We Live in Our Dream Tiny Home in the Forest.

We found this beautiful property and nothing else would fit within these Douglas ferns. So it was either we don't have anything or we build a teeny home. So welcome to Terrapin Station. I'm Tara. I'm Brian. Check it out. Welcome to Terrapin Station. This is our teeny house. It's 12 feet wide and then 36 feet long. The reason why we call it Terrapin Station, it's named after a Grateful Dead song. So as you look through the house, you'll see some nods to the Grateful Dead. That's my husband and I's favorite band. As you can see right now, we're in the kitchen area and then we also have a nice living room area behind me with a TV and a fireplace. And then right behind you, we also have a bedroom and then we have a bathroom with a washer and dryer and a lovely tub that looks out into our awesome trees. So cooking in this kitchen is awesome. We have an island right here, a lot of counter space. With just two of us living here, this oven size is perfect. If we had a bunch more people here, maybe it'd be more complicated. But last night we had tacos, so heating up the beef on the stovetop. I cooked banana bread last night, so we had bread in the cooking. We also made a bunch of rice, so having two burners has been just like perfect enough for us. We've had, you know, six, seven, eight people here sometimes watching football games or just eating dinner and hanging out. It's maybe not as spacious as like a huge house, but it's definitely not uncomfortable to have people over either, which we love. So this is tough to admit, but for years I've been a big DoorDash guy. So when we moved out here, that doesn't exist. So we really had to get into cooking and meal prepping everything we do. When we first kind of started, I was worried that we weren't going to have enough space to store, you know, pans, pots, mixing bowls, everything. But as we've gone along, we actually have cupboards that we don't even have anything in. We have a lot of extra space. Tiny homes are great at having multiple functions for different things. So it's been very easy to accommodate life and cooking lifestyles and everything in a kitchen like this. Trueform did a great job of laying everything out. Everything's at an arm's reach, which is nice, but it doesn't lack in any type of storage or lack of space, I guess. This home does not come with a dishwasher. You're looking at the dishwasher. So we have our drying rack here. It's just easy to pull stuff up and put it on our open shelves. Sometimes you watch these home renovation stuff and people go crazy on these farm style sinks. I'm like, it's just a sink. Like, don't break the bank. Don't go crazy. And then I got my own. Now I understand I'm an advocate for farm style sinks. So there's no feature about the farm style sink that make things easier to cook or use. It just looks dope. When we were designing this house with Trueform, after a while, I realized these guys were so good at what they did. All their design aspects, the opinions, everything was so much better than I could even think of. So when it came to the fridge, they're the ones that chose this color, this size of fridge, everything. And so I didn't even know what we were getting into until the house was done and I showed up and this fridge was there and it's perfect. So not the biggest fridge in the world, but nothing in this house is. And then this big open cupboard is kind of tools and different storage for different things. Not many kitchen appliances or anything like that, but just storage unit. So the kitchen's perfect for us. It's laid out perfectly. I wouldn't change anything about the way this house is laid out, but especially the kitchen. It's perfect. And then it blends perfectly into this kind of small living area we have over here. When I met with Trueform originally and we were going over design aspects, I was looking at some of their other designs and I was kind of just picking pieces from other builds they had done. The main thing I loved was creating this kind of reading nook area living space with this barn wood and this dark finish behind. So this is like our whole living area. This is our couch. This is where we have our family meetings and wind down after work and watch TV. We also have storage underneath this couch. There's three pullout drawers for storage. Only one of them is being filled because we don't need to fill anything else. But that's again, one of my favorite things about these tiny homes is everything has multiple functions. Like our couch is also our storage, which is perfect. This couch was made by Trueform. It's built in and it is as comfortable as it looks. It's the best thing in the world to lay on and sleep on. We have a small little electric fireplace right here kind of below the TV and it's so nice at night just even without the TV on just it gets so dark out here. There's nothing out here. Just having complete darkness inside and the flickering of the fireplaces you just sit on the couch and veg out for a little bit is one of my favorite things to do. Out here on the Oregon coast our summers are pretty mild actually. Like right now outside I bet it's like 68 degrees and it's like that all summer, which is really nice. So cooling, heating is all handled by our central air. So we have a HVAC unit that handles our air conditioning and heating. This fireplace does add a little extra heat in the winter, which is nice. And then we have a small space heater that we just plug in in our bedroom. If we're gone for a little bit and we turn off all the air and we come back in the winter especially it can be pretty cold but the beautiful thing about these tiny homes is they heat up so fast. So between the space heater, the fireplace, and then the central air it just it'll get perfect temperature and I don't know half hour 45 minutes something like that which is perfect compared to a regular size house which will take you know five six hours. At night time one of my favorite things to do is just sit on the couch turn on the fireplace. It's so dark here and we have massive trees outside. It keeps all the light down. We're miles and miles away from any type of town or city. Out of all the cool things to do on the Oregon coast sitting on my couch in a rainstorm watching the fireplaces, it's up there. Weirdly enough it's it's up there. We chose a tiny home living because before this we had a boss hog or we called our boss hog it's a converted suburban. It has a bed in it but I think as we've gotten older it's a little cramped in there now and so that was the main reason of coming here and putting a stationary place where we can live. The property we ended up buying had so many trees. Originally we saw those trees and we're like well we want to build the Ewok village like we want tree houses in these trees so we went to the city and we're like hey we're gonna build you know tree houses and they're like no you're not you need some type of foundational dwelling before you build out all these tree houses. So we looked at the property and we're like oh we should do a tiny home this would fit perfectly in these trees we wouldn't have to take any trees out and then we can kind of build the electrical and the septic for something much bigger if we go tree houses down the road. And once we kind of had that thought we were really turned on by the thought of tiny home living the efficiency of it how little it costs to maintain and having smaller bills having a smaller footprint but still having that lifestyle that we've been chasing. So we looked I think at two different properties and I want to say we found this place within maybe three months. We just fell in love with it it was the perfect place for us to start our lives. When we decided to go the tiny home route I got online and I was looking for inspiration didn't really know what to do then I found this website it was top 10 tiny home aesthetics or something like that and I was looking through them and I found this one called Trueform and I just loved it. So I went to their website looked it up and it turns out they're like an hour from where we live so it's just like this kind of miracle thing. We pursued them very hard they didn't want to build an ADU they didn't they only build on trailers and it just was so much breaking down walls bringing them like voodoo donuts and just random things to just try to like try to get in with these guys. Once we did working with them was amazing I thought I had like a pretty good vision for everything and then I'd meet with them and just be blown away by what they were the ideas they had and the functionality of everything. And they also covered our insurance which was really nice they figured that out for us since they build teeny houses they usually build them on trailers but since this was their first one they figured it out for us and we got insurance through Trueform. Getting it on a foundation there was a lot of meeting with the city begging them to like let me just bring in something on wheels and then just take out the axles and the nice ladies at the city office building told me no they were very nice and so I just kept going back to Trueform and they would say no and then I'd go to the city and they would say no and then I was like one of these people has to give and so I just kept going until finally Trueform was like we thought about getting into building ADUs so maybe this would be perfect for you since you're close we can just kind of drive it out there. It was built off-site and then getting it to move into the foundation was a wild ride. Thinking back at it now I don't even know how we did it it was just a lot of chaos but a lot of miracles kind of happened along the way for us to make it what it is now. So when we were first looking at properties we were meeting with our realtor shout out Kaylin Horak's best realtor in the area and this place the property was listed for $80,000 and we're like oh you know it's been on the market for a long time we should offer like $60,000 or $70,000. She was like no we're gonna offer like $30,000. I was like well you know we'll and they took it and it was great so we ended up getting this property out on the coast in the middle of this forest for $30,000 which is so great. Our monthly expenses between water and electric it's super low we have internet out here so between all of that those things I think our monthly expenses are a hundred bucks a month. Compared to the other houses we've lived in it is astronomically less. I mean just our power bill in other homes was $150-$200 water bills even more expensive with the amount of baths some of us take it is probably less than a quarter of the cost as far as utilities go so yeah it's very inexpensive to live here. We are in the bathroom of our teeny house it's just down the hall to the left. I think it might be weird to say but the bathroom might be one of my favorite places in this house. I love taking baths. I think it's the best way to unwind after a long day. This bathtub is super nice. I don't think I've ever been in a bigger bathtub that I've owned which is funny because we're in a teeny house and it's probably the biggest bathtub I've ever used and as you can see the nice window that looks out into our trees and so I basically get in and read my book and just I also open up that window so I can hear the birds and just like the nice cool air that comes in. We also have a nice countertop and the circle sink. I think this was one of true forms like I wouldn't say mock-up but they had something like this and we just really did like the darker color on the walls. With this pattern too this backsplash it just looked like really good and I felt like it made a different contrast to the rest of the house where you know that this is more of like a sanctuary or a more relaxing place where you can come in. We have underneath here lots of room to put anything for cleaning products or for our like taking a bath. We fit towels also down below where we can roll them and I think it really looks good and matches everything and then over here we have more storage where we keep kind of our like toothpaste, toothbrush, hairbrush, things like that. Again we're kind of low maintenance people I don't really wear makeup or anything like that but we still have a lot of storage open areas and then we have some hooks back here that also hold our towels. I also love our laundries in here as well. We have our dryer and our washer in their like teen year obviously. This goes with the house unlike the bathtub. I like that our washer and dryer in here they do take up a big chunk of our bathroom but I feel like it's the best place for them to be because we wouldn't want it out in the living room where everyone see it and then in our bedroom we wouldn't want it there as well and so I think they kind of blend in a little bit as you walk in that it's kind of a little more subtle. The bathroom in our teeny house we've loved it. I don't think there's anything I would change in it. I've definitely gotten used to it. I actually don't think it had been that big of a transition to a normal house's bathroom and I also think it's nicer because things are closer but the thing that I love the most about it that I didn't think I was going to is the bathtub and kind of where it ended up being placed with the trees outside and so I would say that is one of my favorite places in the house. Right now we're in the bedroom of our teeny house. It is probably my second favorite place. We have so much storage as you can see above me there's like storage everywhere. I think this is the most storage that we have throughout the house and then also across from me we do have a closet where we have more storage. Also underneath this bed you can pop it up and then there's stuff they could store under there as well so I feel like this room probably has the most storage out of the whole house. Our bed is a queen size which is perfect for us. We love having our little own nook area. We have some fun crystals next to us and books that we read. We also both have two nice reading lights so if he wants to go to bed I can turn mine on and read which is lovely or vice versa. Also this room has so many windows which we love because we're in you know the forest in Oregon and we also added a skylight that was something we specifically added over here so as we're laying in bed at night we can look up and instead of seeing the stars we get to see all of our Douglas ferns and it's really pretty. We love this room. It is probably one of my favorite rooms in the house especially with all the windows and all the natural light that comes in. It just makes for a really wonderful place to fall asleep at night and I couldn't picture a better bedroom than what we have right now underneath our Douglas ferns. Our house was actually designed after a Grateful Dead album called Terrapin Sedation so there's a building on this album cover that we kind of took some inspiration from. It was that and some picture I found online of this old mossy cabin in the woods and so I gave those to True Form and I was like this is what I want the outside of my house to look like. I really pushed them to have cedar shakes. I love moss. I wanted moss all over this house. True Form did not want me to have cedar shakes. They're like it's gonna ruin your roof. I'm like oh but that one time it's gonna look so beautiful. We have this I don't know what it is it's just like weird Japanese style wood that you burn it to seal it so it has no finish on it it's just burned to seal. It holds up really well out here in the coastal elements which is awesome. On the cover of this Grateful Dead album there's a platform it's a train station so we wanted to kind of match this train station platform type of deck. It wraps around this tree kind of goes over here to a outdoor shower hammock hot tub fire pit grill area where we hang out a lot with friends and different people in the summer. A lot of people around this lake pull water in from the lake. That was pretty expensive to get all the equipment and then you also have to have like a really big pump house and water filtration system which we don't really have room for so we actually went with a 2500 gallon water tank. That 2500 gallons lasts us about six months which is crazy and you're looking at my dreads and you're like no that dude probably doesn't shower. I shower every day I want you to know that and we still have tons of water. We also have septic kind of buried in the ground over there which is all connected to that same water system. Very efficient very perfect low maintenance it's been awesome for us. So our electrical is grid tied there is not a lot of sun and not a lot of wind that gets through these trees so that was our only option there's no way we could have done solar or some type of wind turbine. We actually have a electric water heater and some other things so it is kind of nice to be grid tied for that reason the utility coming out here is very small very inexpensive so is the most ideal situation for us. Going teeny has definitely made our lives better just slowing down enjoying getting outside more and just being closer with each other when you're a teeny home you're just closer to the people you love and I feel like that's what life's all about is creating those moments that you know people don't forget and that that's why you're alive and that's what you're living for. Yeah I think for me spiritually this home changed everything the building process every single morning and night I would sit there and envision what this house would look like and what it would smell like and what it would sound like waking up in the morning and that type of meditation or manifestation whatever you want to call it gave me so much focus that was the best part about this entire process for me was just being creative trusting that everything was going to work out believing in everyone and everything around me to really make my dream come true that sounds kind of selfish but and then once it was completed just this refuge such an amazing place to escape and feel so connected to nature and each other and everything around us it's been the best thing I think I've ever done for myself spiritually I don't know how how you feel but it's it's changed everything. Thanks for coming to check out our teeny home Terrapin Station you can follow us on Instagram or in the links below and keep trucking!