Tiny House Blog founder: cabins, mortgages, downsizing trend

Kent Griswold doesn't live in a tiny house, but he's become a very well known tiny house geek. Five years ago (May 2007) he launched the Tiny House Blog and it's now the most popular of its kind, but it all began with a lifelong love of cabins.

At first, he had a few hundred people visiting his site every day, so he decided to take it seriously and in the past five years, it's grown to about 10,000 to 15,000 unique visitors a day. Kent admits his timing was fortuitous.

Now there are other similar blogs to his like the Tiny House Design, Tiny House Talk, Tiny House Listings, The Tiny Life, This Tiny House, and Shedworking. There are popular builders like Jay Shafer of Tumbleweed Tiny House Company and Brad Kittel of Tiny Texas Houses. There's even a Small House Society which helps promote the small house movement. 

Kent's home county of Sonoma (California) is one hub for the movement (as seen in the first act of our documentary "We the Tiny House People"). And every so often some of them- Jay Shafer, Stephen Marshall (Little House on the Trailer), Michael Janzen (Tiny House Design) and Kent- gather for a "Meeting of the Tiny Minds". While there may be something new in the way tiny house information is being spread online, Kent is clear that small shelters have always been a viable option.

When Kent first started blogging he had trouble finding enough content for his site. Now he has a couple years worth of great stories (mostly flagged in his Gmail account) and he sees more and more people actually building, or hiring someone to build, their own tiny homes. Though he makes it clear that the majority of his readers are "dreamers".

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