*Intro and outro music are from an original piece by

Carl Zukroff of The Blue Hotel

Pat Dunham’s Website

Jay Shafer’s Tiny Home Info

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According to Wikipedia, the Tiny-House Movement – also known as the Small-House Movement – is an architectural and social movement that advocates living simply in small homes. A residential structure of under 400 square feet is generally considered a tiny home. The Tiny House Movement promotes financial prudence, economic safety, shared-community experience and a shift in consumerism-driven mindsets, which seems to align pretty well with all the things that we’re talking about here on GetYourFILL.

Today, we’re very fortunate to have with us Pat Dunham. Pat is the Tiny-House Advisor. She will help you to both figure out what you’re gonna need in your tiny home as far as getting rid of your stuff and helping you cull out all the accumulated detritus of a lifetime and she can even help you design the home and figure out what kind of nice-to-haves and special little storage solutions and stuff will make your tiny home much more livable and comfortable for you.

So thank you so much, Pat, for joining us today.

Chris: Welcome to the GetYourFILL podcast. Can you just give us a little bit about your background and tell me how you got involved in the Tiny-House Movement.

Pat: Hi it’s Pat Dunham. They know me as the Tiny-House Advisor and I really got started many years ago when my whole family living in Connecticut would take our boat out with however many children we had at the time and we’d go from Connecticut all over to Long Island Sound and stay there on our boat on an island all weekend and we loved it.

Back home in Connecticut, we had a 72-foot long house 5-bedrooms, 2-stories and the kids would be at one end of the house going, “He’s hitting me” and I’m on the other end going, “You kids quit it.” I’m sure parents that can register to them. Well, on the boat we be so together and playing games and no problems and no fighting between the kids or anything. It was wonderful. And so along the way, we said: You know, why don’t we just get a bigger boat and live full time, so we did. We got a 55’ tri-cabin motor yacht. We moved out of that 5-bedroom house, emptied it – so I know a lot about downsizing – and we moved from Connecticut to Florida and lived for several years with six children on a boat. After that, a few years later, we built a 46-foot sailboat from a bare home. Most of the children had left home by then, we just had the youngest ones still with us, and we cruised the Caribbean, went to Cuba and all, so that’s where I got really started in tiny living.

Chris: And I think boats and RVs and those are a nice model for a tiny home using every inch of space.

Pat: Yeah, the boats especially. They are masters at using up space and beautiful carpentry and what have you, as opposed to the RV even though they’re good but boy, the boats really have it. I tell everyone, visit the boat shows you’ll get great ideas.

Chris: So tell me about the Tiny House Movement, how did it sort of catch on and who were the pioneers?

Pat: The Tiny House Movement really is all caught on, oh gosh, 20 years ago, really when a man by the name of Jay Shafer, built this tiny, little house, a masterpiece on wheels. And along the way people started going: Wow, this is awesome. I can do that. And the housing crash in 2008 really put a push on this because people lost everything, including their homes, and they started to realize, well maybe there are some other answers to our housing problems.

Chris: There are challenges associated with living in a tiny home. Why do you think that they’re so popular and the people are able to kind of overcome those challenges?

Pat: The biggest challenge that people face, is where to put them because every single – even within a cit