College Student Builds Her Own House

Photo courtesy the Hartford Courant

A few weeks ago, Whitney wrote a great post about the housing conundrum that parents of college students face: Is it more financially beneficial to have their kids live in the dorm, or buy them a house to live in?

I thought about Whitney’s post when I came across an article about one Yale student that should get an A+ for ingeniuty: She’s building her own house. Elizabeth Turnbull estimated that it was going to cost her $14,000 in expenses to live in a shared apartment in New Haven, Connecticut for two years. A graduate student at Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Turnbull is also concerned about her carbon footprint.

So, she decided to build her own home — one that’s super-small (8 feet by 18 feet), transportable, and extremely green. The home, which she’s built on the top of a flatbed trailer, features a kitchen, living area, bathroom, sleeping loft, and storage loft. (See more pics of the house in this photo gallery.) Turnbull was inspired by the wee homes built by the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company of Sebastopol, California, which we profiled on the blog last April.

The Hartford Courant article says Turnbull expects to be able to light the whole home and power her cell phone and laptop with the energy generated from three solar panels. She plans to tow the tiny home to New Haven in the fall and park it at a site within biking distance of the school. The expected total for building and furnishing the house: $11,000, so she’s even saving some money.

You go, girl!