Image courtesy of The Tiny House Blog
The Building Regulations used to prescribe how big your house had to be, now it’s very much about minimum function. In a previous postwe saw how its consumer law through building contracts that now defines and manages people’s requirements for specific projects, like size!
In the Uniform Building Regulations in Victoria through the 50’s and 60’s there must have been a perception that a house had to be a certain size to meet the basic functional requirements for cooking and washing (both yourself and your clothes).
Nowadays from a minimum legislative perspective the relevant objective in the Building Act is “to protect the safety and health of people who use those buildings and to enhance the amenity of buildings.” Building Surveyors are directed to Building CommissionPractice Note 2006-24 when they evaluate an application for an Occupancy Permit. As you can see size does not matter!
The project “Living in Small Spaces” at Kent Griswold’s blog “Tiny House Blog” shows what can be achieved with small spaces. In our modern age of scarce resources the average “project” home in Australia just seems to get bigger, although the land is often smaller. So here is the challenge “Living in Small Spaces”. Here’s a video from the Tiny House Blog on the tiny houses by Jay Schafer from Tumbleweed Tiny Houses:
