Tumbleweed Workshop Review

This weekend Sam and I attended a Tumbleweed Workshop in Boston. These workshops are pretty pricey (we paid about $250 for a ticket, and that was the Black Friday sale price. Normally those things sell at $400 a pop). Given the sizeable chunk of change that it takes to attend one, I thought I would write up a Tumbleweed Workshop Review. This is intended to help people in the planning stages of their Tiny House Builds decide if a workshop would be worth the investment for them.

First, the nuts and bolts: The workshop itself was essentially a two day long power point presentation, with Tumbleweed architect Meg Stevens as the presenter. It was apparently one of the larger workshop groups (with maybe 75-100 people in attendance). As we walked into the hotel event room, we were asked to check in, fill out a name tag, and were given a very nice booklet with color printouts of the power point slides with a space for notes along side each slide. We all sat at small tables in the ball room while Meg stood on a slightly elevated dais at the front. The power point was projected onto a large screen behind Meg while she spoke. The event was well organized: the room was comfortable, hot drinks were provided, the microphones all worked, it was easy to hear and understand the presenter, there were no technical difficulties with the slides. The room was well lit but the projection screen was easy to see. The booklet for notes was also of a much higher quality than I would have expected.

Apart from the small tables and the tea, coffee, and water that were available at the back of the room, the whole thing reminded me very much of some of my introductory science classes in college. The lecturer (Meg) stood at the front of the room, spoke for a few minutes about each slide, and then took questions before moving onto the next slide and repeating the process again. Every hour or two we got a 10 minute break.

Perhaps it was due to the size of the group, but there were much fewer discussion/interactive elements to the workshop than I had been led to expect (I might go so far as to call it a lecture rather than a workshop). I found this lack of hands-on activities frustrating. As for the presentation's content, while the breadth of information was impressive, the depth was not so much. Had I not spent the last two months obsessively researching Tiny House construction, I think I would have found this presentation very, very helpful in organizing my thoughts. As it was, I didn't learn anything new from the workshop. I was also disappointed when two subjects I was most interested in learning about (electrical and plumbing systems) were brushed over with a simple "hire a professional for these portions of your build". That said, I did come out of the weekend feeling very confident in my research and our level of preparedness for this project. As we sat through slide after slide, I was able to go through my own mental checklist and say to myself "I've researched that, I've thought of that...".

In retrospect, I probably could have saved $300 and been a little less confident, but without knowing that beforehand, I feel good about going to the workshop. I would definitely recommend it to people who want help kick-starting their research, or who don't have the time or ability to do a copious study themselves. For these people, being able to go through the process of building a Tiny House start to finish, and having a booklet to go back to that will help structure their planning process, will be very helpful. Had this workshop been scheduled back in December, it would have saved me a month's worth of work. But for those of you who feel confident in the overall process of tiny house building, who don't need the process described in broad brush strokes to help organize and focus their research, you can probably save your money.

And although this may not apply to anyone else out there, there is one thing which resulted from this weekend that was 100% helpful for Sam and I. I think that Sam feels a lot more included in the Tiny House Planning now than before the workshop. I had been trying to fill him in as I went along over the past two months, but quick chatty conversations after we got home from work or before we left for work in the morning weren't really enough for Sam to get the whole picture. I think that sitting down and watching the power point for two days really helped tie together the bits of information he was getting piecemeal from me since December. It's going to be a lot easier to include him in future decision making processes now that he's had a chance to hear all that foundation knowledge- and that's totally worth the ticket price.