Back in the early 1900s, Sears used to sell prefabricated “kit homes,” where people could order plans and supplies and assemble a pretty affordable house themselves. It’s 2024, nearly 2025, and Walmart is reviving the prefab home concept with a small twist: tiny homes for a tiny price.
Manufactured by a company called Cheryl Industrial, Walmart’s tiny house measures 19 x 20’, or 380 square feet, and sells for the preposterously low price of $15,900. Remarkably, that’s pretty much what the Sears houses would cost in today’s dollars.
Your tiny new home will be delivered to you on a flatbed truck and will come with all of the essential living spaces you’d expect a modern home to have—bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and living area. All you need is furniture, utility hookups, a solid foundation, and of course, the land to put it all on.
Just like the Sears prefab homes of 100 years ago, the home isn’t delivered fully assembled. You’d better add a fully stocked set of tools to your shopping cart before you buy the home because you’re going to need to put it together yourself. You’re also going to need to take local zoning laws into account. You can’t just buy a tiny Walmart house and expect to plop it down in the local park or the McDonald’s parking lot. Just because you’re bucking normal homebuying trends doesn’t mean you can call just any plot of land your home. That’s not being a pioneer, that’s being a cheapskate.
Even considering all the stuff you’re going to have to do yourself and the additional money you’re going to have to spend to get your new tiny cheap home up and running, it’s not a bad deal. The average home in the United States costs around $359,892. So you’ll be able to live a compact but decent life for a fraction of the cost. The home has an open plan layout and would already come with a toilet and shower along with kitchen cabinets.
OK, there are a few more caveats. Not only will you need to build it yourself, but it’s advised that you immediately vacate the home during “extreme weather conditions.” If you’ve got a tornado, a hurricane, a blizzard, a flood, or even just a particularly bad storm on a random Tuesday, you should consider getting the hell out unless you want to be buried in a $16,000 pile of rubble.
This isn’t a home that will house generations. The home has a lifespan of 20 years, according to the manufacturers. But considering how inexpensive it is, you can probably just ball up your old home into a wad and shout “Lebron!” as you chuck it into the nearest trash can before you buy yourself a new one.
Currently, the Walmart listing for the tiny home has only one review. This is from a user named Wassah, who says, “Can’t buy with Affirm. Darn! Lol”
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