This 27K Tiny House Saved Me From a Lifetime of Debt

We can get past the social stigma that comes with living in a tiny house. We can give a lot of people, a lot of very, very cheap rent and affordable housing. I think that's beautiful. How's it going? My name is Silvio and at 18 years old, I decided to build my own tiny house, move to Colorado and start working construction. Welcome to the inside of my tiny home. The dimensions are eight feet by 20 feet by 12 feet. When I was 16 years old, I had no experience with building at all. My dad had an idea of building a tiny house to sell and he told me that I could go to school and then come back and build this. So that's what we did. He rented out a warehouse. He designed this to perfectly fit inside the warehouse. And every day after school, I'd come down here and help him build it. He did probably most of it, but I definitely got a lot of experience from it and definitely inspired me to have the job that I have now. So the size of this tiny house was kind of dictated by the warehouse we built it in. It's only eight feet wide, which is a little bit cramped. If I were to do this again, I'd probably make it 10 feet wide and probably 26 feet long just to give a little bit extra living room in the front. Welcome to my kitchen. As an 18 year old living by myself, you don't really need much. I try to keep the cost as low as possible when doing this. So we've got our thrift store coffee maker, all of these materials you can get right off the Home Depot shelves. Even something as basic as this, this backsplash, you don't need tile, you don't need any fancy, amazing things. This is just real basic $20 piece of sheet metal. Things like that. You've got our pallets that I literally found this outside of the warehouse we were building. And this is what these pallets are made out. Yeah, just trying to keep it real basic. So storage in a tiny house, it's kind of like a boat. You kind of have to use every single nook and cranny just to get all of your things to fit. So just a couple of creative things. We've got a cigar box. It's actually cool, this lid will slide on top so you can move it and your spices won't fall out. The storage down here, obviously you got your basic drawers and all that stuff. We've got a water heater nice and tucked away and out of the way. A little bit of extra counter room can go a long way. So this is normally where the washer and dryer would go. But as it's such a small space, I'd rather just go to the laundromat and have an extra bit of space. I've got a toaster oven, microwave. I built this little shelf thing here, keep all my things and it's really good. It's nice and efficient. All the space is used really good. Frankly, the fridge is a bit too small, but you know, because living here, you have to go buy a bunch of groceries and then come back and this fridge isn't really that big. But yeah, meal prepping is fine. So if there's one small item in this kitchen that I can't live without, it's this Makita coffee maker. It's not sponsored or anything, but when the power goes out, I can still have a cup of coffee. You put a battery in here, you put your coffee in here and you've got a fresh cup. It's brilliant. Can't live without it. Me and my dad, we designed this ourselves. So it's all nice and ergonomic. You know, you got all your things all in one spot. Between these two counters, I've got all the space I need. I used to work in a restaurant. And so honestly, this is more counter space than I'll ever need. Well, every 18 year old needs a gaming setup. I decided to build the biggest desk that would fit this space. I just took a tape measure. It was 85 inches from the wall to this counter. So I made the desk 84 inches. This is just a couple of scrap pieces, a two by four piece of plywood I found. As simple as possible, more money in your pocket. When I first built this desk, I didn't even have close to enough skills to build it very well. So I just built a nice easy frame and maybe if I get any better, I'll make it look like a thousand dollar desk. I didn't have a curtain. So I found this and I put this in front. I've got Starlink hooked up, high speed internet. I mean, it's really all I need. So for tiny houses, storage is extremely important. You already don't have very much space. As much storage as possible is as good as possible. You can see we've got shelf here. Obviously you've got storage under your stairs. You've got storage under the desk. Anywhere where there's an open space, put a storage there. But it's also a balance between open space and cabinets. So make sure it's all up and out of the way. You want to pretty much barely notice it's there. I mean, this is pretty much 16 year old to me, complete dream here. You know, kitchen that's mine, food that's mine, this whole place to game at. It's amazing. It's not too much. It's not too little. It's the perfect manageable amount for an 18 year old like me. Tiny houses are a great solution to our housing problem. I think. All right. We've got a couple of problems with the laws and all that stuff. But if we can get past that, it's amazing. And I think if we can get past the social stigma that comes with living in a tiny house, we can give a lot of people, a lot of very, very cheap rent and affordable housing. I think that's beautiful. You can park this anywhere. You know, you find a friend with a giant truck. Coworker has a giant truck. Get him to move it. It's amazing. You can live anywhere for whatever the utilities cost. It's brilliant. It's such a good idea. So I was 16 in high school. I was working full-time at a restaurant and I was also going to school full-time. Kind of driving me crazy. Kind of lost my motivation when it came to high school. So I ended up dropping out and now I'm up here working construction, working in the trades. But before that, so what was this? Like 2022, right? When everyone started to get really interested in tiny homes. And my dad said, we're going to build a tiny house. We're going to put it on this piece of land over there that we own. I mean, my dad like found a warehouse to rent out. He designed it perfectly to fit. We would, you know, go over and work on it like every single day. And you know, now I've got a great place to live and it's really nice. To talk about the financials of tiny house living. I got really lucky. There was a tiny house lot already built and it's already got sewer hooked up and everything. This tiny house cost about $27,000 to build the entire thing because it's super bare bones. There's no bells and whistles, there's nothing. So it's very cheap. If you're wondering how much it costs to build a tiny house, I would probably say around $30,000 and a lot of work too. Like a lot of sweat equity goes into this type of thing. But I think it's better to work hard to make something that's worth a lot than to buy something that's worth a lot. Colorado is a really high rent state and a lot of people that pay like $1,200 to $1,600 of rent in here. I'm really lucky, right? I know the owner and all that stuff, but I only pay $600 in rent, which is what the utilities cost. I mean, that figure alone, like build a tiny house. I mean, you're gonna save so much money. It's ridiculous. Not only does it take a lot of work to build a tiny house, it also takes a lot of work. You can ask my landlord to plumb all this up and get the permits to get tiny houses hooked up because building it, that's only half of it. This is the only lot in all of Silverton that you're allowed to put a tiny house on. It took him two years of going through the bureaucratic red tape of getting permits pulled and getting sewer lines put up and all this stuff. People think, oh, you just build a tiny house and you're done. That's all you gotta do. Just build one and you're done. No, most of your work is gonna be being allowed to live in it in the first place. And I think that's a huge problem and it needs to be addressed. Otherwise, we're gonna continue paying whatever it is, like $1,600 a month for rent. And I think that's ridiculous. Welcome to the bathroom. One thing I thought was smart that my dad thought of is to put the sink in like a bump out and it gives you a lot more space and it's a lot easier to plumb because you can just have the pipe coming right out the bottom. I think this is genius and this is how you should do it. Plus, then you can have a nice little stained glass window here. It's nice and beautiful. All right, so for the septic, it's pretty simple. All of the plumbing is kind of all in one spot. It's all around this doorway. So it's just all goes into one pipe. I did it myself. It took me like 20 minutes and it goes to the sewer and that's it. That's all you need. We've got the water coming in, water coming out. It's all really simple. It's mostly like an RV hookup. Like if this tiny house was smaller, if it was a van or something that I could go put out way in the middle of the woods where there isn't any sewage, then I would do a compost toilet. But this tiny house is designed to be parked and be hooked up to sewer and hooked up to hot water and electric and all that stuff. I don't think there's any reason to mess with a composting toilet and all the cost and all the space it takes up. I don't think there's any reason to do that for a tiny house that's designed for this. For the shower, it's pretty basic stuff. We've got a horse trough here as the bathtub because it's a lot cheaper and you can get it. You can just go right to Cal Ranch and get one. There's a hot water heater attached behind this wall. It's under the counter in the kitchen. It's on demand, so it's hooked up to a propane tank just sitting right outside. I think it's way better than a tank water heater because it's just so space efficient. This tiny house is already only 20 feet long. Can't really afford to give up that much space. So it's on demand. I think it's worth dealing with the problems of an on-demand hot water heater for just how much space it saves. Okay, so here's our stairs. We've got a little bit of reclaimed wood here. We've got some pallets that I found outside of the warehouse we were building this on. And we've got a little bit of storage under the stairs. Like I said, you want all the storage you can get. There's a cupboard under here. It's where I put all my clothes. Yeah, I mean, that's the stairs. I really like living in a loft because it keeps your bed out of the way. No one's sitting on it. No one's messing with it. Got a couple of stereo systems here. Some shelves, just like I said, storage wherever you can get it. But yeah, I really like having it up in a loft. It's nice and cozy. And especially when it rains on this metal roof, it's the nicest thing ever. The point of the loft is to sleep, you know? Like all you really need up here is your bed, maybe some storage. I would much rather have this ceiling be shorter because you're going to be spending most of your time downstairs, cooking, cleaning, all that stuff. So the ceiling is short and that's fine. If I was going to build a tiny home and have the bedroom be downstairs, I think the name of the game would just be, get the longest tiny house trailer you can get. Because if you put the bedroom downstairs, that's a good 10, 12 feet of extra space you're going to be adding on. And if you don't want to sacrifice your living room or your kitchen or your bathroom, you're going to have to go get the longest tiny house you can get. And that's fine. That works, but you know, I'd rather have a shorter, more manageable tiny house than have a loft. What I'm doing now could pretty much be a career at this point, and I'm only 18. And I think it's like, if five years goes by and I decide I don't want to do construction anymore, then fine, I'm 23 at that point. My life has barely started at 23. You know, people graduate college at 22. I think if you start real early on something like this, and if it works for you, then it works. And if it doesn't, then you haven't wasted any time at all. There's like the path in life you're supposed to do, which is you go to high school and then you go to college and then you get an office job and you do that. And then you waste 30 years of your life paying back a house that is way too big and you don't really need. And if you do anything other than those steps, it's kind of like you're going off the beaten path. I feel like one of the biggest reasons people buy a giant house like that, instead of doing something similar to this, is just the social stigma. So, I don't know, if you can get over that, man, you'd save so much money and time and hours of your life. I've heard that no one my age is going into the trades, right? And we're all going to college and we're doing all these things. And I think that it would be probably a good idea to be one of the only people doing trades because supply and demand happens and you get paid a lot more for it. Thanks for checking out my tiny house. Hope you have a great day.