The first Island-made tiny home is up for sale.
“Instead of subsidized housing, imagine having a subdivision of these, where people making minimum wage could actually afford to own a house,” said Mark Mahar, who co-owns M4G Alternative Housing in Marshfield with Sherri Spatuk.
“That’s more why we got into the tiny home building,” Spatuk said. “It was to show the affordability of changing your lifestyle slightly.”
Mahar and Spatuk were good friends in high school, but then Spatuk moved out West and they lost track of each other. She moved home to P.E.I. 13 years later.
Now they run their family and the company as a couple.
The M4G prototype home is 450 square feet, and as is, comes in around $65,000. It’s made to be moved onto a piling system, like any modular home.
“I can live without the nick-knacks and all that,” said Spatuk.
But she knew, for herself, having a full bathroom, kitchen and laundry (it’s a fancy all-in-one) makes a tiny home feel more manageable.
The unit is move-in ready, but Mahar and Spatuk are keen to customize each home they build.
“We kind of wanted people to come in and say ‘this is what I would do with it,’ ” said Spatuk.
And the little house is built for winter on P.E.I.
“It’s no secret that the winters, well, the falls, winters and springs on P.E.I. aren’t always the nicest, and if we were going to make this year-round, we needed to make this durable to that,” said Spatuk.
The roof is steel, the front is wood siding and three sides are glossy black metal, the rugged kind used for warehouses.
The walls are insulated to R-20 and the ceiling is R-30.
Two electric heaters warm the space for now. But there’s a 220 outlet for a heat pump (it arrived during the interview) and a woodstove or propane are two other options the couple has heard people suggest.
Mahar and Spatuk hope the choices they have made will open people’s minds to tiny home living.
Laura Maillet is doing the same at Kent Homes. The company’s customer solutions specialist is glad to see people considering smaller spaces, in general.
Houses in North America are really big for the number of people living in them, she said.
But while interest in high - Maillet gets two to three calls each day - micro-home sales are low.
Most people opt for a small cottage – the same dimensions as M4G’s newly built unit.
