Family's Epic Tiny Home Journey! Building Dream Off-Grid Homestead

Hi, I'm Jonathan. I'm Ashley. We're Tiny Shiny Home. We live out here in Cochise County, Arizona, building an off-grid desert homestead with our four kids. We've been in our Tiny Shiny Home for the last seven years and here on our property for the last five. We're currently building on 20 acres here in the desert. Yeah, we've been experimenting the last five years with earthbag buildings, some other natural building types. Our favorite being the Superdome home, which we're going to look at here in a minute. Yeah, but first let's go look at our Tiny Shiny Home. This is a 1972 Airstream Sovereign land yacht. It's 31 feet and it's been fully gutted and renovated to be off-grid. We lived and traveled in this Airstream for several years on the road and we built it for off-grid living, which means we had solar power and a composting toilet and gray water system. Since we park the Airstream permanently out here on our off-grid homestead, you can see it's got its own cover which shades it during the summer. Off of that roof we catch rainwater. We run it through a pump so it comes in pressurized so we can use the water like normal if we were in a campground. We have our own large off-grid power system that powers the Airstream with AC power and we've built an outdoor shower, we've built a toilet, put in a septic system. Let's go check it out. So this is our home. Our Tiny Shiny Home. Yeah, it's about 200 square feet of renovated bliss. Yes, like we said we had six people to fit in this small area and so we had to design a bunch of multi-use spaces like this dinette. It turns down into a bed which is where we slept for a long time. Since then we've changed a few things. One of our kids is no longer in here they're sleeping in the dome outside so really we only have two kids back at the bunk and one kid up here with our dogs. On this side of the Airstream is our full-size kitchen. This was really important to me during the renovation process because we like to cook a lot of our meals here and so having a lot of counter space was a must and a big sink. And also we designed it intentionally so that there's as much walkable space here as possible. It doesn't come out into the area. It does get a little smaller as you get further back but with six people moving back and forth we wanted to make sure this wasn't like a choke point during the design. So there's also tons of storage as you can see we have cabinets everywhere. And back here was the kids bunk area. We used to have four beds back here. We still have two on the bottom but the top two have been converted to storage because living out in the middle of nowhere we have to buy in bulk and have a place to put things. So now that we're here on the property they're very much looking forward to having their own rooms in the big house and we'll show you that in a little bit. In this renovation we also included a full bath. Now we used to have a composting toilet in here but because we live on the property we have a separate bathroom now. But we still have a full shower and a sink. Again the main goal with this bathroom was storage so this cabinet was for all of our clothes. All six of us had all of our clothes here in this little tiny space. This worked really great when we were traveling. We have such good memories of just going all over the country with the kids exploring. But now that we are here on the property this has begun to evolve and change and we've started to build other buildings on the homestead that we're excited to show you. I grew up in Indiana. I'm from Knoxville, Tennessee. I met Ashley at a show that my band was playing at. Jonathan came on stage and started singing and I said that's the guy I'm gonna marry. That's a true story. Yeah and we got married a year later. We were living in a suburban neighborhood just doing the normal suburban life thing and I don't know we were just becoming disillusioned with a few different things and sort of questioning these like big picture ideas and I had a friend who traveled full-time in an RV and they came over for dinner and it just sort of was like oh that's an option like you can do this and it sort of opened up this whole idea for us and we started researching it. I think it was that night that I was like why aren't we doing this? Because I already worked yeah we already homeschooled. I already worked from home. I ran a web design company and so like we weren't really necessarily other than family we weren't tethered to a specific location. We sold everything. We bought a huge ridiculously large RV with a fireplace and four slide outs. We thought it was so small. Yeah I do. I mean we went from like 2,500 square feet to 400. Yeah. Yeah it was a big deal. So we hit the road. We started traveling. We got to visit like all these really cool places but we didn't really love where we had to park the camper. It was a huge camper. It needed all the hookups. Yeah it kind of felt like we traded our subdivision in our neighborhood for a worse more expensive subdivision. Yes exactly yeah. So we'd heard about this thing called boondocking right which is where you camp without hookups off-grid or whatever so sounded cool. We took this huge RV out to Lake Mead and totally got stuck in the mud. Our first time it was real bad. Stuck in the mud. And some random people on Instagram that we just kind of knew through the internet they drove their new Ram over with a winch and they pulled us out and they invited us to go actually boondock for real with a bunch of other families and that was kind of the catalyst for us of oh this is how we want to live like it's beautiful views it was quiet it was remote it was there's just something like really magical about it. And we were like okay we don't have the rig set up for this like let's sell it get an old Airstream renovate it for off-grid camping and that's what we did. Six months of renovation put bunk beds in there made it exactly how we wanted it solar composting toilet. We lifted it we put truck tires on it so we could actually like get where we needed to go took out the black tank added a second gray tank you know all those little things so that we could go as long as possible off-grid and we loved it. I mean that was like what we were missing so we spent was it three years three years about a hundred thousand miles like all over the country up into Canada like we went all over the place. One of our big goals out here was to build with as many natural materials as possible to build as sustainably as possible and as cost-effectively as possible. One of the big things that we like to do is use recycled materials. When we moved here it was completely raw land so we had to build a lot of our own infrastructure we had to build a fence we had to figure out how to catch and store water and then pressurize it so it can be used in buildings we had to learn how to take care of our waste and how to infiltrate the water safely into the ground. And even power we had to build our own solar system out here. Yeah and so we're five years in now and we've built a pretty good infrastructure so far. So here is the very first building that we did on our off-grid homestead this is our hyper adobe earthbag solar shed office. Yeah and so earthbag is sort of a plastic netting that you put a certain mixture of soil into add a little water you can press it and tamp it you build it straight up. The first time we'd ever done anything like this we've built anything at all really but we really thought a lot about the design for this we designed it with passive solar so you can see those top windows is letting the sun through in the winter here right now but in the summer that roof overhangs and they're shaded and so it helps that thermal mass transfer not happen too much in the summer because as the sun hits those walls it will let that warmth come through over a 10 to 12 hour period. This building had to serve several different purposes the main purpose was to house our batteries for our power here as well as we needed an office and a guest room so we were able to combine all those things into this one building. Howdy partner have you ever experienced the thrill of a live bingo game? It's fun isn't it? Thanks to Bingo Showdown you can now enjoy live tournaments 24 7 from the comfort of your own home or doctor's office or wherever. It's a free to play casual fun and lively game. Are you ready for this rowdy rodeo? Saddle up and join 70,000 plus live players for the best live bingo games you've ever experienced. Let's see if you're good enough to beat 99% of the players and qualify for the diamond tier. Partner it's real competitive in here but the high stakes make it extra fun and the western atmosphere adds a whole lot of charm. Well I'm fixing to get my bingo on. Feeling lucky? Come on down. The bingo hall is always open. Click on the link in the description to download your new favorite bingo game for free. Available on Android, Apple, and Facebook. Let's go look at the inside of this Soul Shed office. Welcome to our warm hug. When we were designing this space we hadn't been in very many earthen structures until we started researching it when we moved here and one thing that we always came back to is it does feel like a warm hug and I think it's just because you know this is natural clay plaster. We have an earthen floor. You're surrounded by the earth when you're in this building. Yeah it has a certain feel to it for sure and we really got to experiment for the first time with using recycled bottles, glass bottle bricks like you can see going out the front and up near the top of the roof. We even have a Topo Chico bottle brick window. All of those bottles are Topo Chico that we drink. Yep and you handed this earthen floor and then you did all this plaster the inside and it's just it's beautiful. Yeah I love it. Functionally in this rectangular area we have the office right this is where we work on all our video stuff. It's a nice quiet space where Ashley and I can really focus and like get things done. Yeah much different than the Airstream. In this corner we have our power system so there's about 30 kilowatts of lithium iron phosphate batteries. We built that pack ourselves. There's 5,000 watt inverter solar charge controllers and that's all connected to the ground mount array and then we also have additional panels on top of the Airstream cover roof totals about 10,000 watts. This system runs the solar shed the Airstream and the bathroom. It's been a great starter system but we're going to be building something even bigger for the house. One of our favorite design features of this building is how the circular part of the building intersects with the rectangular part of the building. You get this nice little walkway which takes you right into the guest bedroom. So this is when we have friends and family over they've got a nice place to stay. It's got a fan, it's got a tv, it's very comfortable but it's also an earthbag building which is cool. Now a lot of people ask where's your bathroom? There's no running water in this right? We built a separate building for that. Let's go check it out. All right so this is our casa de caca or our bathroom. Yep that is what you think it means. This was originally a composting toilet outhouse building also built with hyper adobe earth bags and as many recycled materials as we could find. Especially recycled materials like our roof is made out of the deck that used to be in front of our Airstream. Unfortunately the composting part of this did not work. We followed all the instructions and the permits and everything and it just it failed a bunch of different ways but now we've changed it and it's much better. So let's go check it out. This is our casa de caca or our bathroom and one thing that we love so much about this is that it cost hardly anything because it was so many recycled materials. The bottles are from a winery, these glass pieces are from a recycled shop in town, I've made this stained glass window. You and we were able to build this all in about four months. On this side we have a flushing toilet which we're very excited about as well as a hand washing sink and on this side we have a washer and dryer as well as folding tables and storage. So a lot of people are confused about the bottles. We actually cut wine bottles in half so there's two ends together and they're taped and installed into the walls with cob. So this is a technique that a lot of earthships use in their natural building but it's something that we want to incorporate in every single build here on our homestead. This was a really fun build but I cannot wait to show you our little super adobe dome home so let's go check that out. To the dome. This was a very fun and unexpected project I think. Last minute. Last minute. We had a viewer from Australia that followed us that had worked on an earthbag home there that was similar to our big house design. He wanted to come over we ended up working together and running a workshop. We built this whole building in one week here on the property with an awesome group of people. Yeah it was a fun week of workshop but then our daughter Adelaide has claimed this as her bedroom. Now this is only a nine foot dome so there's not a lot of room. There is a bed and a fireplace so it's actually pretty cute. I'm gonna go in and show you the inside. As you can see we've got some beautiful earthen plaster. Ashley did all of this by hand. Down here in the corner we've got this adorable little wood stove. Because of that thermal mass transfer this building actually does really well in the winter because it's constantly releasing the heat in that it's gotten during the day but when it gets really really cold this will warm up this whole space very very well. We also had to build a bed in here and it's all custom built because it's a circle and it's weird shapes and we built it on top of a dresser. It's a very small space. It's very cozy but I know Adelaide really enjoys having a little bit of quiet time each day. Like with all our other buildings we have plenty of bottle brick work as you can see and Ashley even did this amazing stained glass work here on the front door. This is a reclaimed door as well. While Adelaide does love her own space here all our kids want something like this in a much bigger space and so that's why we're So we, you know, we're traveling all over the country. We're trying to find the perfect spot and we ended up in Cochise County, Arizona for a couple of reasons. Number one it's the climate is pretty temperate. You actually get four seasons. It's what some people call the high desert. It's actually technically a subtropical desert so it's one of the most biodiverse areas in the country. Really unique space. We had visited here a few times and really like the area. The people seemed super cool. There were already a few YouTube channels out here. People doing natural and alternative building and, you know, living off grid and being really aware of our power usage, our water usage, our waste. We were looking to move somewhere where we could have a direct impact on that on sort of a larger scale. Like how could we live that way and build in a way that's more sustainable, right? Here in this county, in Cochise County, they have this thing called the Owner Builder Opt-Out and it was an opportunity for us to opt out of inspections. You still have to have an initial setback inspection and then a final but they aren't constantly coming in and making sure that you're doing everything to code and so it's given people in this area a lot of freedom to really experiment with these alternative building methods. There's earthbag, there's geodesic domes, there's straw bale, there's rammed earth and people are just making things up. Like it's really, really cool what's happening out here. I do think it's important to say though that we do have to build to code. True. You can't just come out here and build, you know, a pallet house and call it good. It has to be to code and I think that's where a lot of people get hung up. They think that they can come out here and just build whatever they want and that's not the case but there is pretty lenient on what you can do out here. And the climate is super harsh, the winds are crazy, you know, we really have to over build or you build a pallet house it's going to end up in your neighbor's yard it's going to hurt somebody so you still have to like learn how to build the right way and also is an opportunity for us to continue to live in the airstream while we build the house. And finally for us being able to go at our own pace, build with natural materials is allowing us to do this as debt-free as possible. Like we're not having to come in and basically pay for an entire house up front we're getting to build it as we go and to build it in a much more sustainable way and we get to do with our kids too, right? Like we get to have this journey with them of learning how to do all this stuff and spending time together which was a huge part of why we started traveling with them in the first place was just to be able to be with them as much as possible. You know before we make any big changes like this we've always sat down with them as a family and be like we're thinking about doing this crazy thing like please tell us honestly what you think like we're not going to go do it if you guys aren't on board. And so even when we started traveling we sat down with them in the house before we were like what do you think about doing this and of course they were young three to nine but they were all on board and so we went with it. Yeah I mean I think it is important to include them in that process because it affects them in a lot of different ways and so are there days we don't want to go out and put dirt in bags? Absolutely. But in general like I think you know we all sort of chose this together as a family and so so that's what we're doing. Yeah and we always like check in too like we make sure everybody's still on board. And this is the hyper adobe roundhouse. This is what all of our projects have been building towards. This is the biggest project where you have taken on so far and we are very excited about this roundhouse. It's going to be about 2,500 square feet of walkable space but because of the unique circular design the footprint is actually much larger. It's going to have rooms for all the kids. It'll have real bathrooms. A gigantic kitchen. A living room. An outdoor space. Yeah it's going to be it's going to be home is what it's going to be. Yeah it's kind of like you said what we've been working towards this whole time. All these things that we've built and we've experimented with all the different things we've learned we've put into this design. But also this is a house that is going to be for our future you know kids are going to take this over. It's not going to be our house permanently. We're building it for our kids. Yeah it's going to be about 600 tons of dirt once it's finished. It's not going anywhere for a really long time. It's going to outlast us for sure. Hopefully. Here in our homestead we have decided to build most of our buildings with hyper adobe. Yeah we started with the solar shed. We really enjoyed that building process and as much as we love the super adobe dome we found that process to be a little more difficult. It requires barbed wire between the layers so it's a little more difficult during the build process. Since our design needs a roof to catch water and provide shade building straight up is perfect for these type of walls. This bag is uv treated so it doesn't break down in the sun over time and it's just a nice simple safe way for our family and our kids to build this together. Like we can all do every step of this process. Since being here on our property one thing that we have been so excited to do as a family is share what we've learned as far as working with hyper adobe. Yeah lots of videos. Tons of videos. We make tons of videos but we also host classes here and workshops to where we can teach others how to build and then they can go on and do their own projects. Yeah and we've even expanded that to do some like online coaching and stuff for people who are starting their off-grid journey and just have like all the questions right. Sometimes it just helps to like talk to somebody but yeah we really enjoy being part of an in-person community. I think we enjoy being remote but also we've learned that you really have to dig into the community out here if you're going to make it because you can't do everything by yourself. Before we started traveling like I mentioned I ran a small web design company and so we took that on the road and we did that while we were traveling. As we moved out here I was still doing some of that but also the industry was changing. A single person web shop just wasn't very sustainable and we were starting to make videos about our journey here on the homestead and so we decided it's 2021 I think to really go all in and and try to make YouTube like our job because let's face it when you're in the middle of nowhere the job market's not great and you end up spending most of your time driving back and forth or you end up living in a larger town and coming out to the homestead on the weekend to work on it. We really wanted to spend as much time as we could out here so the goal was if we could make videos about what we were building and spend time with our kids and that was how we made a living that's like the dream right. We treated it like a full-time job and it eventually became our full-time job. It was not easy it was a very long very stressful process and it continues to be stressful. YouTube is very volatile you know some months are great some months are not and so as a result because we're a larger family we've had to get creative so we do make a lot of videos but we also have started to run workshops, tours of the property, we sell some digital products, wiring diagrams for some of our solar setups. We just try to teach other people what we have learned here to hopefully make it easier for them on down the road. There's a lot of people that move out here thinking you know we're just going to throw up a house real fast and it'll be done in two years. We've been here almost five years and still don't have our house. I think people just don't realize how much infrastructure there needs to be when you move out to a place like this. Not only is it crazy expensive it's also just so much time learning all these new skills that you didn't know previously. I mean you're basically creating your own grid you're off grid but if you want to live remotely comfortably you've got to have a septic, you got to have some kind of power, you got to have some kind of water situation and all of those things are very expensive and time consuming to set up. Easily like a six-figure first year. Yeah that's what a lot of people don't understand is even out here just to drill a well it's like seventy thousand dollars. That's why we don't have a well. That's why we don't have a well. We're always thinking about our kids and our grandkids and like the reason we're doing this is for them right and to have this experience with them as we do and to set them up for success in whatever they want to do. If they want to go do the normal thing that's totally fine but we just want them to know that there's an option to be weird and crazy and and also make it work. Thank you for watching our video and for stopping by tiny house expedition I'm Alexis and I'm Christian. Don't forget to like comment and subscribe and for more tiny home tours and stories click the videos below and join us on Instagram for bonus content including face-to-face conversations with us. We hope to see you there. All right thanks guys. Have a good one.