Back To Nature Living In A Beautiful Tiny House Tent

I think right now so many of us are just feeling that intense pull to return to a more simple and natural way of living, of connecting more to our environment and maybe even more importantly finding a space where we can connect more with one another. Today we've traveled to New Mexico where we're meeting an incredibly inspiring young family who have built a very unusual home to raise Hey Zach! What's up man? Good to meet you man. Yeah you too. And wow what a place you've got here. Yeah man it's the tent. How did you actually come up with this idea of building a tent here on the property? We went through a lot of ideas. Tent, RV, camper, really any scenario that was just going to get us on the land into something that we could live in and finally came across what they call like wall tents or canvas tents. Kind of similar to your yurt but seemed like it was going to be the cheapest option so we kind of went forward with that idea. Because you're living in here with two young cubs as well. Yeah we got a one-year-old almost two and then a four-year-old so yeah. How did that all come about? Because making the decision to move into any small living situation with two kids, that's a big decision to make right? Totally. That was the reason we did it really. If it was just me and Katie I think we probably would have gone some alternate routes but the idea was to get the kids out, get them outside. That's why we kind of based the whole thing around the fire pit which is more family-based living. Basically we were in California. It's a little bit of a different lifestyle out there than living a little bit more of a country life but you start watching your kids just be trapped inside and living that suburban lifestyle and you ask yourself do you really want this life for your kids and for us we were no we didn't. So we headed out to New Mexico in hopes of finding a better life and a couple years later we ended up here kind of holding our values and what we wanted out of life. When we first started considering moving back to New Mexico was when I had gotten pregnant with my second son and all we had in California was a two-bedroom apartment that had a four by eight patio and we started thinking we're gonna have two boys. This is not a good idea. We need space and so it a little bit hard to rip the California boy out of California but this is a much better lifestyle for us with two boys and even though the house is small we have two acres of land basically to use and it's just a really refreshing thing to have with our children. Because already the tent looks beautiful but your garden here is next level. Yeah I just took about a hundred pounds of seed and threw them everywhere. Let God do his thing with the rain. So you said you built the whole design around the fire. Yeah we originally had brought the camper in and just set it here and then the fire pit we just grabbed some stones from the river and then hauled them in and made a fire pit and literally just built everything around that. Family life was the reason we moved into this whole setup. It's the reason we built the fire pit outside. The whole idea was being able to just sit down as a family and hang out and put the phone down or get off Instagram get off Facebook and just get back to the heart of conversation and hanging out with people and just not being superficial anymore. This is so much of that stuff with culture and I think this was our step of taking that jump and just putting a foot down and saying we're not going to live this kind of life anymore. Yeah. So tell me about the process of building this here on the land. Pretty basic we just did some decking concrete blocks and then I had my friend help me build the deck out and then we had done the frame. Once we got the frame up it was really just as simple as sliding the tent over and then just kind of outfitting the inside really really basic. So what's this tent actually made from? We have our canvas tent. Pretty heavy canvas really helps with keeping in the heat and keeping moisture out. It's also really breathable so it doesn't really let the humidity stay in it kind of just pushes it out. We looked into a lot of options for the front of this. The whole idea with the tent was to do it on a budget and not really spend a lot of money so there's a lot of expensive options you could do for this stuff. We just picked up some polycarbonate sheeting though from Home Depot for real cheap so this whole freight only cost us I think like 80 bucks. The tarp on top is just a 30 mil same thing polycarbonate top that just helps with some heat retention keeping the rain out. We have some hail storms that will come through that are pretty intense but so far haven't had any leaks in there or anything so it's been good. So how big is the tent actually? The total square footage roughly like 304 square feet and once we open the doors up like we have it here it opens onto this big deck that we can just hang out on it really adds on like another 150 square feet to the whole feel of the room so it's never ever felt like we're living in a 300 square foot home. Well I can't wait to see what you've done on the inside can we check it out? Yeah let's go on in. All right. Dude this is just so nice. Thanks man. It feels more like being in a cabin than a tent right? Yeah that was the idea was never to really have it be a tent the structure was always going to be a tent but we really wanted to build it out more like a modern home or cabin feel. And I just love the way that you've styled it in here. Thanks man. A lot of the wood you'll see in here is all from a Idaho barn that was disassembled and hauled back over to New Mexico. I picked it up from some lady locally and then basically made everything I could out of that so that really helped with cost and just really made it a little more of a unique space that matched our style. And I really love the light fittings in here as well and this is actually your job isn't it you actually make these as a business? Yeah that's what I do I started making lights and started selling them and people kept buying them so yeah I guess if you're gonna have lights you might as well have ones you made in your own home. Absolutely and they definitely help to make this space something really special. Thank you. And so what are you doing for electricity here? We have access to mains power right now we're looking at getting like a little solar setup maybe so it can be a little more off-grid with it but for right now that's worked out. Tell me a little bit about some of the other things in here because I can see lots of these cool rocks scattered around the place. Yeah I'm kind of a rock hoarder we'll do a lot of trips to Colorado and there's a lot of mining towns up there and quartz is just an abundant up there so we'll go up there on trips and find lots of cool little pieces of quartz and if you're lucky you'll get some gold. I love it I'm a bit of a rock hound myself so I'm totally with you on that one. About to go up. Oh yeah I'd love that man and you're definitely I can't say you're camping here this is definitely glamping or a more extreme version of it you've got the full television and everything. We got TV man we got kids if there's kids there needs to be a TV. I hear that but at least there's a garden to balance it out in this case. Yeah the TV doesn't come on very often they're out in the garden during the day if they're lucky they'll get some TV at night. And then tell me a little bit about the lounge space here. Same kind of stuff I made some of the furniture out of the old wood the walls are just all plywood so that was really cheap and then just adding our own style with adding some paint to them some lines shelving just simple design stuff that really makes it pop and not just be plywood anymore. And then the dining table over here. Yeah same thing same old wood it's real primitive style but adding some rocks and some lighting fixtures and paintings over it just make it really have a cool unique feel to it. It definitely does and I love the way that the chairs and the table sort of also faces out into the garden. Yeah once again everything which is based on the fire pit so yeah everything points to that. Definitely one of the things that I love about tent living is it just completely breaks down that separation between your home and the natural world. Oh it really does I mean if you can look like right now just the trees casting shadows on the tops if it's raining you know if it's windy you know there's really not much of a separation between you and the outside air which in the winter time can be a little rough but it's really something special though. What do you do for heating? We have a little propane heater just really seemed to be an easy option was a propane heater it was movable we can move anywhere in the tent that we're at the time and propane is really cheap in this area so it really cuts down once again on the cost of living. And how does that really work though because one of the things about obviously a canvas tent is you don't have any insulation so is that sufficient to heat the space? It could be better obviously we're not in a situation where we're ever going to freeze that's for sure realistically it worked fine as long as we had some sweatpants and a sweatshirt on we were perfectly fine. Fair enough too and then tell me what you've done over here with the kitchen. Yeah same thing you'll see all that wood real primitive countertops putting just a little bit of a heavier finish on these guys so we could do our chopping and food prep on there we didn't run any plumbing or anything really just a gravity-fed sink for this guy real basic you just fill it up and we need water in there to wash out our dishes other than that just very very basic. So what about cooking here? We cook basically all of our meals on the barbecue we're very into eating burgers and steak and stuff so we got a barbecue for that we also have this setup right here that lets us cook something if we need without firing up the barbecue but we don't use that too often. Another cool part about with the tent layout was being able to carve out a four by eight closet so we have a nice big walk-in closet so we can store all our clothes and extra stuff any of my extra winter clothes boots all that stuff so we have plenty of space to store that. And you've got the Berkey filter there too. Got the Berkey man that thing's a lifesaver we got plenty of river water so it's just a matter of getting the water in there and getting it filtered and we got free water for the rest of our life. Yeah because you are right on the river here aren't you? Yeah we're about 250 feet so can't be perfect. Yeah so what about the bathroom here? Oh the right over here my man. So here's our bathroom it's a four by eight little square that I carved out into our tent we got our composting toilet which has worked out great for the past year I'm using that haven't had any issues. The shower we haven't put one in yet it hasn't really been an issue for us with showers just kind of outsourcing for that stuff but maybe eventually I'll get one set up in there. So what do you do for showering right now? So right now we're just going over to Katie's mom's house we're on the same acreage it's really close so that's worked out nice for giving the kids baths and stuff like that getting them clean from digging around the fire pit but we do have future plans for getting some probably a solar shower set up in here so we don't have to leave at all if we don't want to. And then what about sleeping arrangements because there's the four of you in here so what do you how are you doing that? So right now we're up in the loft as we like to call it we got a king-size bed up there and our youngest is Grizzly and we bought him a little dog bed it's memory foam though so it's pretty nice. Grizzly's actually sleeping in a dog bed. I gotta check this out. Yeah let's go see it. Watch your head. This is a really cute space and that bed actually looks super comfortable. It's probably more comfortable than ours. Now when you're in a space like this with no insulation I mean I know sleeping lofts in a tiny house just gets so hot how do you manage the heat up there? That's been the great part about the tent if we were in an insulated house it would be way too hot to sleep up there for sure but once the sun goes down behind the trees and the tent's kind of let off all its heat it actually gets really cool up there and so it's really nice like even in the summertime we've always had sheets over us it's never been an issue of being too hot. So how long have you actually been living here now? We're coming up on one year just in a little bit total time of about a year and two months with being on the property but with the tent we're almost a year in. And can you tell me a little bit about how your life has changed since making that move? Oh it's been a big process not only just lifestyle but our mindset and our thinking and just how we look at finances and just quality of life really. It's going to come down to what are we going to be thankful for in 30 years? Are we going to be thankful for where we were working non-stop for 40 hours a week or we're going to really enjoy the times and memories we had of looking back at all the camping trips we did and just the fun stuff we were able to do with the money we saved because we changed our lifestyle. And talking about that financial aspect of it what did this actually cost to build? When we moved in we had spent just about five thousand dollars so I think we're a little bit under five thousand dollars for everything that was including buying a new couch and a toilet that was about a thousand dollars so. Wow this is a really stunning result for five grand you must have found some real bargains out there. Oh yeah we're we're bargain shoppers for sure I think just doing the work yourself is really what saves a lot of the money like I said all the wood and all that stuff if you were to buy it from a store would cost a ton of money but being able to source my own wood and make what I could from it just really really saved us on money. And with your business you're actually able to work from home as well aren't you? Yeah I so I run my own business and that's allowed me to just to stay home all day which really helps out takes that weight and stress off of my life of having to show up at nine o'clock and get home by six o'clock you know. And what about Katie is she in the same boat? Katie worked in a hair salon for a long time and she started doing that when she was here but she recently quit just so we could build our life a little bit more how we wanted it was starting to cut into her having to be at work a lot and we just didn't really like the route that was taking us as a family so. And how amazing with your family and your two young kids that you get to share this space together and then just actually you get to be there the whole time as they're growing up. Oh it's fun it's definitely puts a stress that you wouldn't get if you were gone for eight hours a day but at the same time you think how much you miss when you're gone for eight hours a day and that's a huge chunk of the day so yeah I really get to just experience every every single point of their life and I know I'm not going to regret that when I get older. Just in terms of your kids upbringing I mean this is a very very different situation from their life before in California. Yeah. And obviously they've only been doing this for a year and they're quite young still but have you noticed a difference in how their characters and personalities are developing here? Oh yeah I always go back to when we were in the apartment and Fox just always wanted to be on the iPad and just seeing him stuck inside this brick and mortar type scenario with surrounded by streets and cars and stuff and just really wanting him to just be able to experience nature in a deeper way. So now I think our focus is really just getting them outside watching them run around the garden just putting the iPad or phone down and turning the TV off even though we have one you know it's not on very much really just making the kids get outside and enjoy everything that's out there. Being in the city life living in the suburbs I mean you don't if you get a backyard it's not a very big one you can have a garden back there but our idea was just take the land and make it something we really enjoyed have our first garden and even if we killed everything who cares the kids got to plant some seeds and watch some stuff grow. Yeah I just love that they have this chance and this experience to be outside and be in nature and I would rather see them learning through nature and their interactions with being outdoors and experiencing life outside than being stuck inside playing video games all day or something like that so I definitely like the idea of them growing up being a little bit more wild and free. I think home you got to define what a home is a home is really just a place that you need to sleep that you can house your family and that you can eat in and we can do all three of those things just as well as we could in our two-bedroom apartment or the five-bedroom house we were renting. We don't have the burden of a knowing that we owe four hundred thousand dollars on this house or worrying about making that sixteen hundred dollar rent every month it's just getting back to what is a home and your home is your family and so that's what we kind of built the whole tent premise on. So what do you think the future holds for you now? Ah no clue man it's an open book we've talked about it but couldn't tell you. And that's exactly the way you want it to be right? Yeah. Like the future is a mystery but what an incredible place to be enjoying in the present. Yeah we're here now so just enjoy it. Absolutely thank you so much for sharing your amazing home with me. Thank you man. One of the things that I really love about living in a tent is just how close you get to be to nature. There's just so little separation between you and the outside world and yet you still have all of the safety and security that you need. Especially with the two young children here having all of this access to this wild outdoor playground I honestly just cannot think of a better place to be raised.