Of course I have to talk tiny houses. For a lot of people, they’re the ultimate in portable homes. There’s something romantic about them: their elegant styling, their efficient use of space, their homey feel. For these purposes, when I say tiny house, I’m talking about something with under 250 square feet of living space, that’s intended to be portable, which is achieved either by building it on wheels or on skids so that it can be lifted or winched into a trailer. I recognize that this is not the ‘official’ definition and that some people consider a 400-square foot site-built home to be tiny, but I don’t; I consider it small. As much as people love tiny houses, and despite the fact that I toyed with the idea of building and selling them for a living, I confess that I’m not a fan. I see tiny homes the same way I see the Chevy Avalanche. The Avalanche is meant to be part truck and part SUV; it has a short truck bed or sorts where an SUV would normally have a third row of seating or an interior cargo area. As such, it’s not a very good SUV because it won’t keep your stuff dry, and it’s a terrible pickup truck because the bed isn’t big enough to carry anything you would put in the back of a truck. You can’t tow much of anything with it, and it’s ugly as hell. Likewise, a tiny house occupies the middle ground between a small, site-built home and an RV. Where it tries to resolve the shortcomings of each, it creates its own set of limitations.

•Portability: Tiny houses are heavy. They aren’t made with the cheap, flimsy materials found in RVs, and that makes them weigh much more. They also tend to be taller, and they often have certain features like shingled roofs and lap siding that aren’t ideally suited to traveling at highway speeds, not that they can’t handle them from time to time. They’re also top-heavy. On the plus side, tiny houses are fully self-contained and can be towed by a one-ton pickup. Portability score: 3

•Ease of setup: The only thing that makes a tiny house harder to set up than an RV is that it may not have built-in stabilizers for leveling the home. That’s not a big deal. Setup score: 4

•Quality of materials: From my perspective, tiny houses are built of somewhat better stuff than manufactured homes, and much, much better stuff than RVs, and as with modular homes and container homes, you have a broad variety of materials to choose from, especially when you do your own build. As companies like IKEA try to break into the tiny house market, there are going to be some cheaper, mass produced homes out there, but they should be pretty easy to avoid. Materials score: 4

•Use of space: People will disagree with me on this, but it’s my opinion that with all the effort that goes into making tiny houses space-efficient, you lose functionality. A few places where this is most apparent are the tiny bathrooms and the sleeping lofts. Imagine you’re me — 6’2” and broad-shouldered, and you have to crawl out of bed and climb down a 12-inch-wide ladder in the middle of the night and squeeze through a two-foot-wide doorway to take a pee. One of two things is going to happen: you’re either going to start sleeping on the couch downstairs and peeing off the little deck off the back end of the house, or you’re going to try to pee out the upstairs window while lying on your side. Some of those attempts will be more successful than others. And yes, I speak about this from considerable experience. Did you know you can pee through a window screen and most of the pee will go outside as long as your pee hole is touching the screen? Space score: 2

•Suitability to the climate: You’re not going to build a tiny house with 12-inch walls, but you can certainly get better R-values than you’d find in an RV, and you can opt for high quality insulation. There should be no issue with wind or rain, and heating or cooling such a small space is not a problem. Climate score: 3

•Pest resistance: This is also largely up to the buyer/builder. A lot of tiny houses have steel plates or sheet metal below the floor to protect them from highway debris and moisture, but these barriers double as a deterrent to rodents. Termites are a potential problem. Pest score: 4

•Style: Tiny houses are probably the most stylish homes out there; in fact, I’d say they’re more style than substance. Their attractiveness draws a lot of people to them in spite of what they’d have to sacrifice to live in one. Style score: 5

•Sustainability: This is another one that depends on he builder; I’ve seen tiny homes made mostly from scrap, recycled materials, and upcycled stuff. I’ve seen others that are made from lots of plastics, endangered woods, and other decidedly non-sustainable materials, and now, with some bigger companies trying to get into this market, you can expect to see more non-sustainable materials in mass produced tiny homes. Assuming the builder is conscientious there’s no reason these things can’t be pretty sustainable, though. Sustainability score: 3

•Price: You can build your own tiny house for about $10,000, but most people spend anywhere from $35,000 to over $100,000 to buy one. The price per square foot is quite high; I haven’t researched financing because I’m not especially interested in trying to live in one of these things. Price score: 2

Total score: 30

Biggest pro: They’re so cool.

Biggest con: They’re five pounds of shit in a one-pound bag.

Most unique feature: You get to act smug and superior while constantly hitting your head on shit.