Tiny Chapel Inspired by Tiny Homes on the Move

Lloyd:

Just got your Tiny Homes on the Move. Very beautiful stuff. I hadn’t seen your books since the early seventies.  I was a custom home builder for many years but now, becoming older, (hate to say it), I’m starting to build tiny structures.  

The attached little chapel was inspired by Sidney Poitier’s comment in “Lilies of the Field,” “I’m gonna build me a chapel!” So I did. I guess really it’s more of a meditation space, only 24 square feet. I built it to try my tiny house structural designs since I wanted something not too expensive to test them out.  Everything worked well so now on to bigger stuff, (on a 16′ flatbed trailer). Anyway, I just wanted to thank you for the inspiration. 

There’s a terrible tiny house show on the television where two guys build generic structures with conventional framing that are ugly and are guaranteed to be difficult to pull, and to burn out wheel bearings. The prices they quote are astronomical. My little chapel cost only $600 and $300 of that was for the western red cedar siding. The work you show is a complete opposite of that. I really appreciate the work you do to communicate such admirable possibilities in a time when this whole idea is catching on.

Take care and enjoy your day,

Klaus Eyting

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

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