Tiny Home Floor Plans: 6 Decisions a Designer Says Matter Most
Most people start with a floor plan and try to figure out how to make their life fit inside it. Kelley Walker encourages her customers to start with how they actually live instead.
Kelley owns Cowtown Cottages, a Texas tiny home dealership, and after six years of helping people customize their homes, she has seen plenty of buyers come in thinking they know exactly what they want and leave with a completely different plan.
She also knows tiny living firsthand. Kelley has lived tiny for six years and has gone through the process twice herself, so she has learned a few things along the way about what works, what doesn't and what she would do differently.
On Let's Talk Tiny, Kelley sat down with Cindy to talk about choosing between tiny home floor plans and the things she thinks buyers should consider before deciding on a layout.
At a glance
Guest: Kelley Walker, owner of Cowtown Cottages
Where: designed and sold in Waxahachie, Texas, built by Platinum
Homes: park model RVs up to 399 square feet, single story, one bedroom, one bath
Lofts: an upgrade of about $3,500, not standard
Most affordable: the 300 square foot studio series, starting in the upper $50,000s
Design service: included when you buy, and Kelley does every appointment herself
1. Start With Your Wish List, Not a Floor Plan
Almost everyone arrives having already decided.
"People will spend hours online looking at floor plans," Kelley says. "And they'll come in and tell me, I have to have this plan."
Then she asks questions, and the plan usually changes. Not because the first one was bad, but because they were choosing between the options they happened to find rather than the options that exist.
Her fix is to stop and go backwards. What is actually on the wish list? What are the non-negotiables? Only then does she match it to two or three plans worth customizing.
"I convert people daily from what they thought they wanted, because they haven't lived tiny. They don't understand."
One recent buyer was set on a plan until Kelley asked whether she had looked at its bathroom. "That's probably one of the most miserable bathrooms you could ever build."
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2. Keep the One Piece You Cannot Replace
Downsizing advice usually tells you to let go of everything. Kelley says the opposite about a specific category.
Buyers get tearful in her office about furniture. A grandmother's piece, usually, and the assumption that going tiny means it has to go.
"No, no, no. Let's try to design your house around that piece of furniture."
Her rule is that you do have to get rid of things, but the last thing you should give up is whatever carries real feeling. She applies it to walls as well as floors. When she designed her second tiny home she planned the wall space first, so there was somewhere for the art and the photographs to go.
"There's not one item in that house that does not bring me joy."
That matters more than it sounds, because the thing that makes a tiny home feel bigger is windows, and every window you add takes away a wall. Where the light goes and where the art goes is one decision, not two.
3. Decide Now If This Is Your Last Home
Aging in place is something Kelley thinks about personally, too. She cared for her father for three years, and he passed away the same year Cowtown Cottages opened.
"If we had started this business a year earlier, my dad would have had independent living in his last six months of life."
That experience has shaped the way she talks to older buyers about their floor plans. If someone in their seventies is considering several options, Kelley asks whether they plan for this to be their long-term home. If they do, she encourages them to think about accessibility now rather than waiting until they need it.
One of the biggest considerations is 36 inch doorways.
"Designing the doors 36 wide is really hard in a floor plan. They don't all accommodate that. So I have a very limited amount of aging in place that I can provide."
Wider walkways and enough space around the bed and living areas also need to be considered when choosing the layout. Other features, like handrails, are much easier to add later.
4. Storage Is the Thing People Get Wrong
Ask her for the single most important feature and she does not hesitate.
Her first tiny home was designed as a vacation place, and then four people and two Great Pyrenees moved into it full time. It had one two foot closet for all of them.
"The struggle was real in the first tiny home we had."
The second one she designed herself, and the measure she uses is specific: every piece of clothing she owns is inside the house. Nothing is in an air conditioned shed. There is kitchen cupboard space, a room for the dogs, and storage built into places that were wasted the first time.
Cindy added the one nobody plans for. Where does the trash can go, and where do the mop and the vacuum live? Kelley's answer is trash drawers, which her builder started offering about two years ago and which she now puts in wherever the kitchen layout allows.
5. Check That the Windows Open
This is the mistake she made herself, and it is the one she gets most animated about.
There is a trend toward big modern picture windows in tiny homes. They look wonderful. In her first home every window in the living and kitchen area was fixed except the one over the sink.
The problem is smoke alarms. In a space that small, they are sensitive enough that opening the oven door sets them off.
"So our life for the first three and a half years living tiny was, every time we cooked and just opened the oven to get the food out, the smoke detector went off. But all of our windows were fixed."
The only options left were the sliding glass door, which is not an option in a Texas summer, and one window over the sink, which was not enough to pull a breeze through.
Cindy has the same problem. She discovered hers on the first cool day of the year, reaching for a window that turned out not to open.
6. Where Not to Spend the Money
Two upgrades come up constantly, and Kelley talks people out of both.
Granite. She remodeled houses for twenty years before this, and she does not think the builder's price for granite is reasonable. Her suggestion is to live with the laminate that comes standard for five or six years. If you are still there, you will want to refresh the house anyway, and you can do the counters then. Buyers can also have no countertops installed and arrange it themselves.
Upgraded flooring. This one is pure arithmetic. The builder floors the whole trailer, not only the rooms you walk through. So paying for luxury plank means paying for roughly double the square footage you will ever see.
"Why don't you just let the standard flooring come in, and then later when it wears out, you can put in the flooring of your choice in just 200 feet instead of 400 square feet?"
She is honest that this is unfinished business. Enough buyers want the better countertop that she is working on a way to offer it for less.
Why Tiny Home Floor Plans Have Short Lofts
A viewer asked the question that comes up daily online. Why build a loft you cannot stand up in?
The answer has nothing to do with design.
"These houses have to get under bridges," Kelley says. Most of hers stand 15 feet 11 inches. Bridges are 16 feet. There is nothing left to give.
The roof pitch is already at the limit. She is a custom home builder's daughter and would happily build a 9/12 pitch, which is the tallest a tiny home can carry.
And even if the highway allowed it, raising the loft to full standing height would push the home past 399 square feet, because loft space only starts counting toward the total once the ceiling is high enough. Crossing that line changes how the home is classified altogether.
What Comes Standard, and What Does Not
Worth knowing before you compare prices, because the baseline is not what most people assume.
Every Cowtown Cottages home is single story, with one bedroom, one bathroom, a kitchen, laundry space and a living room. Lofts are an upgrade, at roughly $3,500, not something you remove to save money.
The company caps at 399 square feet on purpose. Above that you are into HUD homes, which run from 400 to around 1,000 square feet but cannot be customized. You cannot move a window, move a wall, raise the roof pitch past 6/12, add a loft, or have the porches you want.
"Every time someone would come in, they'd say, we want 600 square feet but we want it to look like your tiny homes. And I couldn't make the two mesh."
The most affordable option is the studio series, which Kelley designed for two situations she kept being asked about: a place for a parent in the backyard, and the twenty-seven year old who will not move out. They are 300 square feet, start in the upper $50,000s, and are efficiency apartments rather than houses. One room, a kitchenette and a bathroom.
Delivery is its own number and worth planning for. To the far western and northern states she quotes roughly $20,000 to $30,000, going up by something like $5,000 per state of distance. Her advice is to think of it as part of the price of the house rather than a separate shock at the end.
One More Thing She Said That Is Worth Repeating
Find your land or your community before you build the house.
Cindy raised it and Kelley agreed. Cowtown does not provide land searches, and they are honest that they cannot know what is available across the country. Their recommendation is to go to the area you want to live in, find the strongest local agent and put yourself on a land search.
A land or community search can take a long time. You do not want a finished house and nowhere to put it.
If you want to see Kelley's work rather than read about it, two of her designs are already on the site: the Bayou Cottage in North Texas and the Red Bird P-532, which a couple runs for under $1,000 a month. If you are earlier than that, start with the buyer's roadmap.
FAQ
What should you bring to a tiny home design meeting?
Kelley Walker asks buyers to bring a wish list and a list of non-negotiables rather than a floor plan they have already settled on. She says most people arrive fixed on a plan they found online, and the questions she asks usually move them to a different one.
Why can't you stand up in a tiny home loft?
Bridge clearance. Most of Kelley's homes stand 15 feet 11 inches and bridges are 16 feet, so there is no room to raise the roof. Raising it enough to stand in the loft would also push the home past 399 square feet, because loft space does not count toward that total until the ceiling is full height, and that would change how the home is classified.
Can a tiny home floor plan work for aging in place?
Some can. Kelley says 36 inch doorways are the hard part, because only a limited number of plans can accommodate them. Wider walkways and the spatial fit of the bedroom and living area also have to be designed in from the start. Handrails and similar features can be added later.
Where do tiny home buyers overspend?
Kelley points to granite countertops and upgraded flooring. The builder's price for granite is high, and upgraded flooring is installed across the whole trailer rather than only the rooms you see, so you pay for roughly twice the square footage. She suggests living with the standard finishes and upgrading later.
How much does it cost to deliver a tiny home across the country?
Kelley says delivery to the far western and northern states runs roughly $20,000 to $30,000 from Texas, going up by something like $5,000 per state of distance. She describes it as part of the total cost of the home rather than a separate surprise.
Kelley Walker was a guest on Let's Talk Tiny with Cindy. The full episode is linked above.
Cowtown Cottages:
Website: cowtowncottages.com
Email: cowtowncottages@gmail.com
Facebook: @Cowtown Cottages
Instagram: @cowtowncottages
Kelley asks that a first email just request an appointment rather than set out the whole project, because she keeps every appointment she books and is behind on long emails.
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