Where to Live Quiz: How to Decide Between a Tiny House, Yurt, or Cob Cottage

Three small dwellings, three philosophies, three completely different lives. A tiny house on wheels, a yurt and a cob cottage can all shelter you — but each one asks a different life in return. This guide walks the ten questions that separate them, from mobility and money to winter and walls, so you can tally your own leanings and meet the dwelling that is actually yours.

1. Where to Live Quiz at a Glance

This where to live quiz works because the three dwellings are not three sizes of the same idea — they are three opposed answers to the same questions. The tiny house on wheels answers with mobility and legality: a rectangular, certified, financeable home that can relocate when life does. The yurt answers with volume and value: one round, light-filled space, raised from a kit in a weekend, at the lowest cost per dwelling of the three. The cob cottage answers with permanence: a sculpted home built by hand from the earth itself, slowly, in one place, for good. Each of the ten questions below offers three leanings — (T) for the tiny house, (Y) for the yurt, (C) for the cob cottage. Answer honestly, note your letter for each question, and tally them at the end. Most people land clearly on one dwelling; a tie is not a failure but a signpost to the hybrid worth considering. The table gathers the deciding numbers in one place; the sections after it take each question apart.

A $110,000 spread between the dearest and cheapest path, and one year of building time — the decision on one card.

2. The Mobility Question: Wheels, Kits and Roots

The first question is the deepest one, because it is really asking how you feel about moving. If you want the option to relocate — for jobs, for adventure, or out of plain restlessness — the tiny house on wheels is the only one of the three built for it: wheels mean freedom, and the house is designed from the trailer up to travel. If you might move once but mostly expect to settle, the yurt sits in the middle: disassembly is possible, a yurt can come down and go back up elsewhere, but it is not planned — the platform, the deck and the settling-in all assume it stays. And if you are putting down roots, the cob cottage removes the question entirely: it is built into its site and will outlive its builder. Be honest here, because mobility bought and never used is money spent on a trailer and certification you did not need, while roots planted in the wrong place are the most expensive mismatch of all. The full picture of life in the middle option is drawn out in our guide to yurt living, where the settle-mostly philosophy meets its real costs and realities.

3. The Building Question: Buy It, Raise It or Sculpt It

The second question asks what your relationship with building is — and the three dwellings want three different people. The tiny house path suits the buyer: you would rather buy from a builder, or hire one, than build yourself, because you want professional quality and the certification that comes with it. The yurt path suits the organiser: you like the idea of a raising day — a kit, a crew of friends, one intense weekend — and a dwelling that arrives as a project measured in days, not seasons. The cob path suits the maker: you want to build with your own hands, slowly, from the earth itself, because for you the building is the point. None of these is the superior temperament; each is simply the temperament its dwelling rewards. A buyer who chooses cob has bought themselves a year of mud. A maker who chooses a finished tiny house has paid for someone else’s craft and may feel the itch for years. Match the dwelling to the builder you actually are, and the build becomes a pleasure instead of a sentence. Natural building’s wider family — earthships, straw bale and the rest — is explored in our earthship homes guide, for readers whose hands are already itching.

4. The Money Question: Three Budgets, Three Currencies

The third question is money, and each dwelling denominates its cost differently. The tiny house runs $60,000–150,000 — a realistic, financeable budget, with resale value at the end of it; you are buying a product, and the money behaves the way money behaves on any well-made product. The yurt runs $30,000–80,000: the most dwelling per dollar of the three, typically paid in cash, because there is less to finance and fewer lenders who know what a yurt is. The cob cottage runs $10,000–40,000 — but that figure is materials only, because the real currency of cob is labour and time: your labour is the budget, and time is abundant, or the arithmetic collapses. That is the honest way to compare the three. Cob is not a $25,000 house in the same sense that a yurt is a $50,000 one; it is a house whose price is paid in weekends. Lay the three budgets against your own savings, your access to finance and the honest market value of your hours, and the money question usually answers itself. The broader ledger of small living — what it saves and what it quietly costs — is weighed in our pros and cons of tiny houses.

5. The Winter Question: Insulation, Ambition and Thermal Mass

The fourth question asks what winter looks like where you will live, because climate is the least forgiving of all the deciders. If serious winter is fine by you, the tiny house is the engineered answer: insulated walls, a real heating system, conventional comfort behind a door that closes against the cold. If your winters are mild to moderate, the yurt asks more of you — you will heat ambitiously and accept some temperature gradient across its single round volume — but within that climate band it works, and works beautifully. And if your answer is “whatever comes,” the cob cottage’s thermal mass laughs at temperature swings: thick earthen walls absorb the day’s warmth and the fire’s heat and give them back slowly, provided you have firewood. Notice that none of the three answers is wrong — but they are answers about different maps. A yurt in a serious-winter climate is not a philosophy, it is a heating bill and a hard January; cob in a wet, mild climate still performs, but its mass earns its keep where the swings are wide. Answer for the winters you will actually get, not the ones you romanticise.

6. The Shape Question: Rectangles, Circles and Curves

The fifth question sounds like taste and is actually about daily life: how do you feel about round walls? If you prefer rectangular rooms, standard furniture and doors that close, the tiny house is the conventional plan in miniature — every piece of furniture you already own fits it, and rooms divide the way rooms are supposed to. If you love the circle — the volume, the light, the feeling of a single breathing space — the yurt offers a geometry no rectangle can imitate: one continuous room under a central ring, where the whole dwelling is present to itself at once. And if you love curves even more — sculpted walls, built-in niches, no straight lines at all — cob is the only dwelling of the three that is shaped by hand rather than by sheet goods, and its rooms feel grown rather than built. Shape governs more than mood: it decides how furniture places, how sound travels, how a household shares or escapes shared space. Round-plan living has cousins worth a look — the dome cabins make the same bet on the circle in a hard shell.

7. The Legality Question: The Mapped Path and the Gray Zone

The sixth question asks what matters more: legality or freedom? The tiny house offers the mapped path — RV certification, insurance, financing, parks that accept you — a whole infrastructure that exists because thousands have walked it before. Choose it and the paperwork is a known road with known tolls. The yurt asks you to navigate the gray zone: rural land, friendly jurisdictions, calculated risk. Many yurt dwellers live unbothered for years, but the security is social rather than legal, and it should be chosen with open eyes. The cob cottage goes furthest: you are building where natural building is welcomed — or unnoticed — on the bet that the code will catch up. That bet has history on its side and enforcement against it in the wrong county. There is no virtue ranking here, only a risk ranking, and the right answer is the one matched to your temperament and your land. A cautious household on the cob path will lose sleep; a restless one on the certified path will chafe at every rule. Legality is a feature of the dwelling, priced into it like insulation.

8. The Household Question: Who Actually Lives There

The seventh question turns from the dwelling to its occupants: who is living there? The tiny house suits one to three people who value privacy — separate rooms, closing doors, a small household with boundaries intact. The yurt suits one to four people who thrive in shared space: the circle holds everyone, which is its glory for the sociable and its strain for anyone who needs a door between themselves and the day. The cob cottage answers differently again — whoever the homestead gathers. The cottage grows with the family; add a room, it is just more cob, and the dwelling expands at the speed of hands rather than the speed of loans. Household is the question most often answered aspirationally and lived actually, so answer for the people and the temperaments you have, not the commune or the solitude you imagine. A family that needs doors will suffer beautifully in a yurt; a couple that lives in each other’s pockets will rattle around a subdivided plan. And dwellings that grow by accretion have their own tradition — the converted barn homes show how an existing shell gathers a household the same unhurried way.

9. The Timeline and Handiness Questions: Months, Weekends and Years

The eighth and ninth questions belong together, because time and skill are the same budget counted two ways. On timeline, the tiny house runs in months: order from a builder, or buy used, and move in this year. The yurt runs in weeks to months: kit delivery, a platform build, one raising weekend. Cob runs a year or more — it is slow by nature, and rushing it ruins it. On handiness, be honest, really: the tiny house asks that you can maintain a house but does not ask you to build one from scratch. The yurt asks that you are comfortable with tools, tensioning cables and seasonal maintenance — the dwelling is a structure you keep tuned. Cob asks the most and gives the most: you will mix mud with your feet and sculpt walls with your hands, joyfully, or not at all. Read the two answers together. A handy person with no time belongs on the yurt path; a patient beginner with a workshop’s worth of weekends belongs on the cob path only after learning the craft — cob rewards the trained hand, and a workshop first is the original advice. Timelines flatter everyone in spring; answer for your calendar in February.

10. Reading Your Result: Mostly T, Mostly Y, Mostly C — and Ties

Now tally your letters. Mostly T — the tiny house on wheels: you value mobility, legality and conventional comfort in a small package. Buy certified, finance smart, and keep the wheels ready; your path is the most mapped and supported of the three — walk it confidently, and plan the layout with the tiny house floor plans calculator. Mostly Y — the yurt: you want beauty, volume and affordability, and you will settle somewhere worth settling. Invest in the platform and the insulation, respect the climate limits, and enjoy the circle — the most romantic dwelling per dollar ever built. Mostly C — the cob cottage: you are a builder at heart with time, land and patience. Learn the craft first, check the local natural-building scene, and sculpt your home from the ground itself — the most permanent statement of the three. Ties are the most interesting results of all. T+Y: consider the yurt as home base with a tiny house for mobility, or a tiny house parked beside a yurt living space. T+C: the tiny house now, the cob cottage as the forever plan — many homesteaders live tiny while building cob. Y+C: the natural-building homestead, with a yurt for immediate shelter during the cob build. And underneath every tally sits the tenth question, the identity one: what does the dwelling say about you — free and going places, rooted in beauty and simplicity, or part of the earth you live on? The tally counts your answers; the identity question tells you which answer you will still believe in ten winters from now.

Final Considerations

Three factors override quiz results, and they deserve the last word. Climate: serious winter narrows the field to the tiny house and cob, whatever your tally says. Land status: no land yet favours the mobile tiny house, while owned rural land opens the yurt and cob paths. Money timing: needing housing now favours the tiny house and yurt kits; a multi-year build favours cob. The quiz reveals your heart; the logistics reveal your plan — honour both. There is no best dwelling, only the best dwelling for your life, your land, your climate and your hands: the tiny house offers freedom, the yurt offers beauty, the cob cottage offers rootedness. Answer honestly, decide deliberately, and commit fully — the dwelling you choose with clear eyes will serve you for decades, a promise the wider movement keeps making good on, as the case for tiny houses as the future of housing argues. The quiz is the beginning of the decision, not the end — but it is a truer beginning than most.