The subtext of this discussion is infuriating, though - if you live in more than 400sqft you have "croft or dross" and your life is UN"intentional." Yet:

living in a tiny house doesn't mean you don't have a shed, or an office, or a workshop, or even another tiny house for guests. It just means you don't have to live in the middle of all that shit anymore. A place for everything and everything in its place.

That's like a zen koan of poor space planning: you have no room in your life for the shit you need in your life so your life has outriggers. I don't have a shed and an office and a workshop. I have a NORMAL HOUSE. "A place for everything and everything in its place." And when people come to see me there's a couch they can crash on and rooms I can inflate air mattresses in and a dishwasher to clean up our guacamole and margaritas without me needing to wash and dry dishes before I can fold out the bookshelf. And this:

Other friends have stayed in town by setting up in the back yard of a house, so they are still in the regular circle of friends and activities they have always been a part of.

That's not independence, that's grad-level couch surfing. That's a Griswold Family Christmas. Externalization of your lifestyle writ large. Sure - maybe your friends love having your septic system in their back yard. But I'm the kind of guy that feels uncomfortable asking, so maybe that's my problem: there's this facade of independence across the tiny house movement and it's pure bullshit. You get by with a little help from your friends and without your friends, you live in a shack.

Once more with feeling: I have nothing against living in the sticks. I have nothing against doing more with less. I have nothing against asceticism or minimalism. I have everything against the notion that there is somehow virtue in cramming all your shit into an artificially-constrained envelope so that you can smugly pretend that yours is a more considered life.

I lived in a 6x7 space on top of a bathroom in a quanset hut for a summer. I showered at the docks. I lived off of McDonald's and Otter Pops. I had nothing that wouldn't fit into a Suzuki Fucking Samurai. The difference is I didn't pretend my shit didn't stink. There is no more merit in

living in too little room than there is in living in too much. The difference is, with too much space you can probably find room to entertain. With too little? Well, we'll meet you there.