With housing prices skyrocketing throughout the country and homeownership becoming a more difficult prospect, many are turning to tiny homes.

If you’re considering building your own custom tiny home, one of the key decisions you have to make is whether to build a portable one or a permanent one on a foundation. There are pros and cons to both, but foundations are becoming a popular and valuable setup.

Here’s why, and what you have to consider with that decision:

The Main Benefits of Tiny Homes on Foundations

While there are trade-offs between the different types of tiny homes, the benefits of tiny homes built on foundations are noteworthy and worth-while.

On the one hand, yes, it’s “only” stationary — but on the other, that means it will benefit you down the line if you don’t plan on living there forever; tiny homes on foundations appreciate in value, and actually add value to your home when it comes time to resell, something a portable tiny home doesn’t do. And that’s just a benefit further down the line — the immediate benefits are even more pressing.

Perhaps the two biggest benefits for your day-to-day quality of life are:

• less maintenance
• more design flexibility

The former is primarily due to the fact that utility hookups are able to connect to the city’s grid, making it straightforward to receive all standard utilities. Utilities for a trailer tiny home, on the other hand, would be more complex and trickier in exchange for the mobility.

The latter benefit initially comes about while designing and building your custom home but improves your quality of life every day. That is, a portable tiny home can live anywhere, but that means it has to be designed for that possibility. That means more size, shape, and capacity limitations that ultimately you have to live with every day.

On the contrary, tiny homes on foundations can be built far more towards your specific liking and needs because fewer qualifying details are dictating it, and there are many options for customizing your tiny home. This includes adding a basement, or other areas to your custom tiny home design. Furthermore, you can later expand it and modify it in ways that you couldn’t a mobile tiny home — for example, wider storage or punched-out rooms.

It might not sound that impactful, but with space being at such a premium, the design for a custom tiny home on principle has to be much more deliberate — the customizations you can include with tiny homes on foundations are ones you’ll interact with daily for the whole time you live there. They’ll improve your quality of life accordingly.

Lastly, on the topic of the benefits of a foundation: You’ll have easier access to building loans for a tiny home if it’s on a foundation versus portable.

Considerations for a tiny home on a foundation

Like we’ve mentioned in previous posts about tiny homes, the first thing when planning one is making sure that you can, well, actually do that legally.

Hopefully, this goes without saying but — ahem — make sure your regulations and zoning allow you to build before doing so. Otherwise, you could invest a whole lot of time, energy, and money (not to mention opportunity cost) just to have to shut the whole thing down. Yeah, it can be a hassle, but better safe than sorry.

After confirming you can indeed build your custom tiny home, comes the need to pick which kind of foundation will suit you best. Here are a few factors that determine this, based both on your own preferences and on what the environment dictates:

• Certain foundations won’t be well-suited for certain soil conditions
  • A rocky environment, one with heavy clay, or loose soil can affect what kind of foundation you can use.
• The climate can also change how your foundation interacts with the ground around it.

A few options include slabs, crawl space or basement foundations, or pier or post foundations. All your options have their own strengths and weaknesses — for example, post foundations are quite customizable and good for less even terrain, while slab foundations are simple and help insulate. More on foundations in a second.

Then, the fun part: deciding on your custom tiny home floor plan and how to best build a custom tiny home that fits your lifestyle.

Having a permanent foundation gives you more flexibility, allowing you to really consider all the ways you can customize your tiny home to suit your lifestyle and your tastes with fewer limitations.

A tiny home on a foundation can often be larger than a mobile tiny home, which means you can play around with the floor plan more, and provides more options for customization. At the same time, this is still a tiny home — so you’ll still likely want to get creative with your space to make the most of it, both through the floor plan itself and how you use the nooks, crannies, and vertical space that come from it.

A space which, in a larger house, would have only one purpose, can in a tiny house include creative stacking and multi-use setups. For example, loft bedrooms are common so that you don’t have to build out but rather up.

When it comes to your custom tiny home’s floor plan and use of space, getting creative to make your house a home is a fun puzzle of personalization.

A bit more on different tiny home foundation types

We briefly mentioned some examples of different foundation pros and cons earlier; here’s some more on that.

The main types of foundations for custom tiny homes are slab foundations, crawl space foundations, and basement foundations — three well-known types, although we should say this isn’t a comprehensive list and Tiny Home Pros have an in-depth Medium article focusing on a lot of the minutiae of foundations if you want to dig further into it. Here’s our starting point:

Slab foundations for tiny homes are a good all-around basic foundation. They’re basic slabs of concrete, as the name suggests. This means they’re relatively simple and, like we mentioned above, they also act to insulate the house from below. In turn, that saves on heating and cooling costs — something tiny homes already are great at.

Slab foundations are great for tiny homes in particularly damp environments, but as a tradeoff, they don’t offer much space for storage — and as we know, space and using it efficiently is a bigger consideration for a tiny home than a standard one.

If you are looking for more space below your custom tiny home, you have the option of having a crawl space and basement foundations. Crawl space ones are the more common of the two. These work well when the soil is particularly clay-rich, meaning they’re better suited for some regions than others. A tiny home on a foundation with a crawl space has the obvious advantage of offering you more storage than a slab foundation, as well as giving you an easily accessible space for utilities’ control panels.

A basement foundation takes the storage factor to a whole other level. The tradeoff is that, while it gives you space-efficient storage, it also offers more opportunities for moisture and other decay if not cared for, especially during installation. For this reason, be vigilant with basement foundations for your tiny home to make sure they’re sealed and don’t succumb to moisture-related complications.

In the end, the flexibility and equity offered by foundation-based tiny homes make them a fantastic option — both for your day-to-day quality of life, and to safeguard your future.