Small homes, real foundations.

The homes are the whole point. Small, permanent, well-built — not trailers, not tourist cabins. Here is how we think about them, with real numbers, clearly labeled as planning figures.

Small, not temporary

“Tiny” has become a marketing word attached to everything from a shed on wheels to a luxury cabin. We mean something specific: permanent small homes on permanent foundations, in the 200-to-800-square-foot range, designed to be lived in year round for years. A home on wheels is a recreational vehicle in the eyes of most Texas jurisdictions; a home on a slab or pier foundation, permitted and connected to power, water, and an approved septic system, is a house. The village is built entirely from the second kind.

Sizes, and what they actually hold

Square footage is easier to picture with rooms attached to it. These are planning targets for the village, not fixed products:

Size	Sleeps	What fits
200–320 sq ft	1–2	Studio layout: sleeping area, compact full kitchen, full bath, a work nook. The classic one-person maker’s home.
320–500 sq ft	2	A defined bedroom or sleeping loft, a real kitchen, a living area you can put a couch and a desk in.
500–800 sq ft	2–3	One or two bedrooms, room for a couple or a small family, space for a dedicated home-office or studio corner.

The plan skews small on purpose. A village of mostly 200–500 sq ft homes, with a few larger units, keeps costs down and puts more of the living into the shared commons — the kitchen you throw a dinner in, the shop you build in, the garden you eat from.

Foundations: slab vs. pier

Two foundation approaches are on the table, and the choice is site-specific rather than ideological:

• Slab-on-grade — a poured concrete pad. Simple, durable, good thermal mass, and the most familiar to local inspectors. Best on level, well-drained ground.
• Pier-and-beam — the home sits on concrete piers above the soil. Better on sloped or expansive-clay ground (common in Central Texas), keeps the structure off the dirt, and leaves service lines accessible underneath.

Bastrop County’s soils and drainage vary parcel to parcel, so the perc test and soil evaluation that the county requires for the septic system will also inform which foundation each pad gets. That’s covered on the Cedar Creek site page.

How the homes get built: container-grade vs. steel-framed modules

There are two honest build paths, and each has real trade-offs worth stating plainly rather than romanticizing.

Shipping-container conversions

Containers are strong at the corners and cheap to acquire, which is why they’re popular. But the corrugated walls do structural work, so every large window or door you cut requires steel reinforcement, and a used container may arrive dented, rusted, or coated in floor treatments that need remediation. The container itself is cheap; making it a good home is not automatically cheap.

Purpose-built steel-framed modules

A module built on a steel chassis is engineered from the start to be a building, so it handles window and door openings without the reinforcement gymnastics a container needs, and it tends to meet building standards more predictably. It usually costs more than a raw container but less in surprises. Independent comparisons generally favor purpose-built modular for durability, and containers for lowest sticker price.

Container vs. steel-frame trade-offs: Rise; Housing Innovation Collaborative.

Tiny Hacker House has been prototyping small structures — including geodesic and dome builds and a large-format 3D printer — since 2010, which is exactly the kind of hands-on build knowledge the village needs to choose well between these paths per home.

On Tiny Hacker House’s sixteen years of build experiments: VoyageAustin, “Meet Anil Pattni”; anilpattni.com; linkedin.com/in/anilpattni.

What a home like this really costs

Independent 2025 market data puts tiny-home construction at roughly $150 per square foot on the low end and $300–$450+ per square foot for on-site custom builds, with all-in totals commonly landing between $30,000 for a very small unit and $150,000 or more — land not included. The per-foot number runs high because a small home still needs a complete kitchen, a full bath, an electrical panel, and heating and cooling; those fixed costs simply spread across fewer square feet.

Cost figures: HomeAdvisor, “How Much Does a Tiny House Cost?”. These are general market ranges to set expectations — Small Home Village has not set or advertised any price, and no homes are for sale.

Efficiency is the quiet advantage

A small, well-insulated home is cheap to heat and cool — there is simply less air to condition, which matters through a Central Texas summer. Pair that with rooftop solar where each roof allows it and grid power from the local cooperative, and the monthly cost of living in one of these homes can be strikingly low, even when the build cost per square foot is not.

See the model in the wild

We’re not the first to cluster small homes into a community near Austin. Here’s a real tour of an existing Austin-area tiny-home community — useful for picturing scale, spacing, and what small-home living actually feels like day to day.

Third-party video: “Village Farm Tiny Home Community in Austin, Texas (Full Tour)” by Mic Thinks Tiny, on YouTube. Shown for reference; not affiliated with Small Home Village.