He bought a shed made a luxury Tiny Home TOUR COSTS

Hi guys. Welcome to my channel, where I take you on tours of unique homes and spaces. Today we're traveling back to index Washington to take a tour of Nick's backyard shed conversion. Nick talks about his decision to renovate a shed and what steps he had to take to create a space suitable for full-time living. My all-time favorite thing about shed conversion tiny homes is that it makes it super easy to have an affordable housing option for just $30,000. Nick has actually created a luxury tiny home with a marble shower, two lofted bedrooms and a full kitchen. And by the way, we featured Nick a few other times on this channel with his tree house, A-frame and his amazing shippy container home. So make sure you check out those videos, which are linked in the description. But before we dive into the tour, if you like videos like this one where we take you through unique and alternative spaces, make sure that you subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you know every single time we publish a new video. Hi, I'm Nick and this is clay baby, my shed conversion, tiny home. So behind me is our shed conversion that we call clay baby. Clay baby is a name for a mudstone concretion that they find in the South fork of the Skykomish river. So these are the clay babies. You can kind of appreciate like a circular form. I think what happens is the water kind of swirls around and then this mud or mudstone creates these kinds of odd shapes and stuff. Clay babies. In 2010, my wife and I bought the first couple of parcels on this property here in index Washington. It took about a year or two to fix up the first two buildings. The plan was to just use it to ski out of and to play in the river. I would invite friends or whatever. And occasionally they'd come, but many weekends would go unused. So I thought I would test the waters and try short term rental. I decided to do the shed conversion. So it wasn't as intimidating as a full build with foundation and big architectural plans because the shed was already made and I could get one back in 2019 for about eight grand. So I decided to pull the trigger on that and clay baby was delivered. The delivery, it looked basically exactly like it does now. It had the front porch, the siding was already on, the windows were in, the roof was on, the lofts were in place. So we had to do electrical plumbing, insulation, and then wall paneling. Everything included with the shed, the delivery, all the materials inside, all the finishes, fixtures, tile. It was a $30,000 project. It took me about a year and a half to connect all the systems and to finish out the insides. There's a couple of different companies that offer these sheds. They actually delivered it with a gentleman who helped me place cinder blocks in a certain configuration so that he could set it down on those cinder blocks. Then he spent some time shimming and leveling. I just used a pretty simple sheet rock that you'd use to wall the inside of a shower. And then I painted it, leaving an access so you can get underneath and whatnot. Luckily we already had some utilities on the property. So it was just a matter of connecting the systems to this new shed and it was delivered just studs. I think I ended up putting R22 insulation and then simply putting the wallboards on. So the stairs that lead up to Clay Baby are from a big leaf maple that I had milled on the property. So I really like to use stuff that's on the property and incorporate it into all the builds here. This was a hand-me-down swing that our neighbors gave me and I find it to be quite a nice spot to chill for a minute. So Clay Baby really was my first true build, so to speak. What's so nice about sheds is they can be delivered right to any place, anytime. That takes a lot of the anxiety out of building in the winter or, you know, where it's raining a lot, like in Seattle. So for that fact alone, it's just a much easier and more controlled way to get yourself a warm, dry, you know, place to sleep. The pros of a shed conversion is that you just order the size you want and they deliver it right to the pad that you create. Way more affordable than getting concrete guy to come out for foundation, getting framers to come in, getting siders, roof. I don't want to think about that. A lot of thought went into positioning the shed so that it still had unique and beautiful characteristics that would attract, you know, not only family and friends of mine, but for short term rental guests. So in the end I decided to position it facing the river here, almost a full 90 degree view of the river and the cliffs of index. One of my favorite parts of the property here is the stage. Over the years we've done a couple of music festivals, but now we mainly use it for the kids to do skits. We have some, you know, fairy lights hanging over and a new bench for folks to observe the antics. So clay baby really is just 12 by 20 but four feet of it is this front porch. So it's really 12 by 16 on the inside. So welcome to the inside of clay baby. It being my first build, I really wanted all the details to be super nice and I was really going for kind of a W hotel look, but in the forest on the river and in the mountains really it's a super tiny space, only 12 by 16 feet, but I really liked the layout. I had this loft already in place when it was delivered. So I had something to kind of think about and frame what I needed. So I needed a bathroom and I needed a cozy movie watching layer. So we have a perfectly fitting couch for two, a big 55 inch TV. This project, I learned how much I really love lighting and how available cool chandeliers are and different fixtures. But I just really love doing some sconces like this that make the space feel more hip. The chandelier in the center is really statement piece, I think. And then a couple more over the sink for flooring. I chose at the time I was doing some work on our Seattle house that was built in the forties. So I ended up pulling nails from all this old Oak flooring. So this flooring is old 1945 Oak from Seattle. And then I did this gray whitewash over it to kind of give it that gray vibe that get a clay baby seems to have. We did a really nice quartz synthetic quartz top, but I had the guy, you know, I begged him to come all the way out here. So he would cut the sink hole and do this, this scene here. Also had to cut a hole for this two burner induction cooktop. Another thing I like to incorporate in the cabins here at index cabins are rocks and minerals. So I went through a phase where I was buying minerals and then creating these wall hangings. So this is one with one of these geodes from India and these pyrite discs from Illinois. It's kind of dorky, but I love it. So the windows were all here. It came just like this. They've held up pretty nicely. This project we completed in 2019 so they're doing okay. Not like the highest quality windows, but they're, they're doing well. I did some more of this big leaf maple here for the shelves. Sometimes when trees blow over on the property, I have a friend that will help me mill the boards. And I like to make floating shelves. And the staircase here is actually live edge maple as well. I knew kind of going in just from my Instagram scrolling and from the HG TV shows that the shiplap was popular look. And so we went with that and I really liked the design. I like the horizontal lines that kind of stretch out the room and the way it looks. We did a little mini fridge here, which it's okay. It doesn't really hold ice very well, but for a short term stay, it does okay. And we have a simple microwave and that's the kitchen. And then there's this tiny little loft up here. It's just so small up there. It would really take a creative and kind of daring person to sleep up there, but we ended up making it a sleep spot. I had these metal railings made custom to, to, to protect anybody from kind of scooching out. And then we put this ladder that you use for like the back of a car or something to get up on the roof. There's a rock nub that you can see down here. So if you were to get up, try to get up on here, you'd have to climb up on the, on that and then on the counter and so forth. In such a tiny space, it was really difficult to find a pre-made ladder. So in the end I ended up using more of this big leaf maple to make a ladder and it turns out that it works pretty well. You can get yourself up and then there's a hand grab I put up here just to help you either go down or up if you need. I love the way this light has so many options. It has all these different colors that you can switch it to just laying here. It's just beautiful for that light to cascade down on the tongue and groove wood paneling. It's really built for a two person cozy cabin to sleep together and then, you know, sit together and watch shows and then explore the area around with hikes and stuff. I stayed here last Thursday night and it was terrific. I loved it. Just a single person stay. And then I stayed here with my 13 10 year old and my wife and my dog. And it was a little too, too tight. So there's more of this live edge, big leaf maple for a little shelf or I like to kind of think of it as like a place where you could work and you know, never before did we have air conditioning, but it's been so dang hot in the summers now that now all six cabins have air conditioning solutions for super hot days. When I planned the layout for clay baby, we ended up putting this wall in so that we could have the movie watching zone and the little bathroom. And I love this little bathroom. It's got this natural black slate with that heated floor. So that's really nice on your toes, that natural texture. We did a really compact little vanity simple round mirror, but then the toilet is a special compact toilet, like a 25 inch to the edge of the bowl. It's a little more manageable here in this small space. We did a really, it's nice. I love this white marble and I've used it in some of the other cabins, but for such a small space, if you splurge a little bit on a natural stone tile or a super nice tile, it kind of, it really makes the space feel more luxurious and more thoughtful. So it's a very small space, right? So I'm just about six feet tall. So we really don't have much room. This light has a fan inside of the light. And so that kind of accomplishes two things, the fan and the light in one fell swoop, which I like. This was kind of an issue. Originally I had two shower heads here that would be shooting, you know, down on you like this, but I ended up only having a 19 gallon hot water heater and it would take too much hot water. So I ended up taking one of the shower heads out. So it just has the one, but it's off center and in the ceiling. So it doesn't take up any height from the sidewalls. So to separate these two spaces, I got this giant extra wide door and hung it on a really long barn, prefabricated thing that I ordered. And so you can close the door for bathroom privacy and then you can close the door for your movie privacy or you know, somewhat private. Play baby goes from anywhere between 95 and $125 a night. So the return on investment happened pretty quickly, but it was really a smaller project with it only being $30,000. This could absolutely be a solution for temporary housing or affordable housing. And I would love it to proliferate more quickly so that we can get people in homes and out of their tents. Index cabins now has six different units. My latest two builds, the sea containers and the tree frame. I've certainly been the most popular, but then the older smaller cabins also are quite wonderful just because they're really close to the river. This is a real surprise that this kind of evolved and fell into my lap. And I'm certainly happy it did just because it's such a fun and rewarding project. Thanks for checking out this week's episode. Please make sure to subscribe. And if you'd like to watch the videos about Nick's other builds, his shipping container home and his tree house, a frame you can check those out via the link in the description.