Man Builds Tiny Home ADU for $60K & Shares Free Plans + FULL TOUR

My name is Derek and this ADU is my full-time house. It's 524 square feet and it's home sweet home. We built this ADU for just over $60,000 U.S. in 90 days. I'm absolutely obsessed with housing and I truly believe that accessory dwelling units are the most attainable, most affordable housing option available at least in the United States right now in areas that have land to still infill. An ADU or an accessory dwelling unit is a legally permitted secondary dwelling on a lot that was primarily designated for one house. What makes this strategy so beneficial is we can simply place small efficient housing units in areas that are already ready because the infrastructure is already in. The sidewalks and the streetlights and the public services and the public safety they're already in. Many states that have great ADU legislation are now allowing these places to be sold off. So for example if somebody could buy a house that has a big backyard before zoning law would never allow them to be able to build a second house and sell that off. But now we're able to use condo law or fee simple lot partitioning or a strategy also known as tenants in common where we can make fractional ownerships of land and we're able to sell these units off making a more affordable smaller home that wasn't on the market before. My overall mission with building housing and teaching other people how to build housing is really just to add more needed infill housing units all across the country and the world where housing is getting harder and harder to obtain for average working class people. This mission is so near and dear to my heart. Growing up we weren't able to afford a home of our own because of ever increasing real estate prices. I just naturally was drawn to building at a young age. So this is my 28th year specializing in one form or another in the ADU strategy. I've participated in over 300 ADU builds. I've done thousands of consultations. ADUs and affordable housing really are my life's work. Part of our strategy is practicing what we preach and in order to refine our design and improve it really does help to live in these units full-time as well. So this ADU right now that we're in is my primary residence. It's 22 feet wide by 24 feet deep and then there's a 200 square foot sleeping slash storage loft upstairs. This is a unit we've been perfecting over the years. The whole idea of this plan set is to make it as affordable as possible for average people to build. We're able to build these units really quickly and we're able to keep our costs down out of efficiency and by coming up with a simple repeatable design this is the front porch of the barn cabin. We have six feet of covered front porch area which is important when we're in climates that have driving rain. We want to keep the front entry door dry. Up here is our attic pull-down access where we have ski storage as well as the seasonal sauna and it's nice to have an area outside when you live in a small space you want to incorporate as much outdoor area as you can. So we've got a pollinator garden out here and we've got nice morning sun that kind of hits your face when you sit out here with a cup of tea. As we come inside this ADU we've got a great room. It's 22 feet wide by 12 feet deep and we have 16 foot tall vaulted ceilings. Simple, open, airy, natural light filled room. Into the bedroom here this is being used currently as my office. I sleep upstairs but this could also be a bedroom. We put in double pocket doors here and this gives privacy for this downstairs room as well as the ability to have this place live like a studio. So when you walk in the front door you can see all the way through to the back wall and out giving us more visual volume which makes these small spaces feel bigger. Inside the office we also have the closet for the bedroom or the office whichever way it is being used. And there's a double shelf and pole so we've got about eight linear feet of storage space for coat hangers. And then on the other side of this closet behind the other bypass door is our full-size washer and dryer. One thing we do to incorporate these full-size units is we design and build a 38 inch deep closet. Got an egress window here. We use light colors. We want natural light to come into this house and just reflect off of the hardwood floor and off of the light colored walls and ceiling. This is our single one wall galley kitchen. We design our kitchens this way to save money. There's no breaks or turns in the countertop or cabinets. We're able to tool these granite slabs ourself because there's no seams in them. And then we use full-size appliances. 24 inch wide dishwasher. A full-size 30 inch slide-in range. And then we use a 10.1 cubic foot fridge. Small five by eight bathroom. Still has a full-size tub shower combo. What we've learned over the years designing and living in small spaces is we don't want to give any valuable square footage to the bathroom if we don't have to. And then upstairs we've got 200 square feet of loft space. We design this loft space for affordability and simplicity by simply putting plywood over the roof joists of this downstairs bedroom. Essentially we get free space. This is our custom-made Douglas fir loft ladder that we designed and build for our units that gives us good access up into the sleeping area. Some people also use this for storage. We have seven feet of standing room to the bottom of this beam and an egress window out of the back. We put all of our lighting on dimmers. Recessed, affordable lighting. We're using open-sourced design. You can go download these plans for free on our website as well as our shopping list that has all of our fixtures. You can just copy our design because it works. A couple things that are worth mentioning to keep these sustainable and maintenance-free is using good material up front. So we use real nail down hardwood floors. We use granite countertops. We use slate stone tile in the bathroom. If we pay up front for good quality products, over time we're going to have a lower cost of ownership. And so there's less maintenance. There's less off-gassing. We try to use low or no VOC products. Just because we're trying to specialize in affordable housing doesn't mean that we can't have these nice custom amenities. When it comes to our HVAC system, which stands for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, we use these single head mini splits. And it's a 12,000 BTU unit. It's a heat pump and an AC unit. And it keeps our energy bills incredibly low while keeping a perfect climate in this small space. But the biggest factor in reducing your costs over time is just the small footprint. Simply by building smaller, they're way more efficient housing units. Most of the time the ADU is going to be beside or behind or in front of the primary house. So whenever we can, we want to capture privacy on any shared wall. So we have our primary residence here and our accessory dwelling unit here. This happens to be the shady side. And so we didn't put any windows on this wall. That way each unit has a little bit of privacy and we're not losing any solar access by this design. We want to make sure that we build our units to last a long time with as little maintenance as possible. So we don't do any decks. We just do concrete patios. We want to have a fire-wise landscape. So we use this rock and then we do pollinator gardens. We've got an underground sprinkler system. So this is basically maintenance free. Once you set it up, even though it costs a little bit of money to do all this initially, we're not going to have any maintenance costs and we have a nice beautiful hardscape. We like to have parking when possible and then also some storage space for some of our outdoor gear. Anytime we have space for it, we want to incorporate some kind of fenced yard for pets. We put all of our mechanical components and our utilities in an inconspicuous spot. So here we have our electrical panel. We also have our HVAC exterior unit. We have an exterior mounted on-demand natural gas hot water heater. We have our incoming gas meter and our sprinkler box. The biggest thing I've learned from living in small houses over the years is that I bring in less clutter and the less clutter I have, the more free my mind is. I'm also really thankful to have the skill set and have the health to be able to create housing. We do have a YouTube channel and we currently open source everything that we do to make housing more attainable and more affordable. We give away all of our trade secrets. We actually have a step-by-step video series. It's called How to Build an ADU with Cost Breakdown where we give away the whole process of building this ADU. We also give away the plan set, the blueprints for this ADU, as well as our shopping list that covers everything that we purchase. We call it collaboration not competition and my thought is the more we can give away and the more housing units we can get built, the more we're going to benefit the community. When it comes to building a house, many people are intimidated but I'm here to tell you that average people every day are building their own housing. You can use our plans to build your very own ADU and there's a ton of free resources all over the web where other awesome instructors and content creators are teaching people how to build housing. If there was one piece of advice I would give people is don't be intimidated. Don't think you can't create needed infill housing yourself. Subscribe to Exploring Alternatives and please share this video if you liked it. You can also follow that ADU guy on YouTube, Instagram, and on his website. Thanks for watching!