It’s the ultimate install: You take your common flatbed, bumper hitch cargo trailer, see, and build a tiny house on top of it.
Tiny houses are all the rage right now. Cue speech about The Great Recession and the mass reshuffling of priorities that saw Americans’ savings rates grow for the first time in a couple of decades.
I’ll be straight with you: I’ve always been a nerd for RVs. There’s something cozy and just plain keen about the compact, efficient living space found in most RV trailers. How’s this for a confession? I think maybe I like them so much because I spent several weekends of my youth in my grandparents’ old Dodge motorhome and spent every other weekend with my dad in his tiny, single-wide mobile home. Hey, you’re not a true Tennessean unless you’ve spent appreciable time in a tin can of a Clayton home that sounds like it’s going to crumple every time a stiff breeze blows.
Tiny houses are not RVs, in the traditional sense. They’re built like, well, tiny houses — not like fiberglass-and-tin-and-plastic-skinned RVs. Consequently, one might expect tiny houses built on the frames of cargo trailers to be much heavier than an equivalent RV trailer.
That being said, I really admire the beauty of some of the tiny homes created from humble flatbed cargo trailers. We’re talking spaces that would be worthy of setting up on your back 40 and renting to folks who like frontier-style living experiences. Some of these creations make me sad that my stepfather sold off his twin-axle “car hauler” flatbed trailer recently. To think that with enough planning, carpentry, and determination, I could have built my own profit center by building a rental “loft” and parking it in the yard beside my house!