World's Smallest Tiny House Is Just 24 Square Feet, but Mobile and Packed With Amenities

Tiny houses and mobile slash alternative living solutions have gained unexpected popularity over recent years, mostly because of a perfect storm of factors that pushed the costs of living through the roof. Tiny houses still have a sustainable aspect to them but attention to it has been lost in favor of other advantages, namely reduced running costs, higher affordability, and mobility.

The same goes for this particular unit, which seems to exist at the intersection of WTH Internet projects and actual, viable units for tiny living.

It's a showcase unit that aims several things at once: test the limits of tiny living while still retaining functionality, set a new world record, and provide some fun content to idle away half an hour whenever you don't feel like doing anything more productive. In the process, it's also able to stand out for creativity and maybe even an excellent source of inspiration, if that's what you need today.

This is a tiny by DIY YouTuber David Rule, who previously made headlines for "proving" that you can build your own tiny house without a plan and a budget under $8,000. He's clearly invested in the vanlife and tiny living trends, if only to bandwagon on them.

This unit is no different, though it might end up being an official world record breaker. It's not a tiny house per se, in that it's not built on top of a trailer, but it's still a tiny house in spirit. It's a scaled-down house riding on heavy-duty castor wheels on all four corners, so it remains essentially mobile – or at least, as mobile as your willingness to push it wherever you want to go.

It's also livable in the most basic sense of the word. It packs all the creature comforts of an actual home, though scaled down to size, including a rudimentary plumbing system, power, running water, a toilet, and even a shower. For a fun project, it's surprisingly impressive.

The inspiration for this home was the unit that comes up first whenever you Google "world's smallest tiniest house." It's associated with a certain Glen Bunsen and advertised as "self-sufficent," but in reality, it's a work of art by Boston-based sculptor Jeff Smith, who imagined it as a manifesto for tiny living, an experimental unit, and a sarcastic commentary on tiny living all at once.

Smith's tiny is 7.325 feet long, 3.675 feet wide, and 3 feet high (2.2 meters by 1.1 meters by 0.9 meters), offering a volume of 25 square feet (2.3 square meters), of which only 22.8 square feet (2.1 square meters) are livable. To even try to set a new world record, David's had to be even smaller.

So he went for a home that would be 24 square feet (2.2 square meters) while integrating real-life-like amenities that would top what Smith had included in his build. He also decided not to cut any corners in the construction so the structure would be waterproofed, insulated, and with higher-end features than Smith's. A real effort also went into making it a bit more stylish than its predecessor.

Once the wooden base was built and proofed against the elements, Rule opted for 30-inch (76.2-cm) high walls with a gabled roof that would be 1 foot (30.5 cm) tall at its highest point.

The layout included a shower slash bedroom combo, a small sink on one hand, and a rudimentary galley on the other. At the other end of the house, Rule added a toilet disguised as a chimney from the outside – the silliest-sounding idea in writing, but definitely an upgrade over the cat litter "toilet" included in Smith's version.

To make up for the very compact footprint, Rule opted for real wood cedar walls and ceiling, painted wood cabinets, and vinyl tiles for the shower. The water tank is a canister holding 2 quarts of water (1.9 liters) and it feeds both the sink (with a hand-hammer basin, so fancy!) and the shower, which is hand-held and connects to the sink faucet only when you need it.

A small 12V water pump runs on solar, thanks to a 100W panel on the roof. The shower water drains into another plastic container glued to the underside of the home which, by the looks of it, requires flipping the home to the side for drainage.

The toilet is your basic outhouse wooden "throne," with a bag you put in whenever you have to go. It's separated from the rest of the home by a wooden door, which is perhaps the fanciest, most luxurious feature inside the place. A portable fan helps to circulate the air, while insulation will do most of the heavy lifting in terms of keeping the cramped interior habitable.

The kitchen is a small wooden box containing a single-burner butane cooker from Walmart with a small DIY icebox underneath. Hilariously, Rule uses it during his 24-hour test of the home to cook a single salmon file for a party of four, not including the adorable pooch often seen sitting closer to the open fire than any living being should.

At the end of the build, David Rule's home boasted 22.7 square feet (2.1 square meters) of living space, with a total weight of 820 lbs (372 kg), 320 lbs (145 kg) more than Smith's unit. He was still able to push it for 1 mile (1.6 km) on a public street to prove that it's "mobile." The total cost of the project was $1,470, with most of that cash going on wood.

Rule tried to see if he could get Guinness certification for the house but, as it turns out, Guinness doesn't have a category for this record. He got the next best thing, instead: he got Smith on the phone to talk about their projects and obtained an invite to Boston, with the house, to compare the two.

If you want to see how extreme tiny living can go while still retaining a modicum of functionality, take a 30-minute break.