Father Builds Ultra-Affordable Tiny Home for Himself and His Daughter

This tiny house encapsulates everything that made me fall in love with the tiny house movement to begin with. It's affordable, it's off the grid, it's made from recycled materials, it's DIY, and most of all, this is a tiny house that has a huge heart. I'm very excited to show you this one. G'day Shane, it's great to meet you mate. G'day, how you doing? Very well thank you. Dude, this is quite a place you've got here isn't it? It's a nice little nook in the forest here. It really is such a dream spot just to be tucked into the forest amongst all of these trees, eh? I really like it in here. I'm close to the beach and all the services, but I feel like I'm deep in the forest here. Yeah, absolutely. You're actually doing some custodianship work here in the forest as well, aren't you? Yeah, that's my role here, is a caretaker, so I cut out all the exotic trees and allow all the native bushlands to return. That's what I do here. There really is just something about the Australian bush which is so alive and it couldn't be a more perfect parking spot for your tiny house, could it? Oh, it's a perfect spot. I love being around the bush and the kangaroos. There's a mob of about 40 here. They're starting to get hard for them to find places in this area because there's so much development. Yeah. So it's really great to wake up and see the kangaroos quite often around. There's footprints on the ground here right now. Yeah. And I see your artwork here as well. These are fantastic. Yeah, thanks very much. That's my job. I do that almost full-time for the last eight years. Yeah. Sculpting. A lot of timber gets wasted, chopped up on the coast from the development, so a lot of those trees were habitat for animals, so I really like to try and capture that in my artwork, try and acknowledge what trees have been here and what animals used to be in the trees. What got you into carving? Well, my dad was a builder, so I grew up around the timber and with all the tools, and my dad loved everything square and neat and plumb, and I think I just broke the mould in that, and there's not one square line. It's all rough and rugged and nothing's square at all. Yeah. What's the relationship between your tiny house and your art? Selling the art did help fund building the home, so everyone that bought a piece of artwork has, you know, essentially helped fund me creating a home for myself and my daughter. Yeah. So very grateful for people that have supported my artistic journey. And I see you've got a great outdoor kitchen there as well. That is a very cool little design. Yeah. Well, that's our little outdoor bush kitchen, and when it's not raining, it's really nice to sit out there, look at the stars and cook on the fire. Yeah. Just some good bonding time with my daughter. And what's the barrel over there? The barrel is a table for when we have barbecues, but we also fill it up and have a little bush bath in there when it's really hot. Perfect. It's the ideal spot for a day. Yeah. So you do share this home together with your daughter, don't you? Yeah, it's almost 50-50. I've got her half the time and she quite likes a small space. And you built this home together with your father, didn't you? My dad was a builder. He's passed a couple of years ago. I'm sorry. And his main passion was solar passive design, so this is our last project. And I had to finish the last part by myself, which was a really good time while I was grieving to get stuck into a project, and I felt his presence around, so it was really special. Absolutely. Tell me about his, and by proxy, your passion for solar passive design and the way that you've designed this home. There's nothing new about it. The sun has a path and you build to that sun's path, because it will be up high in summer and down low in the winter, and you just got to look at your breezeways and all that. So it just minimises the usage of electricity to cool mostly. Tiny homes heat up a lot faster than they cool down. Yeah, they do. So I've put in a lot of measures to try and get the breezeway and reduce sun in summer and then increase that sun in winter. And it's a pretty damp environment here too, so I've found ways to reduce moisture in the home as much as I can. Fantastic. Normally in solar passive design, I'm used to seeing quite big awnings over the windows, but I don't really see that here. No, I've got an eave on this one. That's just to work with those top three windows up there. I will eventually have a verandah at the front. That particular ratio of the eave to window is for this area of South East Queensland. Each latitude around the globe, you've got to change your ratio a little bit to match your sun's path. And I put the air conditioner on the eastern side, the cooler side, so that the air conditioning doesn't have to work as hard. Right. Great idea. And another huge principle behind this house build was utilising recycled materials. Yeah, I think it's around about half the cost was recycled materials. We're sitting under $35,000 for the cost. $35,000 to build this? Yeah. Brilliant. But what I saved in money, I certainly made up for in time collecting materials. That is such a fantastic build price, but you're so right about it. It seems to be the general rule that what you trade off in cost, you end up spending in time either gathering materials or doing the DIY build yourself. Yeah. And you've done something quite interesting with the colourbond here, haven't you? Yeah, just part of recycling. So I really like black tiny homes. They look great, but they just get so hot for this area. Yeah. So anything that's really light or reflective to reflect heat. This is colourbond reversed backwards and all colourbond has gull grey or this neutral colour on the back, which is pretty light. So if you turn those sheets around, there might be patches of blue and green and white and whatever on the other side. So if you're planning to use recycled material, that's a pretty good way to go. That's such a great way of it, because obviously there's frequently off cuts and general wastage with colourbond. So being able to utilise all of that in a project like this and then still having it look so intentional and homogenous, what a great idea. Yeah, I think if it was the other way around, it probably looked like a chook shed. Which can be a cool look too. Yeah, if you do it properly, it can look really good. Great. And what about sourcing for all of the windows and doors? A lot of the windows and doors came from Reviva, the local resource recovery place, and some from Marketplace. So some of them are free from a local builder that was renovating. Great. And I tried to keep them all narrow and vertical just so I can keep the studs and wall frame really solid and strong. Right. And a lot of windows are up really high so that any heat that goes up can get out. And when I'm cooking food, all the steam can go out straight away. Yeah. I've got a lot of louver windows on this one so that when it is rainy season, I can keep them slightly ajar and rain doesn't come in and I can still have a little bit of airflow. Yeah. They're harder to clean, but they have a lot of practicality to them. You can help direct that airflow through the house as well. Yeah. And tell me about your journey into tiny house living. What was it that inspired you to build a tiny home? My dad had always talked about building a home for all of his children and we just never got around to that. But the way the rental market's going, it just made sense to build something even if it's small and humble, but it's ours that we can keep. And yeah, while he's alive to help guide us through it, we managed to build a little place to live in and to remember dad boy. Yeah. Beautiful. And now if you ever have to move, you can take your whole house with you. Yeah. We can just roll onto a new spot and look after another forest and start a new life. Yeah. Make new art. Nice. What size is the tiny house? Eight metres long, 4.2 high, 2.5 wide. Yeah, great dimensions to work with. I see you've got these big sandstone blocks here. What's that all about? When the cyclone came, I did get a little bit paranoid it might tip over. Right. So I used what I had lying around, which was some sandstone blocks for tie down. Yep. They're about 350 kilos each. Bit of extra peace of mind, eh? It just helped me sleep well at night. Yeah. And you're off the grid with this home too? Yeah, fully off the grid. I catch my own water and I've got a small solar unit. So everything is designed around efficiency with that. Great. I love the little bird footprints on your steps too. Yeah, they're symbolic of the emu footprints and they're also a protection rune as well. Great. I see you've got another rune set in here as well. Yeah, there's some secret messages in there. I can't tell you what they are. Fair enough too. We'll keep it a mystery. Yeah, a lot of it's just for protection. But the emu is symbolic of a good father figure, because the male emu actually looks after the eggs, hatches the eggs and raises the young. So I've got a lot of emu themes through the house as symbolic of my father and then the journey of my fatherhood looking after my daughter. I love that. Beautiful symbolism. Well, I'm very keen to check out the inside of your house. Can we take a look? Yeah, sure. Come on in. All right. This is brilliant. No surprise to see all the artwork in here. I've got plenty of artwork and none of it inside is actually mine. Oh really? I've done a lot of artwork exchange or trade with various artists. I've got a lot of Indigenous artwork in here and some work from New Caledonia and Papua New Guinea. Fantastic. From various jobs that I've done and traded. And so I've got pieces hanging up in other people's homes and I've got their work hanging up here. I love that. And I really like the style of this home. Obviously the art really lifts everything up. But beautiful timbers in here and just a really nice feeling tiny home. Yeah, I do love the timber but also like having it nice and bright and light because I just love all that light bouncing around. So it's a nice little mix between the two. Yeah. It's not so often that I see wood stoves in tiny homes in Queensland because it's quite hot and quite comfortable here year round. Does this just cook you out of the house? That's pretty big for a small space. It's an old Danish one so I kind of like the sentiment connection to my Danish side of family there. Yeah. I actually use that more in the summertime to dry the humidity out of the place. Right. Then wintertime I might just chuck a few little twigs in there. You can even cook dinner on the stove and that'll heat the place up. I shut all the windows when it's been raining for a few days and then put the wood heater on and then everything just dries up so fast. Yeah. It is one of the main challenges of designing for a rainforest, isn't it? It sure is. Water, as my dad has always taught me, is the biggest destroyer of timber or homes. Yeah. So everything I've designed is to help aerate and dry out as fast as you can. Nicely done. Great spot for the lounge. What a view looking out there. It's nice to have a seat right in front of the sliding door and just stare out into the rainforest. Yeah. And that part of the house has a bit more of a sense of space. I've also got the hammock in that area as well. And how does the hammock work? It just hooks up from one side to the other and I've got windows on each side so I can catch a breeze way right in the middle of summer because I haven't actually hooked up the air conditioning unit yet. And great kitchen design. I'm especially a big fan of the open shelf storage. The strengths of tiny homes is that they're quite tall and up. Everything is built up. The hanging built up and all the jars and storage is using that vertical kind of space. I like the design for the kitchen. Everything hangs up so I can just wash it and stack it all or hang it on this northern side where all the sunlight comes through. There's huge splashback on the sink so all that moisture gets caught and taken away because I do see a lot of homes rotting around the kitchen sink. Yeah. It doesn't take long for pines or timbers to rot away. No, it doesn't. So that's a big part of utilising the sunlight to keep the kitchen nice and dry and get that moisture out of here as fast as possible. Nicely done. And I like the way that the stainless steel has been used because it's quite practical. It's also such an elemental thing to use in the kitchen and set off against all of the beautiful woods. It really kind of makes it pop. I do like the stainless steel around food areas. It's quite easy to clean. It's all secondhand too. This material in here, this sink and this rack up here was all secondhand. That's high-grade stainless steel and only like $100 for that and $50 for that. So I'd rather a high-quality item that's a bit scratched up than a cheap shiny item. Absolutely. And what's it like to cook here? It's a pretty big space. I use the gas in the wintertime and then summertime I switch it over to an induction cooker. Right. I don't get that extra heat heating up the house. Good idea. And what gets used more, the inside kitchen or the outdoor kitchen? Oh, I definitely cook outside a lot more. My daughter has said I am good at cooking on the fire but not so good inside. Cooking on the fire is the best way anyway. You just can't beat that. I love getting her off the screen and out around the fire and under the stars and just connect to what's real. Yeah, for sure. And talk to me about storage in this home. Well, I've got the standard storage under the stairs. The stairs are 600 wide. So they're really quite deep. My daughter loves the big steps. We went to a tiny home show and measured up the things that she likes. So she likes the big steps. Yeah, nice deep storage in the shelves there. Storage of all the food in the jars up the walls. A lot of things hanging. Storage under the bed, storage under the sofa. There's not a lot of storage in my daughter's room. Kids don't need that much though, do they really? I don't know. She's got a lot of clothes. For someone who's got a tiny bedroom in a tiny home, she likes collecting really big toys. And so obviously up the stairs is your daughter's loft? Yeah, that's my daughter's room upstairs. She's got her own space and no boys allowed, she reckons. So I don't know how she thinks it gets clean every now and again. When I put the solar panels on top of the house, I put the solar panels on top of her room because her room's so close to the ceiling. Just to help reduce a little bit of extra sun touching the roof. Try to minimise a little bit of heat radiation. And I've kept her clothes on the western wall, which is the hottest and driest wall of the house. So that when it does get damp and humid, the clothes are on the drier side of the house. And it also adds an extra little bit of thermal insulation. That's a great point. I actually think that's quite an underappreciated aspect of putting solar panels on the roof, is that it does in a way act as a secondary roof and helps to shade the roof from the sun. Well, that's my theory in a small space is everything's got to have more than one use. Yeah. And how does your daughter find living in the tiny house? She says she quite likes that there's not too many dark rooms because she gets scared and lost in. So her other home is obviously quite a bit bigger. Yeah, her other home's bigger and it's shared with another Taiwanese family. So they've got kids everywhere. So there might be some dark rooms there that she's a bit scared of. So she gets a bit of both. Real buzzy and fun with lots of kids in there, a nice quiet place to chill out. It's great to have that balance, isn't it? Yeah. And then through the door is your bedroom. Can we check that out? Yeah, come on, have a look. Cool. Again, a really nice design in here. I actually love downstairs bedrooms. I think that it's a really nice feature to be able to build a downstairs bedroom into a tiny house. Yeah, the heat doesn't get here from the fire. I designed it so I could lay down and look at the little wood heater there. And I've got frosted windows from my bedroom because I do like a bit of privacy. I like the way that you've tackled the storage and especially this corner shelf here. Yeah, most of it I designed on a computer prior, but this little corner shelf actually was a bit of an afterthought. And it's been quite practical with a computer. So we can watch movies and just a bit of extra use of space without taking up much walkway. Yeah. So you've got the projector screen there too? Yeah, I got the projector screen. Such a great idea for small spaces. Oh, yeah. And once again, I got all my clothes on the western side there. So that's the really hot side of the house, just to help keep it nice and dry in there. Yeah. Now, one thing that I noticed is that you don't have a bathroom in here. No, this one's designed for... There's an amenities block on the property where I move to next. I can make something to suit. I think if you don't mind going outside to use an outdoor toilet and bathroom, there's actually something to be said for it. It is actually quite nice to separate it from your house in a way. Yeah. I can build a little bolt-on thing on the side of the house. Yep. Which I can slide in and out under the subframe. Fair enough too. Makes a lot of sense. So how long have you been living here now? I've been living on the property for four years. And that's when I started building a tiny home. And we moved into the actual tiny home about a year and a half ago. A little bit early, a bit before it was finished. Right. That's always a challenge. It is a bit of a challenge, yeah. Moving things around, painting, all that sort of stuff. Most of the design, the basic structure, I designed a computer and built to that. And then kept moving things around inside just to feel what's right. Yeah. And how are you finding tiny house living is working for you? I quite like it. I prefer to live more towards minimalism. Yeah. And every now and again, I find that I'm starting to collect too much. And then I just bring it back to what I really need. Yeah. Because we do live in a very consumeristic society where consuming is the norm. And just to reflect on what we really need and what we don't need. And then that time, I can use that time with my daughter. And the most important things in life. Instead of worrying about buying more knickknacks. It's a very big bonding project for me and my father. We had some fallout years where things got pretty rough. And working on a joint vision together really helped bond and get some good years in before he passed. And just to have my daughter in the journey as well. She did get on the hammer and nails and she got quite involved at times. Sometimes when it's just a deck, her and her friends like to use it as a stage. They did a few performances for us. So there's a lot of stages of the build where there's kids playing and laughter inside the walls of the design of the house. That makes the house become a home with those sort of things. You built this home for $35,000, which is pretty remarkable. But obviously, there's a tremendous amount of time and effort that goes into not only the construction and doing this as a DOA project, but also sourcing all of the materials. What are your top tips for people who are looking to build a tiny home on a budget? It certainly takes time to source materials. So I collected a lot of windows and doors and whatnot first. And then built my frames to all suit that. Some of it you have to make up as you go along. But there's some things that you just have to wait till the right item comes along. And you need a place to store it. We had two floods while I had stuff stored here. So I had to lift it all up the ground so it didn't get wet. Well, definitely the corrugated iron, particularly in this part of the world, turning that colour bond backwards. That's a good way to save. Yeah, that is really clever. Now that the home is complete, this is a beautiful space that you can share with your daughter. What does the future hold for you now? So I've been a caretaker on conservation land and farmlands for over 10 years. So it just frees me up to roll on into those positions. Because there's plenty of those positions around where people need the help. So I can roll in and roll out to those particular opportunities. So it's opened us up now for my daughter and myself to land in some nice places, affordable and a place that we can call our own. Yeah. Well, Shane, this is a truly beautiful tiny home that you have built for you and your daughter. I love the art in here. I love the memories that you have already built in this tiny home and what is still to come. Thank you so much for sharing it with me. Thanks very much. There is so much that I love about this tiny home. In so many ways, it encapsulates so much of what tiny homes mean to me. It's affordable. It's beautiful. It's customised. It's filled with art. But what I love most about this home is the memory that's been built into it. The relationship that Shane has with his father that has been immortalised in the walls of this tiny home and the future memories that are yet to be created here with his daughter. That really is what home is. And it's so beautifully encapsulated within the walls of this one.