I’m attracted to the idea of tiny houses, but after reading Adele Peters’ essay about how much she hates living in one, my enthusiasm is diminished. She lives in a 240-square foot house (which is large, by tiny house standards) in Oakland and says that getting a vacuum cleaner out of the closet or even something out of a kitchen drawer “often involves a Tetris-like game of moving multiple other things out of the way.” She says her experience often reminds her of the Portlandia episode about tiny houses:

I can relate to a moment in a Portlandia episode about a tiny house village when Fred Armisen tries to open the fridge and the door bangs into a ladder from the loft. (Armisen’s character, like me, works from home, and in another scene he sits on the toilet with a fold-down desk and his laptop, explaining that the bathroom doubles as a home office as he hands Carrie Brownstein shower gel.) My bathroom, a 3-by-6-foot “wet room” with a walk-in shower, is so small that it doesn’t have a sink, and I have to use the nearby kitchen sink to brush my teeth. Though the apartment is fast to clean, it gets messy equally quickly. Invariably, I meet friends elsewhere, since there aren’t enough places to sit. Even as a minimalist who once happily lived with an ex-boyfriend in a space that was only a little larger, I think it’s too small.

Image: Vimeo/Portlandia

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