Imagine a nomadic life with a walking house…
I was perusing the news this morning and ran across an article about a walking house. Well, the article seemed so far-fetched and weird that I looked up the N55 Collective to find out more about it and found this manual about the walking house.
I’m flabbergasted by it. All I can think about is Howl’s Moving Castle. It was a very good anime film based on a YA novel by Diana Wynne Jones. But, watching the film I was entranced by the castle which moved about the landscape from country to city to lakeside — where ever it wanted to go. Imagine having a home that you could move about the countryside in. Suddenly you’ve not limited to one plot of land — you become nomadic.
The houses can move on their six pneumatic legs. But they’re built to have a very small environmental footprint. They have a water capturing system, solar panels, a small windmill, composting toilets, a energy-efficient wood stove, and there’s an option for a greenhouse so you can grow your own food. The living space is very small — kitchen area/living space with toilet and sleeping loft. You’d need to really, really, like the person you chose to live in the walking house with.
But think of the ability to move with the seasons or the sun — to get the most efficiency out of the solar panels, solar water heater and wind generators. Think of being able to move and take your house with you without being in a gazillion dollar RVTrailer. Nomads without tents — while now most are nomads with RVs.
However, living in small spaces takes a different mindset than most of us are comfortable with — though we could learn. For me, the hardest part of moving to a very small space such as this would be giving up my books. But the current technologies in ebooks and the Kindle could make that much easier than in years past. But still, I’ll be interested to see if this walking house takes off as more than an oddity, seaside vacation home, or hunting hut. It has potentially some very good uses and I wonder if they’ll be realized or this will just disappear as an interesting idea with no takers.