There comes a moment in every one of the approximately 27 shows currently running about so-called tiny houses when the person looking at such a potential home says this:
“It’s a little, I don’t know, small.”
“Yes!” I used to scream. “It is a lot small! You are being filmed by people from a TV show with ‘tiny house’ in the title! There was never going to be space for your barbell set or craft room!”
Now, however, I celebrate that line as an essential part of the genre. I imagine the shows’ producers working very hard to elicit the line, because, clearly, they consider no episode ready to air until it, or a variation on it, has been uttered.
“So what, exactly, is it that bothers you about this house, Tina and Jim? Yes, the toilet and kitchen sink do double duty, sure. And the couch is also the punching bag you use for your mixed martial arts workouts. But anything else? Anything about it, you know, overall?”
And then Tina mentions space might be a tad tight, and little fireworks go off in my head. All is right with the world.
When I got a pitch recently for an episode of FYI’s “Tiny House Nation” — the first such show, an advance scout for what has become an invading army — featuring what was billed as a Chicago couple, I thought it was time to put my feelings into words.
These shows — real-estate porn generally, but wee-living explorations in particular — are what my wife and I always end up watching in hotel rooms, probably because they make the Hampton Inn seem luxurious. The titles all kind of run together: “Tiny House Builders,” “Tiny House Hunters,” “Tiny House, Big Living,” “Tiny Luxury,” and so on. I assume we’ve seen them all. We’ve even seen “Little House on the Prairie.”
They make us all imagine other, simpler possibilities, but there is also an element of schadenfreude in my enjoyment of these shows. When these people acknowledge what they’ve sacrificed to be in the domestic equivalent of a two-door Prius, those of us leading a more Coupe de Ville lifestyle have a not entirely flattering moment of satisfaction.
Then there is the simple logistical wonder of it, the marveling at what people can squeeze in under stairways, for instance. I have long known such spaces can accommodate one Harry Potter, but it turns out that sleeping quarters for an unwanted boy is only the beginning of their potential.
The couple in this episode were Alexa Noti and Allen Johnson; I only learned their last names later, because in reality-show world surnames are seen as too much information for viewers to process. It turned out they weren’t really from Chicago. They just came to visit, staying in a River North hotel while their 230-square-foot home was being built on a trailer by Titan Tiny Homes in South Elgin, in the northwest suburbs.
If you’ve watched these shows, you know they follow strict formulas. There is a deadline. There are impossible demands by the homeowners, such as storage for a vintage bicycle collection or for clothing you don’t have to rinse out and reuse daily. There is a composting toilet, and, despite the composting toilet, there is a happy resolution.
Oh, and there are absurdly obvious moments of product placement. In this one, it was for 3M’s Command brand of reusable wall-hanging implements. “The whole premise of this entire brand of products is that it’s not damaging,” said co-host Zack Giffin, as the camera lingered on the product’s logo.
Alexa and Allen had two crises: They only had a week for the build to be finished (for unexplained reasons), and they were betting everything they had on downsizing to support their online travel and fitness publication, Travel Well Magazine. She needed to be able to do yoga, he was a home brewer, with lots of bulky equipment, and there had to be desk space to do the magazine work.
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As the show meandered toward the inevitable satisfaction of these desires — making sure to repeat simple information after every commercial break just in case we had suffered a blow to the head in the interim — there were some confusing moments. We were supposed to see the logic of the couple, who came from North Carolina, bringing along all the stuff they wanted to keep in their new house in a beat-up midsized moving truck? And when the show ended, they drove off with a nice, newish Ford pickup towing their new home.
So where did the Ford come from, and what happened to the moving truck? Meantime, these two seemed like smart people with access to cable television and the Internet and the wealth of information there about tiny-house living, a trend big enough that it is actually labeled a “movement.” They surely knew that bringing the big black sofa-and-chair set was only going to be useful for a scene in which the TV host told them they couldn’t keep it.
But keen-eyed “reality” viewers know that the word, applied to TV, means the title of a genre, with its own set of meanings very different from what the word might be said to mean in a dictionary.
“The Truth About Tiny House TV Shows” is an April 2015 piece written by Greg Parham, the founder of Rocky Mountain Tiny Houses in Durango, Colo.; that’s a construction business, not the title of yet another TV show.
Explaining that such TV series paint an “extremely unrealistic” portrait of his line of work, especially with regards to affordability, Parham said it’s sometimes even worse than that. A reality producer contacted him wanting to tour a couple through one of his houses, even though “the homebuyer had already bought a house and they basically wanted to try and recreate the whole process just to get something good on film,” Parham wrote.
But, again, savvy viewers sort of know, or at least suspect, all that. And simply by going to Allen and Alexa’s website, www.travelwellmagazine.com, you can find some modest discrepancies. Six months out, they haven’t been living the nomadic existence the show implied they would. They moved from an 1,800-square-foot home, not the 3,000 square feet the show said they left behind.
But overall they liked the experience and like the home, Noti wrote in a piece on the couple’s site. The composting toilet is “not as gross as it seems,” she said, and “we don’t actually miss having more space, something we thought would be a much bigger mental adjustment.”
And they’ve got to be really happy about squeezing their own product placement out of the show: Suddenly you and I and thousands of others have heard of Travel Well Magazine.
But for all their proclaimed satisfaction with the process, the show did still manage to get its money quote from Johnson, the statement about a pint-sized house not being able to fit a quart’s worth of stuff.
It wasn’t as explicit as some of the others I’ve heard, but there he was saying, “We understand there’s some paring down that we’re going to have to do, but there are certain things that are special to us that we’d like to hold onto.””
From the comfort of my not-tiny home, stuffed with way too many things I’ve just held onto, without really deciding or not deciding to do so, I needed to hear that.
Twitter @StevenKJohnson
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