Constructing a tiny home with an expandable room, often referred to as a pop-out or slide-out, is a fantastic way to add space to a tiny home floor plan while keeping within the constraints of tiny homes. Typically extended across living areas, bedrooms, and occasionally bathrooms, these expanding sections offer extra width that can add a lot of precious space to your tiny home.
One of the key requirements for tiny home design is that they remain within 2.5m in width. This is both for ease of transport, but also for legal classification as a caravan. This can be challenging for tiny home design, as this width limit means several things:
Queen Beds can’t be oriented with great walking access on both sides:
Bed Orientation in the Casuarina
Bed Orientation in the Casuarina
Kitchen’s can’t have luxurious island benchtops:
Kitchen in a custom tiny home
The floor plan needs to include the bathroom, which either blocks an end, or sits in the middle:
Casuarina floor plan
Tarkine floor plan
Lounge rooms sit in the middle of the space:
Lounge room and entry door in a custom tiny home
These limits can clash with the floor plan, interior design, and feng shui of the tiny home. So if expanding is such a great solution, why doesn’t everyone do it?
Creating an expanding tiny home is a particularly difficult engineering challenge. Not only are we building a home, on a trailer, to last as long as possible, but now we’re introducing moving parts! It sounds like madness. This hasn’t stopped many innovative minds from tackling the challenge.
For example, this double pop-out tiny home from Mint Tiny House Company in Vancouver. Their design has two popouts, and shows us many of the fine details related to the popouts’ function:
Source: Mint Tiny House Company Instagram
Inside, this space is generously apportioned to the living space, and the sleeping space:
Source: tinyliving.com
It’s obvious what this popout does for the space! Incredible!
Let’s talk about a few key features and design compromises:
Hauslein tiny homes have their own clever selection of pop outs, using wall supports and minimal trailer modifications to achieve small pop outs suitable for lounge rooms.
Source: https://www.hauslein.com.au/settler
Note this mechanism allows for a small yet effective popout for a lounge chair. Note the step up to the popout, allowing the finished floor of the rest of the tiny home to remain separate from the popout floor!
We can see from this photo that the Mint Tiny House Company trailer achieves the popout through a complex set of rollers and pins:
Source: autoevolution.com
This is great, as it means that any part of the trailer can be made expandable, in any direction!
With the Hauslein tiny homes pop out, we can see that it uses a wall slide and roller system to ‘hang’ the popout from the wall:
Source: Hauslein Instagram
This design is limited by the strength of the wall, and hence the pop out is limited to the size of a lounge or bed head.
Other tiny home builders have created nifty solutions, such as this rack and pinion solution from Canada, or this motorised solution from Australia.
At Bare, we have developed a flush slide out mechanism that is simple, reliable, durable and strong, with a secret blend of off the shelf industrial parts that are known for their quality. IT can be applied to any part of the tiny home, limited in size only by the static structure that surrounds it, and the ability to create welded frames to support it. Our latest and greatest design with this feature is a custom Tarkine 7.2 – with the concrete-floored bathroom off to the side, creating a luxurious open studio space:
The floor shown above is a ‘drop in’ floor which allows for more rapid disassembly and future transport. Of course, you can build this floor flush on site if you wish!
This popout can be applied in many different places – chat to us about your design today!
It’s very important to note that while popouts offer astounding flexibility in their floor plan, and can be more budget friendly than getting a larger (or second, or third!) tiny home, they do come with some responsibilities that need to be respected:
Expandable tiny homes are a very clever way to get the absolute most from your tiny home project within the confines of the minimal footprint. As we’ve explored, these dynamic spaces are not only a testament to modern design but als the strong demand for tiny homes with adaptable, flexible living solutions that meet the needs of a diverse range of lifestyles and budgets.
