Tiny House with Garden

The repurposing of old construction trailers has a long tradition, deeply rooted in do-it-yourself culture. The sturdy steel-chassis is a good foundation for building a small-scale version of your dream house, that can be moved anywhere, by using a tractor. While this has been mostly an alternative way of housing at low costs or a great addition to any allotment garden in the past, this style of living gained more attention in the mainstream over the last years. They’re more commonly known as Tiny Houses nowadays and there are also companies out there, who have specialized in professionally building these trailers.

I’ve always been fascinated by DIY culture and I have a few friends, who placed repurposed construction trailers in their allotment gardens or even live in them. It’s stunning, who much creativity people unfold, when they’re given a project at a scale, that is complex, but still manageable by a single person. That‘s in stark contrast to a regular-sized home, where one usually depends on specialized construction companies, architects and lots of other professionals for building and maintaining it. But a tiny house is more like designing your own creation using LEGO bricks – it’s all about tinkering, exploring and gaining knowledge about how to solve problems yourself.

My main goal was to create a tiny and cozy space, where you want to spend some time, just having a look at it. For me, a great model needs to have just the right amount of detail, so you can imagine yourself being inside of it. But not too much, which would make it hard to focus on the most important details.

On top of that, every area of interest should be accessible, so I gave the tiny house a detachable roof. It features solar panels for generating electricity. The interior is based on actual tiny houses and construction trailers, that I have visited myself. Very typical elements are the wood-fired oven and the raised bed. The latter one ensures, that you are sleeping closer to the roof, where the heat from the oven accumulates and keeps you warm—even in a very cold winter night. It also provides additional storage space underneath it. The rest of the interior focusses on stuff to spend your recreational time with – playing the guitar, reading a book or just listening to the radio.

On the outside, the tiny house features a shelf and two drawers for storing garden tools, additional lighting, and a little porch. I decided, that Sand Blue was a good color choice for the trailer, as it gives it a slightly aged look as if the trailer had once been painted in bright blue, that has already weathered a bit over the years.

I was a huge LEGO fan as a child and I really think, playing (and especially building) with the bricks had a big influence on my personal development. Nowadays I am making a living as a graphic designer and web developer. Both jobs, which are all about creativity and solving problems within constraints. Though I never stopped being a fan of LEGO, I only got back into building very recently. After I got the fantastic Treehouse set as a surprise birthday present, I felt an urgent need to design something on my own. I started a few projects and tinkered around with Mecabricks and other digital tools (I don’t have my collection from my childhood in reach right now). The construction trailer is my first finished model and I’m very proud, that my skills seemingly haven’t faded despite my long absence from the LEGO world.