Small building built by ShelterI'm a reader of Brevity, a literary journal that publishes short essays. I'm also a fan of Brevity's blog, and they recently posted about an essay competition to win a small house.

We've written about the small housebuilding movement on the Shelter Build blog, and we're very excited to see how people are starting to think about living and building on a smaller scale (and not about building a McMansion).

The contest is sponsored by Tiny Texas Houses, a builder of small houses from "99% pure salvage." The intent of the contest is to offer a cool building, but also to continue the conversation about small houses. That's something we can definitely get behind.

If you enter and don't win the Tiny Texas House, Shelter is a great resource if you're interested in building or purchasing a small house. We build super-insulated small buildings and cabins of all shapes and sizes. Some are used as artist spaces, some as vacation spaces, and others have been used as guest cottages. Here's a link to a photo gallery of some of the small buildings we've built for Shelter clients.

Many of our Design Build and Purely Post and Beam students go on to build their own small buildings. If you're interested in taking a class, please see our upcoming class schedule or read about our classes on our website.

Now, I'm off to write my winning essay.