DIY Trailer Home – Schematic design progress
(click images for larger ver)
We’ve made progress on the mobile home design. Take a look and help us find a name for the home!
In the summer of last year, I realized that my dream home might be a mobile home. A mobile home could be compact and resource-friendly, appealing to my eco-tendencies and my hope of a simplified life. And making the home mobile eases the hardest question; where should we live?
Over the last 8 months or so, Hiro and I have read books, done research, and teamed up with the extremely talented and clever architect, Ron Golan. Ron has been hard at work designing the basic layout of the spaces Hiro and I want and modelling them in SketchUp (3D design software). We’ve got a rough draft of the schematic design, so it seemed like a good time to share some renderings of the mobile home.
The design is a two-story, trailer home of approximately 380 square feet that can be pulled by a commercial semi-truck. The second story collapses like the lid of a shoebox for transportation. On the first floor is the kitchen, living room, office space, and toilet room. On the second floor is a project room, the shower, and a bedroom.
The image at the beginning of this post is the whole structure, viewed from the back left. The red boxes are the cabinets in the kitchen. The project room is directly above that, with the blue shelf workspace and storage. The orange and blue box to the left side is a pop-out that contains a couch (orange) and office desk (blue). The yellow thing buried in the middle is the toilet room sink. And the green stuff above on the second floor is the bed and under-bed storage.
Next is a view of the whole structure from the back right.
First floor from above (2nd floor removed) with the stairs leading up to the upper floor.
View with the second floor exterior walls removed.
The rough layout of the galley kitchen.
The first floor toilet room from above. The stairs snake around and over the lavatory.
Please let us know what you think in the comments below! Name suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Tags: DIY trailer home
oh man this is beautiful! so cool! i can’t wait to see what this is going to look like when it’s all said and done! but where’s the drum storage??
Thanks, Shoj! One of the hardest decisions early on was to forgo a practice space. For a while, I see me and Hiro putting this home in a trailer park and me practicing somewhere else (my current space at JCI is actually working out pretty well). Somewhere down the road when we finally decide where we want to live and buy land, I’ll build a separate building (or basement) for practice. And then it’s party at Kris’ practice space! Actually, by then, *you’ll* probably have a home and a rockin’ practice space. Or maybe Kelvin will beat us all to the punch with a beautiful Ashland recording studio. :)
Wow, Kris! Park that thing in a trailer park and you’d pretty much blow all the other mobile homes away.
WOW that’s so cool! You HAVE to invite me over to check it out. How does the top floor collapse? Won’t that smush things?
This is soooo awesome. I can’t wait to see it in 3-D!!!
Thanks everyone! Kathy, the upper story is like the lid on a shoebox, sliding over the outside of the bottom walls. The second-floor bathroom is suspended from the ceiling of the second floor (the roof), and it lowers into the living room as the top floor collapses. The storage unit in the project room moves to the center of the room and drops down between the kitchen cabinets. It’ll be a miracle if we pull this off. :)
ahaha! awesome! what happened to the people? i wanted to see the snowboarder guy. i’m surprised patrick didn’t get to it yet, but i’m gonna ask first… where’s the maple syrup pipeline from montreal gonna go?
maz, the beauty of this all is that it’s mobile! forget bringing the maple syrup to kris, with this sweet ride he’ll be able to go to the maple syrup! i’ll bet 10 pairs of batchi that kris’ next project will be a DIY solar bio-diesel wind powered semi truck!
By having it double height, are you concerned with clearance and maneuverability? is it going to be stable in high wind situations? I’m also concerned about internal lighting. Doesn’t currently look like it’ll get a whole lot of natural lighting. otherwise, it looks very cool.
Hey amigo! The second floor lowers down to go under the 13.5′ federal highway height limit. In the parked position, it’ll probably need to be anchored down somehow, though I’m not sure.
With lighting, the eventual goal will be to not require *any* electric lighting during the day. It seems silly to me that we block out all the sunlight in our rooms and then turn on electric lights. I’m not sure if it’ll be possible to get light to every task situation (like working at a desk or cooking in the kitchen, but in any case, there will be a lot of natural light in every room, and the building’s narrow width (8.5′) will help as well.
haha! shoj, you crack me up! and you’d probably win that bet.
yeah…. clearly, this is great an everything… but it does kinda screw-up the maple-syrup pipeline design i have submitted to Energy and Natural Resources Canada for approval.
i mean, i don’t have time to re-write the proposal.
Kris, anything we can do here?? help me out buddy!
Love it! Ray is very impressed too. Feel free to park in our neck of the woods any time!
Kris, that KHasita design is so neat! Good luck with your plans…but wouldn’t you get more interior space with a cylindrical shape? Hmm, like maybe a Taikomobile? ;)
Awesome. Your first road-trip should be to Seattle where you and Hiro can park next to my vegetable garden and have fresh eggs from the chickens.
great design… just wondering if its stable, or balanced.
Totally AWESOME Kris! I know we sort of breezed through talking about your trailer, but I had NO idea what you were talking about. I grew up in a trailer so…when trailer/mobile home is said, that’s where my mind went. I’ve got a TON of questions but will save them for later. Just when I start thinking you couldn’t surprise me by your creativity, you go and totally blow me away again!
We love to hear about new design projects such an Innovative design