Incredible Tiny House Even Has A Built-In Sauna!

Choosing to live in a tiny house is about so much more than just putting a roof over your head. It's about choosing a lifestyle and making a decision to create a life of your choosing, and that is exactly what this next young couple have done in their beautiful tiny home here in Austin. Hey Ken, how's it going mate? It's going well, how are you? Good, thank you, great to meet you. Hi Molly, lovely to meet you. Nice to meet you, thanks for coming by. It is absolutely my pleasure, and this is such a great looking house. We appreciate it, thank you. Thank you. Now, you're parked up here in an RV park, and one of the really interesting things to me about this is that this park is actually filled with tiny houses. It is. Yeah, that was a big draw for us out of the parks that we toured to choose this one. We felt a sense of community coming here with all the different tiny homes, and it's nice to have like-minded people close by. And it's a great location, you know, as far as proximity to work, and you know, restaurants, and just highway access. Yeah, so what was it that made you both want to build a tiny house on wheels? Well, initially, you know, wanted to just take that next step to pursue travel and whatnot, and you know, just wanted to save money and whatnot. Living a little bit more like minimalistic was kind of our big goal. We lived in about an 800 square foot apartment for a few years, and then we upsized to a about 1,300 square foot house, and then we found ourselves buying all these furniture to fill these rooms and things like that. And I don't know, there was a room that we never walked in in, and we're just kind of like, I think we could go smaller. And we were looking at saving money, and we're like, well, we might as well own something in the process of it. So this just made sense, and here we are today. The tiny house just made sense for where we are in our lives right now, and is gonna eventually allow us to travel full-time. That's like the end goal, the big motivator in life. And just like the housing industry, we never really bought into the idea of living to work versus working to live. It's not our dream, you know, to do the nine to five. You know, we were made to run. We were made to, you know, get out and explore. Life is short, and we don't know when it could happen. We don't want to wait till we're older, and we just feel that, you know, if we don't do it now, we're just going to keep talking about it. It's just going to be an idea of the past. We just don't want to get caught into the trap of having to get a house here, get a mortgage for 20 years, you know, advancing your careers. I mean, who's to say that those rules were written for us? Yeah. So we just want to capitalize on the journey, and just see as much of the planet as we can possibly. And tell me about the design of the tiny house. So the design is, you know, we have a metal accent, black accent for the side and along the backside, as well as the roofline. And we also have two by four stained cedar as well. And on the inside, we have a shiplap that's stained white, and all in between that is going to be foam insulation through the walls, roofline, and underneath the tiny home as well. And to also touch on one of the more important parts is, you know, we do have three skylights as well as 17 windows. Some are fixed, some are not fixed. But that was a big feature for us to, you know, have as much natural light as possible. And what size is the tiny house? So we're at 267 square feet. Well, I think the home looks really great, and I cannot wait to see what you've done on the inside. Can we check it out? Yeah, let's head in. Absolutely. After you. Thank you. Oh, this is beautiful. Thank you. Thank you I love all the green and the plants that you've got in here. Yes, absolutely. That was another requirement, is that we had a place to put our plant babies. We had a majority of these in our last place that we lived, and I could not part with them. They're part of your life. They're like your, you know, your pet. Absolutely. They're part of your family. So we made sure that we had space for them, and plant shelves made sense, and they really add a lot of touch to the space. It definitely has a very light and open feeling in this home as well, doesn't it? Yes, that's definitely what we're going for. And with the natural lighting, it does help, you know, the plant babies thrive. That's very true also. And it's great to see you've got a really nice mix of lots of windows and the skylights that also just makes the house feel so light. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, we wanted it to feel as like bright and airy and open as we could, and we might have gone a little overboard with our skylights, but we're pretty happy with how it turned out. Yeah, and where you're standing right now, Bryce, is about 11 and a half feet of height to the ceiling, so it feels very nice and open. It certainly does. And then coming in here, we're immediately greeted by this very comfortable looking couch. Yes, this custom sectional, which these cloths can come off for wash. Yes, they're pet fabric, so if the dogs step on it with muddy paws or we have any, like, wine spill, which is definitely possible, it just kind of beads up and it's easy to clean off and wipe down. It doesn't stain easily. Seriously, we couldn't be happier with how it turned out. We did gain a lot of storage with this couch. So each cushion lifts up and has a storage compartment underneath it, so we tend to store our sheets here, any kind of off-season clothing that we're not wearing at the moment, whatever little nicks and knacks that we can't find a place for in the home, it goes under the couch. And then also a really great thing are the ottomans. So each ottoman has its own storage. We have the parents of preferred game night, we have all of our games stored in there, and then we also have additional guest bedding should they decide to crash on the couch. And it looks like you've got a lot of additional storage space up here in this loft as well. Absolutely. So with what we can't store down here in the ottomans or the sectional, we place up there. So we have a lot of our winter clothes up there, work shoes, I have a keyboard, we put our work bags, we also have our camera stuff up there as well. Projector, that's pretty cool. Yes, projector, a must-need for us. We do hook up a projector screen through these hooks and this will pull down. Right, and it's like a 70-inch TV, so it takes up the entire width of the house, but oh man, it's awesome for game night. Yeah, so we make sure we get all the drinks, all the snacks here, so we don't have to keep going underneath and getting all that stuff. And speaking of that, if we do have friends over for a game night or whatever it may be, or dinner, we have a dinner tray that's behind the couch that we pull out. So that way two people can sit on the ottoman, two people on the couch, we can have dinner together, drinks, whatever it may be. But if it's just Ken and I, we use our ottomans as our table. Right, and then this kitchen, this is really lovely. State-of-the-art. We absolutely love cooking in here. We don't feel like we're missing out on anything. We have an oven, three burner cooktop, we usually only use two. And both these appliances, they run off of our propane and whatnot. So it's a great size kitchen, it's a full-size oven, and we do have a full-size fridge, farmhouse sink. We have all what we need. Absolutely, even a washer dryer over there as well. Stackable washer dryer unit, full size. Yeah, it fits. And then these stairs, this is a really cool design. Thank you, thank you very much. What's great about the stairs is that these first three steps do have storage in them, and then the last five steps, we do have coat closets and whatnot that we store our work clothes, casual clothes. Yeah, we found these decals and got them to fit the stairs and put them on, and we could not be happier with the look of them and the functionality of the stairs alone. We're very pleased with how they turned out. And through the door there is your bathroom, I'm guessing. Yes, yeah, there's a little surprise in there. Gotta go check it out. All right, let's check it out. No way. Is that a sauna? Yes, it is. That is the surprise. This was one of the requirements for us going tiny was to fit our sauna. That is ridiculously cool. Thank you. It's definitely as snug as a bug in here. Yeah, there's only about maybe five or six centimeters within the space between the sauna and the shower. I certainly never expected to see a sauna inside a tiny house bathroom. There's a first for everything. There's a first for everything, and this is what we wanted to take with us, and it's also just something to be different with. Yeah, we absolutely love it. We probably use it about a few times a week, and it heats up to a pretty toasty temperature, and you just gotta sweat it out sometimes. Yeah, everything fits. We do have a sink with storage underneath, a toilet that is not compost. We also have a full-size shower with a rainfall showerhead as well, and just all this storage here for, you know, just what we need for our bathroom. And then what do we have upstairs? Above us is where we sleep. That's our loft where we stay. It's where the magic happens. Where the magic happens. Let's check it out. This is so cozy, and I really love what you've done here with this climbing plant. Thank you. Yeah, we thought it added a nice little piece of greenery up here. We couldn't be happier with how it turned out. Absolutely. The windows up here are really good as well. You've got great cross ventilation, I'm guessing, between these two, and then the skylight. You hit it right on the money, cross ventilation. So she'll open up her window halfway, I'll open up mine halfway, and we just get a nice breeze in the morning. And she has a skylight on her side, which the sun comes in. Yep, 7 a.m. natural waking up time. There's no more sleeping in inside this house, but that's totally okay. It gets you started for your day. But yeah, when it's not 100 degrees outside, we get these windows cranked, and it's really a nice breeze moving through here. We have a lot of windows throughout the house, but we wanted to make sure that every room has enough natural light. You've got the TV up here as well? Yes, so when we're not down there viewing anything on the projector screen, and we want to come up here, just have a lazy night, kick up the pillows, have a binge night on whatever we're watching that month, we have a TV right here. Yep, and we even have like a little Nintendo system up here for like the old school Mario games. Absolutely. Yeah, it's a lot of fun up here. Nice. I am definitely a fan of Mario Kart. Yes, yes, we are too. Nice. So how long have you been living in the home now? So we moved in December 19th, 2018, so we're going on about 10 months, and we love it, and we can't even envision going back to living, you know, the normal lifestyle. Tiny's the way to go for us. Also for the dogs, they transition just fine as well. They were always underneath our feet in our last house that we lived at, so we knew that it was going to be the same here. It was just a little bit tighter quarters, and they absolutely love it too. It's funny, they'll sit right there on this top step, and they'll just like look out this window and perch, and they're like, this is our RV park, and just kind of overlook the entire land, if you will. They love it, they love it, they love it. And for a second, let's talk about cost. What was the budget for this home? So our first initial budget, we didn't want to go over $85,000. Was that kind of the threshold? Our first budget, we were pricing out houses at like $100,000. We're like, this is getting ridiculous. She was pricing into $100,000. Because I'm like, what else can we add into this place? She was trying to do anything and everything. Yeah. And then we found like a builder that fit our budget, allowed us to do what we wanted to do. We hit probably right about like $80,000 or so. We did take out like a tiny house loan, if you will. And we are renting our space here, but still with those two things combined, we're sitting lower costs than what we were for our rent in Austin. So it's a money saver either way. And we do own something now instead of, you know, putting our money towards rent, which is essentially nothing, and we couldn't be happier. Now that we own it, and now that we can call it ours, I mean, that's pretty self-explanatory. It's our home. You know, now that we're building our own dreams and not building somebody else's, this is the biggest step that we can take, you know, to our travels. Yeah, it's such like a refreshing feeling to like wake up every morning and be like, oh, this is ours. Like literally, I think every day we say how much we love living here and how happy we are to be here. And I don't think we've ever been like that in any of the places that we've lived together. It feels good. Feels great. I think you have just built such a beautiful home here for yourself. I can see how well you both fit into this home, and I am excited for the adventures that it's going to lead you on the future. Thank you so much for sharing it with me. Appreciate it. Thank you so much, Bryce. Thank you for coming by. Appreciate it. My pleasure. The design of this tiny house is just so great. There is everything that Molly and Ken need, including some ridiculously cool features like a bathroom sauna. But what I really like about this place is that it allows them to focus on the things in life that are really important to them, like travel and like spending quality time with one another and their dogs. And that is what really makes this place special.