Above: The 198-sq-ft tiny home is just 18 feet long.

The LEEDing Tiny team was up against the clock. It was 3:00 in the afternoon, and they still weren’t on the road yet from Jacksonville with the ultra-green tiny house that they’d just finished building, even though they were scheduled to be in St. Augustine for the Florida Tiny House Festival by 6:00. Instead, the team was more than 3 hours away finishing its National Association of Alternative Housing inspection, which certifies alternative housing using high-quality standards.

“We weren’t on time for our own party,” laughs Annie Murphy, president of Eco Relics, a Jacksonville-based company that sells architectural salvage and new, reclaimed, and surplus building materials.

In truth, though, they’d been up against the clock for months in an effort to build something totally new: the first-ever Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)-certified tiny house on wheels, which is working to achieve its LEED certification this year once it finds a permanent location.

The project started in May 2017, when Murphy and Sarah Boren met for lunch.

“It’s all Annie Murphy’s fault,” jokes Boren, director of market transformation and development for USGBC Florida. “Over a bowl of noodles, we crafted this idea of building a tiny house as green as possible.”

Tiny houses—generally considered anything 400 square feet or smaller—lend themselves to green building just by virtue of their size, and naturally use fewer resources. For instance, Boren notes that the average house (2,426 square feet according to the census) uses 12,773 kilowatt hours of electricity per year, whereas a tiny house uses just 914. Heating an average-sized house produces 8,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per year, compared to 558 for a tiny house.

“The very nature of being so tiny is a lot of what makes it so efficient as far as LEED’s concerned,” says Nate Ritter, director of sustainability for Orlando-based GreenBuilt Solutions, who worked as the LEED for Homes green rater on the project.

Annie Murphy, president of Eco Relics. Sarah Boren, LEED AP BD+C & Homes, director of market transformation and development for USGBC Florida. Nate Ritter, director of sustainability for Orlando-based GreenBuilt Solutions.

Annie Murphy, president of Eco Relics. Sarah Boren, LEED AP BD+C & Homes, director of market transformation and development for USGBC Florida. Nate Ritter, director of sustainability for Orlando-based GreenBuilt Solutions.

The tiny house concept is relatively new, and LEED certification requires a permanent location. However, “USGBC and GBCI have long sought to better harness the enthusiasm of the Tiny Homes movement,” says Asa Foss, director of residential technical solutions for USGBC.

“The wheels on the tiny house pose a unique challenge for us, since the LEED certification is based on a specific address. That hasn’t changed,” he says. Recognizing the value to showcasing new ideas, USGBC determined that certification could be awarded for the house in its permanent location. If and when the house moves, the project team would need to resubmit for certification at the new address, taking into account factors like location- and site-related credits.

As the scope of the project grew, so did the team’s goals. They wanted to finish the project in just six months, in time for the Florida Tiny House Festival in November 2017.

“Annie and I always think big,” Boren says. And they made a great team, thanks to Boren’s environmental knowledge and Murphy’s Eco Relics crew, along with a 50,000-sq-ft warehouse and outdoor space filled with salvage, doors, cabinets, flooring, and other supplies. But they needed some extra help.

“I knew how to make it green and she had the labor and materials, but we didn’t know how to build it,” Boren says. That’s when a mutual friend helped them recruit Jenni Edwards, owner of the tiny house building company Norsk Tiny Houses, who lives and breathes “tiny,” having long ago traded her huge house, Prada heels, and Lexus convertible for a different lifestyle.

“I worked 80 hours a week for stuff,” Edwards says. Now she travels the country in her motor home teaching people about tiny houses. “I am truly living this tiny world.”

She too threw herself into the project. “It sounded like an amazing idea,” Edwards says. “When I do something I do it with every ounce of my being.” Soon, the project was in full swing, using Edwards’s tiny house designs, a crew of dedicated volunteers, and donations of everything from electrical and air conditioning work to flooring from a St. Augustine high school gymnasium.

The home was built from as much as 87 percent reclaimed, recycled, and repurposed materials.

Most of the volunteers were as green as the project. “Some had never heard of LEED or green before,” Boren says, but their dedication was inspiring. “We’re talking sweat equity like you wouldn’t believe.”

Among those volunteers was Dolly Johnson, whose volunteer stint included a day spent inside the house’s three-foot-deep AC and propane storage compartment in order to paint it. “I just crawled in and painted it from the inside,” Johnson says, recalling how she was “dripping in sweat” in the Florida heat. “Anytime anything needed painting they were like, ‘Dolly!’”

Within a few months, the project gained incredible momentum, gathering volunteers, donations, and sponsors at a fast clip, and even getting a good chunk of the building started. Then Hurricane Irma hit Florida in September 2017, devastating parts of the state and forcing the project team to store their partly built project in the Eco Relics warehouse to protect it. Many of the project’s volunteers were evacuated, and later had to clean up storm damage at their own homes.

In the end, the hurricane delayed the project by several weeks and cut its volunteer numbers significantly, but the team soldiered on, eventually incorporating plywood reclaimed from the storm into the house itself, which Boren calls “really good karma.”

“We have a little remembrance of Irma,” says Murphy. Over the next several weeks, the team continued to work, with the Florida Tiny House Festival deadline looming all the while. “We were heads down, just trying to get this thing done,” Murphy says. And finally, they did get it done, arriving in St. Augustine just in time. It was an emotional moment.

“You’re so raw that the tears flow very easy,” Murphy says. “I don’t think until we got to the tiny house festival we realized how cool our build really was.”

Jenni Edwards is the owner of the tiny house building company Norsk Tiny Houses.

It certainly is cool. The 198-square-foot finished house is 18 feet long, including a two-foot-long front porch made of reclaimed decking. It boasts 87 percent repurposed materials; low-flow water fixtures; a superefficient RV toilet; solar for electricity; a cool reflective roof; no-VOC stains and paints; a reclaimed corrugated metal standup shower; meters for energy, water, and gas measurement; and reclaimed wood throughout, including a bathroom counter made from a downed tree and a barn door for bathroom privacy.

Small-space living features include a reclaimed ladder leading up to a loft with a queen-sized bed, built-in nightstands, and vaulted ceiling; deep and narrow slide-out closets and storage cabinets; a slide-away kitchen prep area; and a bench that converts to a table. “When you build tiny you do a lot of things that serve multiple purposes,” says Edwards.

Now that the home is built, the team is using it for educational purposes, taking it to different festivals around the state and beyond, like the Jacksonville Home and Garden Show and, hopefully, Greenbuild in the future. Eventually, they want to donate the house to a veteran and perhaps someday start a green tiny house community for veterans since Jacksonville has a number of military bases and a large veteran community. Ideally, this type of community would encourage skill and job training for veterans in the energy independent sector.

Above all, the team is committed to education, training, and sharing what they’ve learned with others. “Tiny houses are such a trend, and they’re here to stay, they’re not going away,” Boren says. “Our other goal is to make it super easy for future tiny house builders to go whole green that includes focus on integrated design, materials, and indoor environmental quality not just energy and water efficiency.”

The tiny house movement goes mobile in Florida with help from volunteers