‘You don’t think we can build it, wait my beer,’ says agent of controversial $619,000 tiny house built ‘out of spite’

SPITE may be the strangest reason to build a house, but that’s exactly what this company did.

With two full floors, this small house in Jacksonville, Florida, was built on leftover land in a personal challenge to the builder.

10

10

Open House Optical The real estate agent listed the 1,547-square-foot home for $619,000.

At just three meters wide, the house is slightly less than the total width of the property, which reaches 7.5 meters.

Ryan Wetherhold of Oceanside Real Estate and builder John Atkins have made it common to find creative ways to use small lots for even smaller homes.

This lot sat vacant in the neighborhood for a while before the pair found it.

Although it was not zoned for construction, they appealed that decision to a board to get special permission to build the tiny house.

“What you can do on these smaller lots is go in front of a board of adjustment, and they will allow you to build more than the building code is allowed,” Wetherhold said. Business Insider.

NEIGHBORS ON THE WAY

Many neighbors opposed the construction of the house, attending council meetings and hearings related to the rezoning.

One man was using the vacant lot as a garden and was particularly vocal about not wanting the house to be built there.

With all the resistance from the neighbors, the house’s originally 4.5 meter wide plan was reduced to the 3 meter width that the house is now.

Undeterred, the pair saw this as a challenge and rather than back down in the face of their neighbour’s obvious attempts to stop the construction; they found a way to make it work.

“And to be honest, the builder almost built this out of spite just because of that fact: ‘Oh, you don’t think we can build it, wait my beer,’” Wetherhold said.

He went on to explain how they were forced to change their plans.

10

10

10

10

“What we were left with was to build within the building code, a modern building code that has been revised and which is quite conservative, with 35% legal coverage and seven and a half foot setbacks on each side,” said Wetherhold.

“So that made us build a 10-foot-wide house. We had no other choice.”

CREATIVE PLANNING PAYS

To make the house livable, the pair had to deepen their plans, building more on the lot than previously planned.

“If they [the neighbors] understood the process better, they would have worked with us to help us build a larger home,” explained Wetherhold.

“But their idea was, once the pot was served, ‘We can stop it from being built,’ which is counterintuitive because that obviously wasn’t the case.”

The 10-foot width restriction has a small loophole, as builders are able to build seats and protruding nooks as long as they are not floor space.

Because of this, most rooms were 12 to 15 feet wide.

“You shouldn’t put floor area on them, but you can put a seating area—so you can’t stand on it, but you can do built-in seating,” Wetherhold explained.

“We built a ton of built-in seating because it’s narrow anyway. Trying to fit a couch into a 10-foot-wide house isn’t very practical.”

10

10

10

In addition to the home’s unique footprint, they added some historic touches that connect the property to the area.

“The builder’s son made a really cool dining table made from boards from when our dock was destroyed by Hurricane Matthew,” Wetherhold said, referring to the 2016 storm.

“He saved all those boards and then made a dining table in front of them, which was a really cool thing.”

Although the builder-seller duo was concerned that the market for such a home might be thin, they were pleasantly surprised.

“I had an open house the weekend after ‘Zillow Gone Wild,’ and it was a three-hour open house, and I probably had 300 to 400 people — which is unheard of,” the realtor said.

“And we found that we weren’t sure if this was a niche that existed, but it definitely is,” concluded Wetherhold.