The three video sets I purchased were from Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, Tiny Home Builders, and from TinyHouseBuild. I purchased all three videos while they were on sale after Thanksgiving, but otherwise paid market value for them. None of them was gifted to me from the companies which produced it, and I am in no way paid for or compensated for this review in any fashion. If for some reason that's not enough to convince you that this is an unbiased review, then let me know what will be.
The first video set I purchased was from Tumbleweed, and unfortunately I was fairly disappointed. These videos reminded me of an informational segment on Mr. Roger's Neighborhood than a step-by-step how to video. Sure, some specific points were covered and some key vocabulary was introduced, but at the end of this video, I felt no more prepared to build my Tiny House than at the beginning. I feel that the information contained in this video is available for free from other sources on the internet if you don't already know it. Furthermore, if you do not already know the content that is provided in this video, you'll need far more information than is provided to successfully build a Tiny House. If, on the other hand, you're already fairly comfortable with the building process, then the information contained in this video probably isn't crucial for you to hear. Either way, you can probably save your money on this one.
The second video set I purchased was from Tiny Home Builders. Dan Louche gets credit for being the only one of these guys to skip the hassle of making actual DVDs and just put the videos online available via a year long subscription, Right off the bat, these videos gets points for being immediately available (what can I say? I'm a digital native and I want my content now, not in 4 to 6 business days after processing), and for not requiring an optical drive. They also have the most content of any of the three video sets. Unfortunately, that's where they start to loose me. These videos feature a lot of Dan standing in front of his Tiny House in Progress going into detailed descriptions of how to build the thing, with monologues like "you hold this small piece against the big piece, and you scribe a line from one to the other, then you take that angle and transfer it onto the flashing and cut that....." and by that time I've fallen asleep. No, literally, I think I've made it through only one of his videos start to finish without falling asleep half way through. The long, technical descriptions with relatively little visual reference makes it very hard to watch these. On the other hand, there is a lot of information, and I'm really hoping that when I'm actually building my Tiny House, and I have the big piece, the small piece and the flashing in front of me, his long descriptions will be a lot easier to listen to and find interesting/useful.
The final video set I purchased (and my favorite so far) is from TinyHouseBuild.Com by Andrew Morrison. I was the least eager to purchase these as a) I had already bought tow video sets and wasn't sure that I really wanted to spend money on a third and b) the hOMe Tiny House that is built in the video set is the least similar in both design and aesthetic to the Tiny House that I want to build. But it turns out these videos were incredibly useful, and I'm really glad I bought them. Much more detailed than the Tumbleweed videos (although perhaps not quite as thorough in some aspects as Dan Louche's videos) this videos gave me a really good understanding of how to accomplish most (if not all) the steps involved in building a Tiny House. The video itself was also dynamic enough in it's content to keep me interested, and each technique was shown as it was done, rather than just described verbally as in Dan Louche's videos. I felt that this video set was really key in developing my comfort level with the process of building a Tiny House.
So in summary: Having watched the Tumbleweed videos, I don't think I'll be referring back to them again, and wish that I had saved my money for other things in my tiny house build. Conversely, I do expect to refer back to both Dan Louche's and Andrew Morrison's videos frequently throughout my build, and I'm very happy that I bought both of these video sets. I'm hoping that some of the more detail oriented (read: harder to follow) monologues in Dan Louche's sets become more clear/easier to follow when I have my actual building materials in front of me. If I had to choose just one of these videos to buy, it would probably be Andrew Morrison's, but I'm glad that's not a choice that I have to make.
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