Road Blocks

When my dream was a giant house in the shape of a J, I understood my main roadblock was money.  Now that my dream is to have a tiny house, money is a much smaller road block.  Unfortunately there are many other road blocks such as finding a legal place to put a tiny house, how to get someone to finance the house and minimum house size codes.

For us we have a few requirements:

Our house has to have three separate sleeping areas:  There are four of us going to live in this tiny house.  Two adults and two kids (plus two cats, two frogs and a fish, but the animals won't affect house size).  Our son is a teenager and our daughter is a tween so they cannot share a room.

We want to stay in our current school district:  The kids have been through many changes in their lives and the one thing our daughter has requested is to please let her stay in this school district.  I understand how important this is to her and so for the next 7 years this is a non-negotiable.

We want to live legally:  Because we have kids enrolled in school, I don't want to live hidden in the woods, I want my home to be legal.  I'm not the type of person who would be comfortable with the fact that someone might report my home and we would have to move it or worse vacate.

The first requirement is pretty easy to accommodate.  We won't go super tiny, maybe just 400 square feet or so tiny.  I'm not sure if this classifies the house as tiny or just small, either way it's what will work for us.

The second and third requirements are what is keeping us from doing this today.  Land in our school district is expensive and the minimum requirement for a home is 1800 square feet.  This is a frustrating road block because I do not know how to overcome it right now.  I don't understand the codes and I don't have connections with someone who would let me buy or rent some land from them.  And even if I could get a small piece of land, would I be living illegally due to the small house size?  

The more research I do, the more questions I have.  Should we try to build a small house on a foundation or on wheels?  The houseboats look really cool maybe we could live on a lake?  How about container houses?  Should we just use an RV for now until we can figure things out?  So many questions right now.