One side note: our property is heavily wooded and it has pretty good cloud cover in the winter when the trees shed their leaves. We purposefully built under the treeline to obscure what we are doing. Of course someone from the county can just drive right up and look things over in person, but they don't have the manpower for that. As far as code compliance, we're going to (a) occupy a building with no occupancy permit, (b) install a solar panel system without electrical permits, (c) harvest water from a creek, and (d) dispose of wastewater without a septic tank and drain field. Also (e) using a composting toilet, but this may actually be allowed. Unclear if you are required to actually have a flush toilet. The old neighbor guy a mile down the logging road also lives in a cabin and he has a real-life Porta Potty outhouse. He says it satisfies the county. He actually has a company come out and empty it from time to time.

In a very sparse or poor county these issues probably wouldn't matter at all. There are some unincorporated counties that actually don't have building codes or permits. You just get some 2x4s and build stuff.

Depending on where you are, and how harsh the government is, the penalties for building stuff without a permit can get pretty bad. I've heard anecdotal tales (may or may not be true) that people were forced to tear down their work. Others that I know of, were issued "stop work" orders or forced to go get permits and inspections. Probably a fine in there somewhere too. It's a calculated risk. I chose a pretty big county that is sparsely populated and has a very small government presence, in the hope that I won't have to tangle with them.

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (6 children)

I wonder about the questions in your first paragraph too. I think the answers vary by state, county, and city, as well.

The big bugaboo now is satellite and aerial photography. With software, they don't even have to manually look. They can run the software and do a comparative before-vs-after analysis and see if anything changes from year to year. They can estimate square footage pretty accurately from good photographs. I have heard that come counties (with more money than ours) are starting to use drones, following automated paths with GPS. Good photography, cheap, and on-demand.

I wonder if you just built the sheds a bit far apart and under big trees....

I've heard anecdotal tales (may or may not be true) that people were forced to tear down their work. Others that I know of, were issued "stop work" orders or forced to go get permits and inspections. Probably a fine in there somewhere too. It's a calculated risk.

I can see this if you built something that just isn't up to code, but if it's basically up to code but just not registered, then I imagine you'd only have to pay the fines? I wonder if those fines would be less than the tax increases from reporting the buildings? Hmm

I chose a pretty big county that is sparsely populated and has a very small government presence, in the hope that I won't have to tangle with them.

Seems smart. I'd only do this way out in the country, if it were me.

[–]yetanotherone_sigh[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

I had a couple of thoughts along the way. The buildings that we put up (if they were larger than 200 square feet) are on pier pads instead of a permanent foundation. So you could argue that those are temp structures and not under the jurisdiction of building codes. Might be totally wrong about this. And of course you have the delicate thing that you have to explain why there is a bedroom and kitchen in your 350 square foot "chicken coop".

For real, the best way is to keep it quiet.

Build in a county with small government presence and somewhat lax building codes, sparsely populated, poor and rural.

Build under cover of trees.

Spread the buildings out.

Keep all the buildings under 200 square feet so they won't attract attention.

Don't annoy neighbors. They could turn you in if you piss them off. Bake some cookies and act friendly.

Be LOW KEY. We're not setting up a zombie apocalypse bomb shelter.

New: If you are using a wood stove, make sure you don't have a lot of smoke that can be seen for a long distance. We're in a valley, so that won't be an issue. Our state has a department of ecology and they publish a list of allowable wood stoves due to smog. Anything that is not on the list cannot be bought or sold or installed or used in the state. I looked over the list and bought a model used on craigslist that is allowable, so nobody can give me any grief about that. Thinking about the next structure, I may put in a rocket mass heater stove, which basically has no exhaust at all besides warm C02 and water vapor. Extremely low emission. You would never be able to get a permit for one but they are basically invisible due to not emitting any visible smoke.