Smallist

Ever wonder how Oscar the Grouch had so much room in his trashcan? Maybe, like this Sliver House, it had roots. From Yankodesign:

The Sliver House (its owner prefers to call it the Glass House) has been built on the site of a single-storey wine vault that served the adjacent pub. From the street it looks impossibly small, with a 3m frontage and 8m height. It looks even smaller because of its wide and high neighbours, all brick, terracotta, stucco and tall sash windows: those great stalwarts of Victorian life, the terraced and the public house.

And once you’re past the 3m frontage? It’s a brightly lit, open, modern flat. For the total narrow house experience, check out Jack Sammis’ house in Alexandria, Virginia:

It used to be an heavily trafficked alley, but the owner of the adjoining property decided to quiet things down by building a house. More pictures on Oprah. Via TrendHunter.

Treehugger alerted me to this library alternative. If you’re willing to part with a few of your paperbacks, PaperBackSwap allows you to trade them in for credits, in order to recieve other books. The service is free — you just have to pay postage when you send the books out. I suppose it also depends on the honesty of the receiving user: if he decides the book never got there, you don’t get credited. But I imagine for products as inexpensive as used paperbacks, there’s probably a very low probability of sleazeballs gaming the system. Oh — and they also do CDs. Unlike the book service, they charge 49 cents on top of postage, but if the disc skips, they’ll give you your money back. That beats iTunes.

Related: Thinning the book herd.

Apartment Therapy NYC brings us this little book about sustainable design on a small scale. But one caveat: an Amazon reviewer points out, it’s not primarily about houses.

this is not a book concentrating on small houses. This a book on all kinds of small structures. They may be viewing platforms, a bridge, a pigeon loft, a monument, an emergency shelter made out of an ocean shipping container, a camera obscura, a work of art, or indeed there are a few houses here.

Books are heavy. Bookshelves take up valuable wall space. And there are public libraries that will let you read anything in their collection for free. Hell, they’ll even let you take it home! So what the hell are you doing keeping these things? Now that we have the Internet, you probably don’t need them for reference, and if you have a yen to revisit the DaVinci Code in 2027, you can take your hover-car over to the library, or maybe even download it, and read it on e-ink. So here’s a way to thin your collection without feeling like you’ve given up anything valuable.

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Apartment Therapy is getting small all month. And it sounds as though this year they’ll be showing off everything: All seven subsites will be getting into the act, showing off small tech, small decor, small anything. I can’t wait to see what they come up with, and you can be sure to see the best of it here.

And if you want to enter the contest for the Smallest Coolest Apartment, you can do so here. And view last year’s winners here. Alas, at 500 square feet, I think the smallcave might be a bit too large, and it’s not quite slick enough anyway.

If you’re under 25, avert your eyes, for here there be mortgage talk.

As the proud renter of a 500-square-foot studio, I’ve been watching the housing market’s impending bubble burst with keen interest. The lending community has become quite creative with new products, designed to let people own things they can’t afford. For instance, you can now get a 50-year mortgage, or even an interest-only mortgage. These can make sense in certain circumstances, for tax reasons, since mortgage interest is tax deductible - you could take an all interest loan, invest the difference elsewhere, and pay taxes on the principal at the lower capital gains rate. But for most people, that’s not gonna happen.

So I was thinking, if the 30-year fixed rate mortgage is the gold standard, what happens if you pay off a little quicker? Here’s the monthly payments and total costs of a 400,000 mortgage at 6%, for 15, 25, 30, and for a laugh, the 50:

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I thought these things were extinct, based on the fact that I only saw them in cartoons from the forties and fifties. But manual lawnmowers (or “reel mowers“) are still around, and they’re a lot easier to use than you might think. Not only are they quieter and easier to maintain, they also cut the grass instead of pulling it, which leads to healthier grass in the long run. And best of all for smallists, they take up a lot less space. Like everything else on the internet, they have their own advocate, who offers a few pointers. Among them:

• Don’t let the grass get ahead of you. That’s when these things tend to jam up and become a pain. Don’t let it go farther than a week. If you must, have someone do it with a power-model after a vaction.
• Walk at a very steady, brisk pace. Since your forward motion is what cuts the grass, you need to keep moving quickly to keep the blades spinning at their optimum speed. Slow down too much, and the grass will win.
• Mow in the morning. It’s cooler out, and since there’s no engine noise, no one will mind.

Of course, there are ways to avoid mowing altogether. Lesslawn.com has the story.

Skystream energy is selling a small windmills for residential use. By small, they mean 34 feet minimum, but they have a few pictures of these babies in the suburbs, and it doesn’t look too crazy. When I go into my Uncle Owen (grouchy unkempt pioneer) phase of life, I definitely want one of these things. And maybe a rooster.

Spousal approval factor on sinkpositive is probably 0%. For starters, the hardware looks incredibly cheap. And since it only runs when the tank needs to fill, it can’t possibly replace the sink in any bathroom. Which means you’ve actually lost the surface space of the tank lid. Plus, as germophobes will tell you, a flushing toilet is spitting bacteria into the atmosphere, so you shouldn’t be hanging over it. And finally, um, didn’t your mother or McDonald’s assistant manager tell you to wash your hands with HOT water?

This system looks a little more reasonable for saving sink runoff, but it doesn’t save any space either.

If water is at a premium, there are full-blown graywater collection systems for your house. They use sink, shower, and laundry runoff to irrigate your garden or landscaping. But they’re probably not ideal for your apartment.

And for the absolute hardcore environmentalist, check out the Earthship water system. More on Earthships later.

The tiny book Tokyo: A Certain Style features some of the smallest apartments in the world, and the way people live when space is at a premium. As with the jeweler’s workstation, the result is beautiful clutter. And it’s the opposite of Japanese minimalism: clean lines and featureless surfaces require the luxury of surplus space.