Time to check out your new (200-square-foot) home

For years now, tiny homes have been popping up in Puget Sound backyards, island properties, on blogs and TV shows. Now they’re coming to the Tacoma Home and Garden Show, thanks to Carriage Houses Northwest. The Shoreline company that makes six models of tiny house will be bringing two of them to the show at the Tacoma Dome this week, including the most popular one.

“The Big Little Barn is definitely the most popular,” says Kurt Galley, owner of Carriage Houses.

Like the other models, the Big Little Barn is made of wood with a stick frame construction on a trailer, but with a contoured roof that allows for two sleeping loft spaces, it looks bigger than most.

The other model Galley will be bringing to the show is the Northwest Cedar Bungalow, a more traditional-looking home with a receded front door and porch and just one sleeping loft. Like the other models, it includes a small kitchen and bathroom, and buyers can customize everything from interior fittings to exterior siding of HardiePlank, tongue-and-groove timber or cedar shingles.

Even better, you can customize the length. While the width of every model stays at 9 feet, folks can extend from 22 to 28 feet, which makes room for a separate bedroom off the living area.

Other models include a gray Craftsman cottage, the Vineyard Caravan with porthole windows and curvy porch roof, and the new modern-vibe Metro Retro — “like a cargo container with a slanted roof,” Galley says.

So are tiny houses still a thing, after all these years of media attention?

“Yes!” says Galley. “In fact it’s just now that people are finally buying them. There’s been lots of talk and people love the thought, but there hasn’t been tremendous adoption. Now buying is finally beginning to catch up.”

And they’re not just being bought as backyard studios, either, which is what Galley first expected. He’s seen customers who want tiny houses as a vacation home, or as a temporary dwelling while they build a larger house. People put them on their property to rent as an AirB&B, and whole families come in who want to live tiny.

“They walk into a 200-square-foot space and say, ‘This is for us,’ ” says Galley.

This story was originally published January 21, 2017 at 6:27 AM with the headline "Time to check out your new (200-square-foot) home."