Tiny House Living Helped Her Follow Her Dreams & Start a Business

How I got here, COVID was happening. I was living in an apartment complex and actually my brother was living with me at the time and he's a creative as well. He's a music producer and my mother was like, you need to get a bigger house. That's kind of the narrative. Everybody is told to bigger, better, more, more, and more. And so I was trying to figure out how to buy like a four bedroom house. I think the average median for homes in Austin at that time was like $650 or something like that. And I'm a single girl and I was like, I don't know how I'm going to afford this. Why am I trying to buy a bigger house when it's just me? And my brother was like, you've always been really creative and alternative. And I just feel like this isn't your lifestyle. Maybe you should, you know, look into something different. So I was originally looking into schoolies or like a converted van, but I worked in tech sales and I would report to an office every single day. And so I was thinking, well, maybe I'll do something smaller, a little bit more alternative, but something that is grounded and not so mobile. Hi, I'm Van and this is my tiny home. And we are in Village Farm in Austin, Texas. I have been living tiny for five years. Clayton Homes built my tiny home and I actually bought it through Village Farm. So they facilitated the sale. I believe the dimensions of the home are 12 by 48. For a lot rent, I pay $725. That includes landscaping, valley trash, valley recycling, and valley propane. I also out my front porch, get a beautiful view of the organic commercial grade farm where we have a lot of waterfowl. So you might be hearing some of our feathered friends in the video. So come step inside my tiny. Welcome to my tiny home. My tiny home is 399 square feet. And what I really love about it is it's open concept as well as it's big windows. What I love about having the big windows is all the natural lighting within the home and also helps the house feel a little bit bigger than it actually is. So my Clayton models called the Haven and this one has been named the Van Haven. We picked this model just because of the open layout. It just felt bigger. So behind me is my living room space. And I think the biggest feature is the couch. It helps section between the dining room and the living room, but also it's a pull out into a queen. So whenever you have guests, you can have somebody come and stay with you if you'd like. Also a really great feature about the living room that we have is the deep shelves up top the window seals. I turn them into shelves to collect all my books and to save some space as well. And one of the main reasons why I chose this particular models for the storage space and we have an amazing entertainment system that's already built in all the storage and cabinetry and stuff holds all my additional books and wires and files and anything else that I would need games and all that kind of stuff. And then I have some additional shelving for my games up there. So when I moved the one thing that I prioritized and could not get rid of were my books. And so this was the way that I was able to keep all of my books and I've collected quite a few games as well because I'm a big gamer too. Overall, this is the main area that I stay in within my home. I work from my couch. I eat from my couch. I watch movies, play video games, and also entertain my guests here. So this is the main part of the tiny home for me. And the last thing that I really love about the living room are my French doors that I have here on a really beautiful day here in Texas. I can open them out, look directly at the farm that we have here, and play and say hello to those feather friends that we were talking about earlier. So behind me now is what was a dining room space, but it's kind of a everything fits all space right now. So my puppy, who's not here right now, this is where the pup eats, drinks, and we house any of his medications and things like that. As an actress, acting and has moved to self-tapes. So you do everything from inside the home. So instead of what I used to have as a bar top and some stools and things like that, I removed that and I actually have a portable and movable gray screen that I pull up and down for auditions when I need them. So it might seem weird that I don't have a dining room table or anything to eat on, but I actually use a C table if you've ever heard of that. They roll and they go in and out from underneath the couch. We also have a bar top here. Honestly, this ends up being where all my mail gets stacked and things like that from day to day to occasion. I've lived in this tiny home community for five years. August of 2020 is when I moved. I've been living tiny ever since. I have a puppy named Mischief. We call him Chief, but he's at daycare right now because he lives up to his name. He's a wild stallion, needs to go be running and playing. I own a professional services company, an alternative real estate. So I help folks get in and out of things like tiny homes, dome houses, tree houses, anything that you can't find on the regular MLS. We do everything from the sales and marketing to the legal paperwork, contracting, insurance, advisement, and basically everything in between. We also have an investment arm on that side too. So a lot of my clients, they buy the properties and then immediately turn them in investment properties. So we have property management, cleaning, rate setting, marketing, all that good stuff. On the side of all of that, I am a professional dancer and I'm an actress. So if I'm not working with all of my professional services company, I'm on set or honing my craft. I had a friend who was working with me at the time who was like, hey, have you heard of this community called Village Farm? And I said, no. So when I started looking it up, I basically fell in love with it. And about a year later, I had already a deposit down and finally landed in August. Our tech sales company cut like 50% of their workforce. And I was one of the lucky few who got to stay, but our workload was already too much. Then we were doing the job of now two or three people who were already doing too much. And it was like a running joke that if you left after an eight hour day, that you were taking a half day. It was kind of that, like I would be getting in trouble if I had to go to the dentist. If we weren't working like 16 hour days to get everything done, then like we weren't doing our job. And it was just completely sucking my soul. And in 2023, my position got outsourced to South America because it's cheaper there. And I had never been let go in my life. And I was panicking. And my husband at the time was like, why don't you just take this time to think about what you really want to do, what direction you want to move in. I did not want to like rewrite resumes. I was literally crying as I was writing my resumes. I was like, I don't want to go back to tech sales. And the company that I have now had it kind of on the side. It was just a little side gig that I was doing to help some of my neighbors here in the community. And I decided just that I was going to go full force into that and take that full time and then go ahead and re-pursue my career of acting and dancing, which I had done before. I got told to grow up, get a real job, buy a big house, all that kind of stuff. And on this side, we have the kitchen. So my newest prized possession is the brand new fridge that I got. It is a full size fridge. I've been very blessed to have all full size appliances within the home, except the dishwasher. The dishwasher is half size, but since it's only me, it actually goes back pretty deep and I don't really need much more than what this dishwasher affords for me. So part of the custom bill that I had for my tiny home, I had the countertops upgraded from laminate to quartz, marbled quartz throughout. So you'll see that also in my bathroom and you've seen that on the bar top. I am not the biggest cook in the world. So some tiny homes prioritize a large kitchen. That wasn't really a big factor for me. So having just a half galley kitchen on one side of the tiny home is perfect for what I needed. I have a full range, as well as an oven with a nice giant vented hood. So it feels really nice to have a full functioning kitchen. For transitioning from an apartment complex to a tiny home, that wasn't like something I had to adjust or get used to, but actually it also afforded me the ability to restart a skill that I had that I didn't really quite utilize in my past life. And now I'm using again and it's something that I can, you know, kind of touch on and not say, Oh, well, I can't even learn to do that again or try to do that again. Cause I don't have the means to do it, but I can cook. So behind me, we have my washer and dryer, which is between the kitchen and the bedroom. It is a full size stackable washer and dryer that we have here, which is great because I do go through a lot of clothes. And across from the washer and dryers is my bathroom. So this is my bathroom. It has a really nice banjo countertop. We have the marbled courts here, as well as in the shower. I actually have a bigger bathroom than a lot of the models do, which was really important to me being an actress and a dancer, having to put on makeup and do a lot of changing and wardrobe and stuff like that. It was important that I had a lot of room for that. I also was able to utilize a lot of the wall space and get creative about how I was storing things. So I was able to put racks for towels. So you could see my plethora of toilet paper that is kind of stocked up between my cabinet space. And then we have my shower, which also utilizing some of the wall to store some of the items. And then we were able to customize a rain shower head. Do you know what's tiny but extra mighty? EcoFlow's Delta 3 Plus. It's an industry-leading portable power station featuring beefy 1800 watt output power and a 1024 watt hour capacity with five fast charging options. It can fully recharge in less than an hour, but enjoy extra peace of mind knowing that in just 30 minutes, you'll have enough power to last for hours. Control its smart energy management system via the convenient app. And before bad weather, it'll give you a warning so you can fully recharge the Delta 3 Plus. If grid power goes out, rest easy knowing that it can instantly provide backup power for specialty equipment. And it does it all ultra quietly. Need more power? Get up to five kilowatt hours with expansion batteries. Unlock next level power for every scenario with EcoFlow's new Delta 3 series. Use our code to enjoy an extra 5% off during the Father's Day sale. Valid until June 22nd. See the links in the description. And in the back of my house is my bedroom. It currently is fitting a queen size bed. And behind you is a dresser drawer. I have a closet there. It is packed to the brim. I'm going to have to probably redo it a little bit and figure out some storage space because my closet isn't really that big. I think that I have plenty of storage. I think the problem is, is you find yourself getting into the same thing you would in a traditional home where you start collecting things and thinking, Oh, I might need this, or I might wear this. And it's because I had the space that I was keeping it. And I'm finally getting at a point five years into living tiny that I'm like, okay, I think it's time to start reducing some of the stuff that I've collected over the five years and really prioritizing what should stay and what should go. But I have these really nice big windows, windows on the sides for the sun to come in as well. More of that natural lighting. Back here we have my back door that leads to my back porch. So come on out. So for all intents and purposes, this is like my garage. This holds all my storage and tools that I couldn't otherwise fit inside the home, having my company and supplying cleaners with their products, as well as being onsite for property management and doing some handyman stuff. I ended up collecting a lot of things for that. And this is where I store it all. I actually had this custom door made when this home was originally built. None of this even existed. We had what we called privacy cedar planks, but there was a wide open space. And so we had a contractor come in, build the doors out so that they have a lock in function and mechanism. So all the stuff back here is safe. So originally this model did not have a back porch, but I custom the back porch into it. A lot of the tiny homes close to me have back porches and I wanted a space that offered some privacy and security and storage space. So what I had to do is I actually had to take off some of the front porch. I used to have a much bigger front porch and then they tacked it on in the back so that I could have a little bit of a storage space back here. This has made my life so much easier. The fact that it's easily accessible, I don't have to pay money to go put it in a storage somewhere. And I'll have to drive there to go get stuff and come back. What's also something that's unique about these homes is you have crawl space underneath the house. So you can store stuff underneath there too. I would just recommend vacuum sealing, double binning them and stuff before you put them underneath the house because it's not waterproof under there. So if it rains, it gets touched, but it's been really great for me. It wasn't really that hard of a jump for me to go from apartment to here. I had the luxury of having to wait for this place for so long because of COVID and all the constraints and stuff like that. So I took about eight months to reduce a two bedroom apartment and I got rid of about 80% of my stuff before I got here. So when I moved here, I had everything that I needed and nothing that I didn't. It was really, really liberating. My tiny home was custom. Non-custom, it was going to be $95,000. Custom, it was like $113,000 I think was what I settled on. I was blessed enough to have money for a down payment and I think it was only like a little over 10% that I ended up paying to Village Farm. But funny enough, because my whole down payment wasn't due until the home was planted onto the property, I had eight months of basically selling and getting rid of all of my stuff. So I was able to come a lot with that deposit just from selling the stuff that I never needed. And so I just put a down payment. They offered financing. It was really the only option at that point in time. Basically, Village Farm was the bank and then I financed it through them. I mean, it was a pretty easy process. But outside of Village Farm, if like you're trying to resell a home, it's very hard. But that's where my company comes in and we've been able to partner with a few banks who specifically do this that you really wouldn't find otherwise. So we're just trying to get the word out that there are alternatives to having to go with whoever like your builder is or whatever. I think some of the main benefits that I have from living tiny, and I think it partially has to do with living in the community that these tiny homes are in, is the community itself. I have met some of my best friends here. My CPA, my financial advisor, my company now is focused around tiny and alternative living. And I don't think that I would have ever met any of these people otherwise. Like because they're my tiny neighbors, I probably would have never met them. We're so completely different from one another and it's been really eye-opening to see how different people from different backgrounds, different ways of being brought up and doing different things can mesh so well together. And that's been one of like the most beneficial things to me is to have a really solid core community. Having some people that I know that will like be with me for the rest of my life has been pretty significant and impactful and it's helped me grow a lot. I've grown a ton living tiny and being here and being with the community. And I feel like everybody told me not to buy a tiny home. They called me crazy. They were like, oh this is insane. Every time somebody comes in the house they're like, oh my god this place is so cool. Like I wish I could live like this or whatever. And so it definitely like boosts my ego a little bit just to be like, yeah I know like I live in a pretty cool spot and I do a pretty cool thing. So yeah. Thanks for stopping by Tiny House Expedition. I'm Alexis. And I'm Christian. And this is our DIY tiny house on our homestead in Oregon. Looking for more tiny inspiration? Watch these videos. But if you're looking for something specific, visit our channel home page to browse tiny homes by category. And don't forget to subscribe. Hope to see you soon.