‘Tiny House Nation’ on Netflix: Big Problems Can Arise When You’re Dealing With Small Square Footage

“There’s a lot to do still.”

The notion of “tiny house” living appeals to a very particular kind of person. Adherents of the lifestyle believe in paring down the things they own, reducing their environmental (and physical) footprint, lessening or eliminating mortgage payments, and simplifying their lives overall. In doing so, though, they often manage to make their situation pretty complex. 

John and Zack are here to help with that.

That’s the premise of Tiny House Nation, a reality home-building series that’s come to Netflix after four seasons on the FYI and A&E Networks. The show follows ambitious — if not always well-planning — families in the process of pursuing their tiny house dreams. In this seven-episode fifth season, repackaged as a standalone series for streaming, we meet these builders mid-project, just as they’re realizing that their dreams of simplicity aren’t nearly as simple as they’d hoped. Co-host builders John Weisbarth and Zack Giffin — a charismatic, lively duo with a dynamic that reminds of American Pickers’ Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz — help troubleshoot, re-design and get these big little projects finished.

There’s some real design challenges to be met in getting these builders everything they want while keeping things small. And they are small: the houses are generally under 500 square feet, if not considerably less. They’re not just looking for a bed and a place to hang their hat at night, though: we’ve got home office workers, musicians, baking aficionados, pets, children — demands that might be tough to accommodate in a normal American house, let alone one the size of a generous walk-in closet. It takes careful consideration and clever planning to fit it all in. There’s a lot of custom casework, hidden drawers and surprise doors, double- and triple-purpose spaces that shift, tuck and fold with the motions of daily life. 

These sort of design innovations are helpful, but they’re not cheap or easy. Budgets and timelines have swelled past the builders’ expectations by the time John and Zack arrive to help see the project through. There’s often complications the families haven’t foreseen: plumbing and heating systems, life safety codes, functional snags. No custom building project is easy — I say this in my personal experience as a practicing architect — and in a tiny one, all the pieces have to fit perfectly, or none of it is going to work. The experts parachute in just as things are looking dire and help save the day with their experience and knowledge.

Why go this route at all, though?

Many of these would-be tiny house builders find themselves at a personal crossroads. Whether it be a young couple about to get married, empty-nesters looking to downsize, a growing family with lively young children, or type-A personalities looking to slow the speed of their lifestyle, there’s a lot of psychodrama behind the decision to “go tiny.” It can be a real test of one’s relationships to live tiny, to decide that you’ll be happy having your desk three feet from your bed in one direction and three feet from your kitchen in the other, to share your sewing room with your spouse’s banjo-jamming studio. I speak from personal experience in this, too — when my wife and I first got married, we shared a 400-square foot apartment for several years. It took a lot of creativity on our part — wooden storage boxes that doubled as dining room benches, bookcases modified to conceal a computer workstation and home bar, pots and pans neatly arranged on shoe racks in the living room — but it also took real awareness of each others’ needs. (There’s a lot of sponsored building products visible in the show, but to me the most natural product tie-in would be noise-cancelling headphones, the truest lifesaver of tight shared living spaces.) It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t something that we wanted to make a long-term situation, but it did teach us a lot about living very close to another person.

That challenge is what these builders are truly taking on. After all, there are plenty of simpler ways of achieving the stated goals of these projects. If it were just about saving money or going simple, why not build a modest bungalow? If it were about mobility and living light, why not a prefabricated home or trailer? If it were about eco-friendliness, why not make modest retrofits to an existing home, rather than building from scratch with new materials?

If it were just about being easy, why not actually make it easy? 

That’s not what Tiny House Nation is actually about, though, and once you realize that, the whole venture makes a lot more sense than it might on the surface. Tiny house building isn’t strictly an architectural venture or a financial one. It’s an emotional journey of deciding what things you truly value and shaping your world to make space for them.

It’s not just a house; it’s a statement of purpose. 

Scott Hines is an architect, blogger and internet user who lives in Louisville, Kentucky with his wife, two young children, and a small, loud dog.

Where to stream Tiny House Nation