Living in a STUNNING Tiny House: $50K Invested

The word I would use to describe tiny house living is freedom. Freedom of time, which I think is the most valuable thing we could have. Freedom to learn new skills and freedom to build the life that we want to build. So welcome to our 24 by 8 foot tiny home. Most people when they come over they are amazed by how large it feels and that was intentional. We wanted really high ceilings and it gives it a sense of space. For the layout for the kitchen we actually used the online IKEA kitchen building tool. We knew roughly where the kitchen was going to be. We used some blueprints that had sort of laid out where it would be, but then we used that online tool and that allowed us to design exactly where the sink and the stove and our fold-down oven was going to be. Moving into a tiny house meant a lot of downsizing, which meant getting rid of a lot of our things that we had in our previous apartment. So we really cut down on what we have, but I will say that we fully use this house and we didn't try to parse down to nothing. We have everything that we need and these are fully used drawers. We use every square inch that we've got and being in here for four years means that we, you know, you fill the space that you have, right? So one of the things that we really want to do is we want to reorganize some of the kitchen cabinets and put in a second cabinet up here that's going to fit in this space to move all of our cups and plates up there. It kind of makes more sense to be up in a wall cabinet rather than down here and this can be dedicated just to pots and pans. When we built the stairs we obviously knew we wanted storage in the stairs, but it was one of the last things that we got to and in fact we only very recently put in this pullout cabinet, which is a pantry, a skinny tall pantry, and this door that covers up our hanging clothes. It utilizes the space a lot better than how we had been using it previously, which was essentially just tossing things in there, but now we're able to utilize the whole height and the whole depth of the space. We really wanted to be able to use mostly regular appliances and so for one the air fryer is a regular 120 volt air fryer. It does use a lot of electricity, but we have a system that we built that is sized such that we have no issue. We can run the air conditioner, the oven, we can use everything at once pretty much. Moving to a off-grid stovetop meant that we were moving to propane and the main difference with propane is that it burns a lot hotter, so it's a little bit harder to simmer, but with really thick pans and with very small burners it's actually not a big deal. And the upside is you can boil water in like way shorter amount of time. The reason for the propane was just because we knew we wouldn't be able to tie into a natural gas source where we are and so propane was the obvious solution for that. I will say that one thing I would maybe change would be to do an induction cooktop instead. We have no issues with electricity and we kind of assumed when we very first started the build that we wanted to be careful about electricity and we didn't want to use too much because we'd be off-grid, but I think in the end we would have been perfectly fine with an induction cooktop and I would have maybe preferred an induction cooktop for air quality reasons and for the ability to adjust from a very low simmer to a very high boil, so that would be one thing I might change. Cooking in this space is actually wonderful. I never have worked in a food truck but it kind of feels a little bit like that because everything is in one place. Where we are maybe lacking would be in like cutting board space, you know, we only have a couple of areas where cutting boards can go, but it actually works great. Everything is close by and everything is laid out how we wanted it to be laid out, so that filling a pot and moving it onto the stove and cutting vegetables and, you know, putting things into the trash are all precisely where we kind of wanted them to be. There's one thing that we wish that we had that we do not have which is a dishwasher. That is something that we had to sacrifice to have our very large pull-out trash and recycling bins, which we also love. This is our off-grid unique brand tiny home fridge. It's quite large for a tiny house fridge. I think it's 16 cubic feet. It works great for what we use it for. One caveat is that we did end up having to power it using 120 volts through an adapter rather than taking it directly from our DC batteries, and that was because this fridge didn't want exactly 24 volts. It wanted 27, which we had difficulty getting a buck converter to do. So before we moved into our tiny house, we lived in four different apartments, and then when we moved to the Sacramento region, we house sat for several different houses, and in house sitting for those houses, we actually got to kind of study the different things that we wanted in our tiny house, and we used those ideas to build our dream tiny kitchen. One of the things that we borrowed from a house that we house sat for was having a large single basin sink. We liked the idea of being able to wash large items, and in a tiny house where you don't have a dishwasher, you need a big sink to wash a lot of dishes. So easy to clean up after a meal, and after we're done eating, we can move on to the living room. This is our living room area. This is where we relax. We've got our couch here, and as you can see, a lot of things from our three-year-old. So we have a three-year-old, a toddler in the house, and so this is also kind of his play area. We've got a lot of toy storage underneath the TV, and then we have an ottoman that also has storage for craft supplies, things like that. And yeah, this is where we can relax. The couch folds out also into a queen-size bed, so it's another sleeping area if need be. And we have a nice big picture window that looks out into the orchard. We love that. And then another window as well over here, so lots of natural light. It's a great place to hang out. I think we learned a lot about the layout as we were living in it. In the original design, when we were laying out the interior of the tiny house, we anticipated having this couch actually there facing this way, and it kind of goes to the expectations versus reality about living in a tiny house. And when you're looking at a layout, you see, okay, here's where the couch is going to be, and we'll put the TV there, but then when you're actually in the space, it doesn't really make much sense. And so putting the couch here meant that it kind of worked best overall for the layout, but we're always evolving where things are, and so I'm not certain it won't change again. We have had guests over multiple times. I'm not sure the most people we've had over, but probably close to eight or nine. It's actually great entertaining in the small space. It's very intimate, but it's fun. And now that we have the porch area, that is even easier because it provides an area where you can have people hanging out outside, people hanging out inside, and especially with kids, they're kind of constantly in and out everywhere. So everything's in flux, but it's actually an excellent place to entertain. We were living in the Glendale area, which is in Los Angeles. We were working different jobs, but we were just hardly seeing each other. We realized we were spending about $32,000 in two years living in this apartment where everything was just fine, but we just kind of felt like we were missing something, mostly each other. A lot of things happened. At the same time, we got engaged. My mom was having some health issues, and she needed to have surgery, and so just all at once, we both put our jobs and just moved to Northern California to be near family, which we had always wanted to do, but that made it happen faster. We stayed with family. We stayed with relatives, and then that just became a thing where when our relatives or family friends were going out of town, usually they'd go for at least a month at a time, and they asked us to house-sit for them, and then there were enough houses that we just kind of went from one house to the next. We became professional house-sitters for kind of a long time, actually. Yeah, for a very long time. When Heather was sending me tiny house things, I was like, yeah, we could probably do that. We had no construction experience at all. Well, we did build a queen-size loft bed for our studio apartment. We did build a queen-size loft bed. So that was our building experience. So we maybe took one small step up from that to build an entire tiny house, but yes, we had a very small amount of construction experience. We learned from the incredible teacher YouTube. Yeah, the manufacturers of all these construction materials, actually many of them have great online video presences where they show you how to install this kind of metal roof and how to install these kinds of solar panel mounts and these kinds of, you know, how to install insulation that's this specific kind of insulation. So the resources are out there in a big way. It's just a matter of going through and actually watching it and paying attention. Building the tiny house was a long process. We started in 2017, I think. I mean, we started researching maybe even before that, but it was a very slow process because we started our company and started building a tiny house at the exact same time. And we were getting married. And we were getting married. So we're planning all of that. But one of the things we actually did was instead of asking for gifts or for like a honeymoon fund, we asked for help funding our tiny house. So that ended up paying for the trailer and ended up being a helpful thing to do too, because then we felt reliant on family and friends to see it through because they helped make it possible. We couldn't stop halfway. Yeah. So there were many times where we're like, what are we doing? What are we doing? And then we're like, we're gonna finish this thing. So that was helpful. Some family friends of ours reached out to us and they said, we have a property. And if you are interested in caretaking for the property, you can build the tiny house there. And we emphatically said, yes. So that was, it was a very wonderful gift that they gave to us was allowing us the space to build and keep our home. So when we started the tiny house process, I don't think I was aware of any tiny home specific loan products. I'm sure we could have gotten maybe like a personal loan of some kind, but to us at the time, it was like, we were on this equity building thing. And it was the idea of minimizing loss due to interest, minimizing any of that. So we said, if we can do this slowly, we can pay cash for this house. And that's what we did. And we took really great notes about the budget and what everything costs for the first 75% of the build. And then we started losing track a little bit of what we paid for things, but I would say a rough number for the whole house, including all of the appliances and amenities that are inside would be about 50,000. And mainly that's because we did all the work ourselves, save for a couple of things. So the labor cost was pretty low. We did have to hire out for a plumber and we had a handyman who was sort of a jack of all trades who could guide us through a lot of the different things and help us bring some of the timeline down on a couple of the installs that just take a long time. But overall, the labor cost was low and that's why we were able to do it for that price. Financially, we've noticed a pretty significant difference, especially with the cost of utilities. So in our last apartment that we rented, our electric bill was something in the neighborhood of $150 a month. And that was 10 years ago. Today, we pay a little less than $40 a month in electricity. So the cost savings from a utility standpoint have been massive. Our cost for water is about $10 a month and our cost for propane is about $20 a month. So one of the first steps of our tiny house journey was simply leveling the space for the tiny house to go. That cost about $5,000. We've had a couple of other unexpected, or not unexpected, but I guess interesting things we've had to do in terms of earthwork because we're downhill from the sewer connection. So we actually have a sump where all of the sewer lines run into and it's basically a big tank underground that has a pump in it and that pump is able to pump everything uphill to where the sewer cleanout is and that allows that to work. And we also had to trench the line for the water connection. But besides that, we haven't had to do any major earthwork projects. Our house has now become our first family home and we brought our son home from the hospital to the tiny house and it has worked beautifully for that phase of our life because it's very cozy and like having a newborn and a baby and now a toddler in this space has just flowed really nicely and we've all been really cozy in this nest basically together. So now we're here in our bathroom. We wanted a relatively large bathroom. We're here on the tongue side, the front side of the trailer opposite the living room. It's a traditional but small bathroom. So we've got our sink and our toilet. It's not a composting toilet, it's a regular toilet. We wanted a 36 by 36 shower stall and that would allow us to have both a shower and a washer dryer all in one unit as well as some closed storage. One of the things that we did in here was actually for the whole house, we installed these air inlets and that allowed us to plumb all of the sewer lines in the house without having any penetrations in the roof. If you can avoid, you know, additional holes in the roof, that tends to be better. And so our plumber came up with a pretty cool way of installing these air inlets as well as one vent that's above our kitchen window that allows us to have a completely sealed waterproof roof. So it obviously is a small bathroom and so getting ready in the morning with two adults and a toddler can be challenging, but it's actually plenty of space. We're not exactly all on the same schedule so we can kind of stagger a bit. We don't have too many issues with needing to share the bathroom. I'm sure if we had a teenager that would be another story, but for now it works great and it's enough space that it doesn't feel too cramped. Having a toddler in a tiny house without a bathtub means that we had to get a little creative so what we did was we got this foldable bathtub that sits in our shower pan and we can fill that and he can take a bath in there until he's old enough to take a shower. You'll notice that in here the ceilings are a little bit shorter. I think it's only about six five six six in here and that's because above us is our bedroom. So this is our loft space. This is where my wife and I and our three-year-old son sleep. We have a queen-size mattress for my wife and I and then we have a toddler mattress for him. It actually has worked out pretty great. The age that he's at it works. I'm sure if he was a little bit older we would have to have a separate sleeping situation for him downstairs maybe and we may do that in the future. One of the other things I really like about this space is we've got our storage for clothes in our dresser as well as storage for some of our son's stuffed animals and nighttime books. Over here I've got a nice big window which allows us to look out over the orchard and see some of the wildlife around us and also provides egress to escape the house if we need to. One of the other nice things about our windows is that we added motorized cellular shades. They are blackout curtains which helps keep it really dark in here and they also are solar blocking which helps with the sun. As far as other efficiency things in here we've got a mini split for heating and cooling and that is sufficient for the space by far and then the entire home is insulated with sheep's wool from a company called Havelock. We decided to do sheep's wool for a couple of reasons. It's a very sustainable material. It doesn't off gas like some of the spray-in foam insulations. It's about as insulating as fiberglass but it is way better acoustically. The other thing I would say about the insulation is that while it is expensive, insulating a small space wasn't too bad because it's a small space so we decided to splurge on the insulation and we're really glad we did. As with most houses it's a work in progress all the time so we have lots of projects that we have still yet to do. We haven't finished the bottom of our stairs. I plan on cutting a little hole in this and making a little shoe drawer. The other thing is our smaller loft on the opposite side of the house. We haven't come up with a good solution of what to do there but it might be storage. It could hypothetically have a little bed but we haven't figured that one out yet but that's on the future. Welcome to the outside of our tiny home. Our tiny home is on a 24-foot trailer so it measures 24 feet long and about 8 feet wide. We went to the maximum height for our tiny home so it's just under 13 and a half feet tall. You'll notice that the exterior of the tiny house is sided with live edge redwood and so we worked with a company in Sacramento that offers sustainable wood recycling and they basically take trees that may have been felled by a local utility and they mill them into rough sawn lumber and so we were able to get 2,000 board feet of this redwood and unfortunately it wasn't the right dimension for siding so we ended up re-sawing 2,000 board feet of redwood on its edge with a table saw. It took us working on weekends almost six months to re-saw, plane, stain and put on all of the siding of this house and some people build their entire tiny house in six months. So it took us a very very long time and we now have the beautiful exterior that you see here. Above the porch we have our solar system so we have 365 watt solar panels up there that are powering our house. We have two lithium iron phosphate batteries that hold about 10 kilowatt hours of power and that provides energy for us for most of the sunny months of the year. We also have rain catchment from that porch roof and that captures into a wine barrel that we use to water plants in the garden. Using excess wood from our build we were able to make a couple of other things. We made a mud kitchen for our son, he loves playing with that and making a big mess. We also made a shed where we keep a lot of our tools and then the smallest house we've built is our bird house which currently has a family of western bluebirds nesting in it. Thank you so much for visiting our tiny home. If you'd like to see more of our house or our entire build you can visit our Instagram or our YouTube channel Wilder Tiny Home or our video production company is C-Stand Productions. Thanks so much! Bye!