links


Important documents:

If you are thinking of building with timber framing, the Australian Residential Timber Framing Standard (AS1684.2 for non-cyclonic areas and AS1684.3 for cyclonic areas) will definitely come in handy. If you purchase it, it will include a CD or download with span tables.

Australian-specific guidelines regarding trailers are lined out in the National Code of Practice for building small trailers up to 4.5 tonnes in their Vehicle Standards Bulletin 1 (VSB1) and are worth looking at and adhering to if you are thinking of building a tiny house on wheels. They outline size limits and other design elements important for roadworthiness.

Facebook groups and pages:

Some other tiny house projects around Perth that we know of are
Tiny Moonbeams and We Are Tiny. We have also connected with lovely likeminded people through the local Tiny Houses Western Australia Facebook group - keep an eye out for monthly catch-up sessions! There are countless Facebook groups out there documenting people's tiny house dreams and journeys (including ours), but Mini-Maisons Micasa have a great collection of photo albums sorted by topics such as bathrooms, lofts, stairs, you name it!

Sustainable building materials:

Eco Specifier is a great starting point for comparing the sustainability of building materials (e.g. wool vs. glass wool etc).

Instructional videos:

Kiva and Jake at the Tiny Nest Project in Canada are doing an outstanding job at showing all steps of their build on their youtube channel. We have learnt a ton through binge-watching their videos.

Software we are using:

We are using the free Sketchup Make version for both drawing sketches and detailed plans of our tiny house. There is a bit of a learning curve but it is very intuitive and probably the easiest 3D drawing tool to get your head around within a short time. There are lots of tutorials online on how to use Sketchup. 

As we are both working on different computers, it is helpful to use software such as Onenote or Evernote to consolidate all our notes, images, shopping lists, etc. so they are always accessible and editable by both of us. It's also good to know that they are backed up online. We are using Onenote, which is free on Mac and Windows in the app store.

Podcasts:

Macy Miller and Ryan Mitchell have been producing some informative podcasts that answered many of our early questions regarding going tiny. They cover topics such as reclaimed and new materials, timelines of their builds, tools they found particularly useful (and useless), how they went about waste and toilets and they also discuss how they planned for pets and families.


We will be adding more links as they come our way, feel free to add some that you have found particularly helpful in the comments below.