Completed Cottages
The first house we built was a 400 sq ft cottage, constructed in two 8’ – 6” wide, 24’ long modules by students at San Marcos High School (SMHS). Our cottage was designed to comply with state and local building codes, including California Building Energy Efficiency Standards (i.e. Title 24). The construction plans for the cottage and building permits were approved by County of San Diego Planning & Development Services.
The cottage modules were built using traditional wood frame construction techniques and materials so that the skills the students learned would be transferable to careers in the residential building industry. Inspections during construction were performed on the SMHS campus and at the installation site by County Building Inspectors.
We gave the cottage to Wounded Warrior Homes, a nonprofit that helps veterans recover from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI), many of whom have experienced homelessness. The two modules were transported on trucks to a single-family residence owned by Wounded Warrior Homes in the unincorporated area of Vista where they were joined together as an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) on a permanent, raised concrete foundation. The cottage is comparable to a small one-bedroom or large studio apartment with a galley kitchen, bathroom, living room and bedroom.
The ADU provides an additional bedroom for Wounded Warrior Homes’ transitional group home. It is a fully equipped home that veterans can live in to help them transition from the group home environment to fully independent living. Veterans live in our ADU for a few months to experience living alone before moving out to a permanent home in the ‘civilian’ world. The Ribbon Cutting Ceremony for our first cottage, delayed by the COVID-19 lockdown, was held on March 24, 2022.
We started building a second cottage in parallel with the construction of our first cottage. Unfortunately, we were unable to find a nonprofit with a suitable site for our cottage in an accommodating jurisdiction. After two years of unsuccessfully searching for a home for our cottage, we made the difficult decision to sell the second, unfinished cottage ‘as is’ and use the proceeds to expand our Moveable Tiny House building program. We did this in the summer of 2024.
The construction of our cottages was our Proof-of-Concept stage for the Warrior Village Project. We concluded:
• YES, we can build houses in high school construction classes
• The community strongly supports our program – the timing is right
• But, to expand to more schools we needed to adjust the Scope, Scale, Schedule and Cost of our program
• We shifted to building Moveable Tiny Houses:
– The building codes, regulations and 28 jurisdictions in San Diego County make traditional stick-built construction difficult
– More jurisdictions in California now allow Moveable Tiny Houses as ADUs *
– Governed by national, American National Standards Institute (ANSI) code
– Designed to be built and inspected on campus, with an integral trailer foundation
– Less site infrastructure work required
– Less than half the size of our first two ‘stick-built’ cottages
– Less than half the materials and cost
– Mobility: ANSI code Moveable Tiny Houses can be sited in any state in the U.S.
– Plans, Instructional Videos, Materials Lists & Support from Tiny House, Inc.
– Virtual Inspection and Certification
– Options for selling finished houses
* See Warrior Village Project May 2021 and June 2021 Newsletters for more information on Moveable Tiny Houses and Tiny House Education.
