She downsized to a beautiful Tiny Home for her senior years

You can imagine going from paying close to $3,000 a month out of pocket to going down to paying about $900. It was a big plus, no negatives for me. Some people think that tiny home bedrooms are so small, but this is a queen size bed in here. I love all the areas of my tiny home, but one of the best things that I love the most is my craft room. I'm sitting here in a beautiful 55 year and older community. It may not be a big four bedroom home, but this is my home. This is where I live. Nobody can come and take this from me. And if they do, I will fight them, physically fight them. Hello, welcome to Adele Lee Chateau. My name is Rosa. Come in with me and see my tiny home. I had a four bedroom home paying $2,000 rent. And I probably had a 200 to $300 light bill, $100 water bill, almost my whole entire check out to someone else that gets to enjoy my money instead of me enjoying it. I started looking for an RV because that's what I was gonna do after leaving that four bedroom home. But in the middle of all that, I lost my mother and my brother back to back. They both passed away. And I have a hard time calling this home a blessing, even though that's what it is to me. It's a blessing, but it's bittersweet. But I received it because of the deaths in my family, specifically my brother. But I just figured that he would love seeing me here. If he was here now, he would love what I did with the blessing that he left me. And that's the reason why my home is called Adele Chateau. My mom's name was Adele and my brother's name was Lee. So it's their name combined. Nowhere in my mind was there a tiny home because I didn't know anything about a tiny home. So I was putting in an RV and all of a sudden, I'm an old lady, but this very, very good looking young man comes up doing tiny home tours. Mr. Tiny, Recreational Resort Cottages came up and he was actually touring this home. I gave him some money to hold this house for me. And a month later, I went and I purchased it cash. And now I no longer pay $2,000 rent. I have no home mortgage or anything. And because they are 399 square feet and under, you do not have to pay property tax for them. This home cost me $98,000. I'm sitting here in a beautiful 55 year and older community. I pay $675 for lot rent. And my last light bill was $52. And my last water bill was about $13. So it's very, very economical to live in this space. You can imagine going from paying close to $3,000 a month out of pocket on one of your paychecks to going down to paying about $900. It was a big plus, no negatives for me. Welcome to my porch, my patio. As you can see, I added a sign and it says porch therapy session in progress because that's exactly what happens out on my front porch. Even my neighbors come over and have some therapy with me sometimes. This is my favorite seat. Everybody catches me sitting right here in this chair all the time. Other people may think that's boring, but it is so much fun to me to just sit out on my porch and relax. And that's my day after work, after a stressful day at work and all the emails that I have to take care of and all the people that I have to take care of to be able to come out and maybe get a cup of coffee or a drink and sit out on my patio and do nothing is like going to Disneyland for me. I have a fan that I turn on because you know we are in Texas and it gets really, really hot here. So any extra added fan helps. I also bought this, this is called a swamp cooler. So you turn it on and it has some kind of evaporation on the back of it and it blows out cool air or should I say it's supposed to blow out cool air, really does it in Texas. But again, it's better than nothing. And the other part of my patio, I actually have two parts to my patio. I have this part and I also have this part. In my tiny home, I didn't have an actual dining table in there because I decided to put my dining table since I had this long patio out on this part of the patio. So not so much in the summertime and I just moved here in November, but this is going to be the place where I probably bring out my breakfast in the morning before work and I can just sit here and eat in the coolness of the Texas fall weather. But I just have this dining table here and just some decor that I added. Of course, this is a dino trap to keep the bugs away. I have a bench so if anybody's sitting over here with me, I can have four or five people sitting here with me and we can eat breakfast together or talk and laugh and just have a good time. And I put up this privacy fence just because of the way it looked, I thought it was really cute. And I do have extra storage out here because I didn't want to just have my broom and everything laying everywhere. So I bought a little storage unit and put it together and had it on my porch. It fits in just right. Just recently, I had a carport added to my home because again, we're in Texas and it gets hot. And if you get in your car, it's 150 degrees. So this is my carport. And like I said, it provides a lot of shade in this hot Texas summer. I love having that carport. I guess you can say I added on a third patio to my home by extending the pad. I bought some decking off of Amazon and they just snap together. And I put them down on that patio to make it look a little bit better and bought me some chairs and a fire pit that I'll be using in the wintertime in Texas. I love all the areas of my tiny home, but one of the best things that I love the most is my craft room. This is my craft room. I don't know how to not buy craft items, but I was allowed to have a shed here. So I was able to get that shed from Ulrich Lifestyle Builders. They're not inexpensive, but so worth it because I was able to still have a room for all of my crafting items and still have somewhere to go to relax because that's what relaxes me. That's what brings me down at the end of the day. That's what brings me more peace is just to go out there and make something beautiful. I make things with polymer clay. Everything that you see on here, I made all of this myself. This is also not only my craft shed, it's also where I work my job too because I work from home. So I have a whole corner over there with my work computer. So I am working out here on a daily basis also. And it's kind of hard to work in my craft room because behind me I'm always wanting to grab something and play, but I have to be careful with that because I need my job for a little bit longer. I have a refrigerator. So if I'm out here and I get thirsty, I can just open the refrigerator. It's just full of water. And this is my oven that I use to bake my polymer clay in. And I also am influenced with sublimation. So I have heat sublimation devices where I can make tumblers. I also like die cutting. So I have a Juliet sizer. I just have some of everything. I just love crafting. It's what keeps me busy and it's what makes me happy. Welcome to my living room. I absolutely love the coziness of my living room. When I first got my home, the people who follow me on social media will know that I had a very, very uncomfortable couch that used to hurt me on a daily basis. And it hurt so bad that I would live out on my front porch most of the time. But I just recently upgraded and bought this recliner that is so wonderful because it reclines. And now instead of running from my couch, I'm actually falling asleep on it every night. And I love to just be out here watching TV. Sometimes I'm doing some of my sewing crafts. The books behind me on this shelf, all of these books are actually adult coloring books. And that's how I spend some of my time just sitting on the couch, coloring, watching TV. It may sound boring to you, but it's the best thing ever. So my little cat, Karma, she is 15 years old and I have had her since she was six weeks old. I love her so dearly. This is Karma's seat where she sits. Most of the time she's sitting on my lap, if I'm honest, but you'll catch her most days just sitting here on her chair, bought especially for her. And she actually, if y'all seen Karma by now, y'all see that she looks just like this little pillow, but this is where she sits and sleeps on most days. When I first bought the home, it was white. All the walls were white in here, but I changed the color and it is the Sherwin-Williams color of the year. It's what's on the wall, the tan color. I had that changed and it just bought another element to the home instead of having the white walls everywhere. Like I said, it almost reminded me of being in a hospital room and I'm already over 60 years old. So this is going to be my last place. So I didn't wanna go out in a hospital room. So that's why I wanted to change the colors. And I think it just bought another element of beauty to the tiny home. Can you imagine how long it took me to clean a four-bedroom home? And I'm single, I don't have a husband and my girls weren't gonna come over and help me. So the cleaning is easy. It takes me probably, when I'm feeling good, 15 minutes to clean this whole home. Outside of that, I think on a personal level, this house bought me peace. After I moved in, I got on this mission of just wanting peace in my life. Maybe it's because I'm getting older. So when you get this age, I believe you start thinking about, oh my gosh, how much time do I have left? And when I go, I just wanna go peacefully and I just don't want any strife in my life or anything. And this house has given that to me. I don't know if I believe it or not, but they say that your loved ones are looking down on you and things like that. So if that saying is true, I do believe that my brothers and my sisters and my mother and my father are very happy with where I am in this life right now. And I just wanna honor them by living out the rest of my life in peace and just making them happy wherever they are. So that was my living room. Let's go take a look at my kitchen. This is my tiny home kitchen and it is called a galley kitchen. I think that term comes from naval vessels, the galley part of that, maybe because it's so close together and you can reach each side. I fell in love with this home because it had a lot of storage, which doesn't make any sense for the kitchen because I'm actually not a cooker, I'm a microwaver, but I do love the extra cabinets in the kitchen. And I did have a lot of dishes and cookware that came from my mother and even my grandmother that I didn't wanna get rid of, so it's still housed here. This home, I also fell in love with it because it came with all full-size appliances. So we have our microwave right here, which is a full-size microwave. We have a full-size dishwasher right here that I need because I don't like to wash dishes when I cook, which is hardly ever, but I love having that. And a full-size oven. On top of the oven, this is called a noodle board and I bought that just to have a little bit more counter space in the kitchen for when my family does come over. I have six grandkids, when they come over, I'm able to have extra counter space, maybe to make sandwiches or whatever when they're here. I also have a full-size refrigerator. So that's all the full-size appliances. The only thing extra is what I bought in myself, which is this oven right here. It's a Brava oven. Why do I need two ovens? I don't need two ovens, but I wasn't giving this to anybody because I love my Brava. For some reason, they call this the rich girl's easy-bake oven. It bakes everything and cooks everything by light and I just love it. So I use it more than I use my own oven. And I also have a Instapot up there when I just want to, if I'm busy, I can throw something at it. Everybody knows Instapot, just like set it and forget it. So I do use the Instapot very often. So that is my kitchen. And I was telling you that I had everything repainted and I picked out the Sherwin-Williams colors for my wall, the tan color and the gray for my cabinets. I did this myself. I put all this tile up. It is peel and stick tile. But from a distance, you can't tell that it's peel and stick tile. I had a rough time doing this, but it came out amazing. Down here, I have my full-size washing machine and dryer. No, it did not come with the tiny house that came from the four-bedroom house that I was renting. And it was one of the sale positives for me picking this model because my full-size washing machine and dryer fit in this space. And I love that. It does stick out a little bit because there's an issue that I need to get fixed in order to push it back a little bit more. I just haven't had time to do that. But once I get that fixed, this won't stick out and protrude in front of that door as much as it's doing now. So stay tuned for that. It will get fixed. You wanna come in and see my bathroom? This is my tiny home bathroom that I absolutely love. When I was having everything painted, I just had the whole house done the same, but there was one thing I wanted to have different in here because my mom passed away about two years ago and her favorite color is purple and my favorite color is purple. So I had to have a purple accent wall. So I had them paint this wall over here purple because it was her favorite color. So when I'm looking into the mirror in the morning, behind me is what I see. I see this purple wall. Just makes me think of my mom. Had a new toilet stoop put in because as we get older and if we have any muscle issues or leg issues, sometimes it can be hard to sit on the smaller toilets that come in houses and that came in this house. So I had the toilet replaced to a taller toilet so that I don't feel like I'm sitting on the ground. It's just absolutely perfect. And I also changed out the shower to a rainfall shower. But this is my bathroom and I love it. It's nice and tiny and normally it's a lot of stuff everywhere, but it's nice and clean today for you. And we can go into my bedroom. Some people think that tiny home bedrooms are so small, but this is a queen size bed in here. It's actually an adjustable bed and I was not gonna give that up because I don't like sleeping flat. So I love that I was able to fit my queen size bed into this room. Just did a little decorations, nothing special, just a regular bedroom. I did change out the light fixture in here and in the living room, there were these big white ceiling fans and I just didn't like them. So I found those on Amazon and replaced those and it just put another feel in the room. I love my room, it's nice and tranquil. And at night when the lights aren't on, I only have that little tree light on in the corner and the ambiance is amazing. I know you see this weird lamp here and it probably looks like out of place because it doesn't go with the decor, but this is actually a red light light so that I can get some red light therapy in my old age. Maybe it might turn me young. I don't know, but that's what that is, a red light therapy. I have these barn door closets. Both of those are closets. This closet over here is, and you're probably gonna see some junk, but this is like my work closet. When I have to go places for work, I chose that to be my work closet. And this closet over here is when I want to go out on my porch and get some porch peace. That's all my clothes that I just wear on a daily basis. But that's it for my little tiny home bedroom. I absolutely love it. It's very comfortable. And Karma, of course, sleeps with me on the bed. She has her little bed on top of my bed and we just get along famously together as we sleep every night and find peace in our little tiny home bedroom. If I had to speak to anyone, I would want to speak to people that look like me. When you see some of the tiny home communities, you might not see many of us there, but I want to encourage you that this is a lifestyle that you should think about looking into because a lot of us struggle from day to day, from check to check, and this is an opportunity not to struggle from check to check. I know that I wouldn't have had that money had not it been for something tragic happening in my life, but this is a true option for anyone to open up your life, open up your finances, open up the opportunities that you have to just be free. This is really a lifestyle to look into if you're struggling, if you just want to be at peace and not have to worry about big bills anymore. I have everything that I need in here. I don't need anything else. It gets me by from day to day. It makes me happy. This is still home ownership. It may not be a big four-bedroom home, but this is my home. This is where I live, and it's home ownership. I own it. Nobody can come and take this from me, and if they do, I will fight them, physically fight them. 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