How many of you city dwellers wish that you owned a vacation home in the
mountains, but you don't think you can afford it or maintain it? Well,
in today's video,
you're going to meet one couple who found a solution to that problem. You see,
tiny homes are great vacation homes. Not only are they more affordable,
but they're especially easy to clean and maintain. And Hey,
if you ever decide to change the location of your vacation home,
you can do it pretty easily because these homes are on wheels.
This is exactly what Mark and Mary did when they decided to own and park a tiny
house on a piece of land just outside of Washington's cascade national park.
One element of this tiny home that makes it completely unique is that they have
two nano doors allowing the outside into their tiny space. Also,
this house sleeps six people comfortably,
so there's plenty of room for Mark and Mary to bring their friends and family on
vacation.
So let's take a tour of this gorgeous tiny house.
Hi, I'm Mary and I'm Mark. And this is the tiny house
We're actually not sure what Tito means, but uh,
my dad is as labeled that as Tito as a reminiscent of the small cabins in
Poland that he grew up with.
Since we've been together over a decade.
It's always been a dream of ours to have a small space in the mountains that we
can escape to.
Just having a place that is light and easy to take care of and minimal
maintenance. Tiny homes are perfect for that.
Our tiny home is parked on a small plot of land in the Methow Valley and this is
just on the Eastern slope of the North cascades national park this place just
really rang true with us, not only for its natural beauty, but also for,
I think a lot of our values of, you know,
having a place with community and having a place to really cares about nature.
So Tito is 32 feet long, eight and a half feet wide on a trailer,
three axle with the front toe.
I believe the towing capacity on that is 1600 pounds.
I believe we're just underneath that.
The total square footage inside is around 260 square feet.
We have two sleeping lofts.
It actually adds almost another a hundred square feet of livable space on top,
which is super nice.
It's really just an escape for us from Seattle and we love to come out
here and really reenergize and rest and we do that and it's just on our own,
but we've actually designed it to really sleep six people plus camping outside
during the summer so we can have, you know,
our friends and family and community join us for these experiences that we have
out here in Louisiana.
Welcome to the Tito tiny house. We are just
coming in through our back door.
We designed it this way because we do a lot of outdoor recreation, running,
skiing, playing outside.
So we wanted a covered place out there that we could come in, kick things off,
throw things directly into the combo washer dryer and it's actually been
awesome. Fast wash does a really great job for us here.
We've got our bathroom and shower,
which is usually where Mary sends me when I'm coming in from the outside.
We've got a 36 inch shower in here.
It's actually been super nice to kind of have like that much room pop that we
were able to squeeze that in here. Propane,
a heater here for all our on demand water.
Sometimes we'll have a lot of people in the house or even staying on the
property outside with us so it's nice to never be able to run out of hot water
for us. We have a RV flush toilet.
The toilet is connected into a septic which is on the property and I think the
only thing that we had to do the property to get it ready for the tiny home and
then Mary's made some cool kind of design decisions.
We ripped apart a purse that she had to get some straps up here so we can easily
have enough towels hanging out for friends and families as they come over.
We put in a sink here and we decided to do it outside of the bathroom.
These are quartz countertops that actually matches to what we have in the
kitchen.
So it kind of gives a nice cool like pop of lightness into this space and also
super easy to keep clean.
So we kind of move into the kitchen anytime that you come to the tiny house,
we pour these out. This is our operating ski.
It is our Polish recipe of Krupnick.
And so when you come here you have to have a little bit,
you've got to do a cheers.
there you go. So, so keeping the important things, uh, on demand here.
Microwave oven here we thought about going big because we do spend a lot of time
cooking, but just given the amount of space,
what we heard about in terms of creating ambient heat, uh, with a bigger oven,
if we do have bigger groups here,
we're usually doing something big on a pot or outside on the barbecue.
So the small size is definitely been nice,
allowed us to have more space for storage.
We did opt for a big fridge and sometimes we'll come in here with a bunch of
food. Let's say we're coming out here for a week at a time or we're feeding four to six
people. It's been nice to be able to have that much storage. All of our drawers,
all of our cabinets are click lock, so it is totally legal to tow.
There's no handles. You're not catching yourself on anything,
especially if you're coming in and someone's cooking and you're going around
them. It just gives you that much more space. When everything's super tight.
We went for a bigger sink that we could negotiate. Kind of getting in here.
I think we played had been able to sneak it a little bit bigger,
but honestly this is, this has been pretty big. It's pretty deep,
which is super nice.
We're oftentimes cooking not just for the two of us but for more that are
spending the weekend with us.
And then we opted to put this on the corner because this window just kind of
rolls open and now we've got a screen up in case we ever wanted to just pass
things outside or or just pass dishes right in.
So we spent a lot of time thinking about window placements and just making sure
that wherever you are hanging out you could just look and see outside
We never actually had heard of a pullout washer,
but we got one and it's so cool. They're super quiet, they're super efficient,
runs a full cycle in 45 minutes.
I did a lot of research on our cooktops. I know a lot do propane. Uh,
we ended up doing induction because we heard that propane creates a little bit
more ambient heat. So again, it kind of being in a small space,
we wanted to minimize that.
You can actually still have a fully functioning underneath it.
So we've got utensils, spices for cooktop.
All right there we did go for a mini split,
a ductless both heat and AC being on the Eastern side of the mountains here in
Washington.
It can get pretty hot in the summer and then it gets really cold in the winter.
So having something that could easily just do both and not take up footprint was
essential to us.
I'm going to show you the other half of the house.
And so I'll first show you my favorite feature in the whole home,
which is actually this awesome nano door that opens and collapses and really
enables this indoor outdoor living experience that we wanted to have.
Or we could just go out on the deck and listen to the river.
And another design choice that we made is instead of buying traditional home
furniture,
we actually purchased outdoor furniture because it's lightweight and we could
easily take these little socks off here and throw it outside on our deck and
really just have a comfortable afternoon or evening outside.
We have this beautiful cross breeze from one deck to another.
When the furniture's moved out,
it just almost feels like a hallway between two big rooms. Overall,
we really wanted a really soothing interior experience, you know,
nothing too loud to really keep the focus on the exterior, the trees,
the mountains and everything around us.
So what you'll notice is fairly muted tones in general.
We also chose white curtains. We did a double layer here.
So there are actually two different curtains.
The reason that we did this is because in the winter we want a little extra
insulation when we're in here. And so we typically use both of the curtains
With the light fixtures I wanted
something that added some personality but just wasn't overbearing when
the light is on,
it actually casts almost a star onto the ceiling.
And on the ceiling we use beetle kill pine as the wood of choice because it's a
really sustainable wood and it's something that also adds a soft touch of of
texture and color. But you know, without being overbearing again
We actually chose a full XL bed,
which means that it's the width of a full, but the length of a queen.
We wanted to make that.
We had plenty of space with regard to storing clothes underneath of the bed.
We have a bunch of gray bins, pajamas, outdoor clothes,
nicer clothes, et cetera.
This is the beetle kill pine that I had mentioned earlier actually
So we're in one of two lofts, so believe it or not,
but we have three sleeping spaces in here so we can sleep six people and
probably more if we have someone sleep on the living room floor as well.
Up here we have two twin beds, especially when we have individuals or kids.
This is a good place for them to stay.
Now I'll show you our third and final sleeping space.
We're just going to head upstairs so as we're heading upstairs.
I just wanted to point out this decision that we made here.
Instead of a solid wall,
we wanted to make sure that this remain very open air and light and so we
decided to do these wires.
Now we are in our third and final sleeping space and again we did another full
XL here, particularly for couples that want to snuggle at night up here.
We also have some shelving folks can throw their clothes, shoes,
anything that they bring with them into that for convenience on each side of the
bed. We have placed windows in this loft as well as the prior loft.
We just want people to feel like they're having this indoor outdoor experience
on a regular basis. We didn't do any sort of molding around windows.
And you also notice in the kitchen there's no back splash.
We just wanted to minimize lines and layers of material to just keep it simple
and airy.
Our back porch area, we built this,
uh right after we got the tiny home delivered.
It's like doubles the footprint of your livable area here we've got to know the
smoke style barbecue but it's actually hooked up directly on to,
it's going into a propane line that we have teed coming out of the house so it
can fire up the barbecue as well as our heater.
When the tiny home was getting built,
we asked them to include extra a siding, trim, etc.
Cause we knew that we were going to build this tiny shed.
So you're coming up here, you know, we're taking, if things are muddy or wet,
taking them off here. We actually insulated the shed, so wet ski boots, clothes.
We can actually just throw right inside here.
We've got a power outlet that runs in there so that we can have a heater in
there. It just helps dry things off
Living in Seattle, you know, with the overcast so, so much throughout the year. You know,
I'm a person that really needs a lot of natural light and sun, um,
for my own happiness and energy.
And so I could sit here on the deck in the sun, watch cross country skiers,
go by, look at the mountains. It's really beautiful gem of the
spot here.
I think the idea behind Mary and I investing in getting a tiny home is for us to
have a place that we can easily just get out to,
even if it's just a moment's notice, you know, in the city we're working,
we catch up with friends over dinner and there's just so many distractions,
so many places to be. So many things to do.
And when you come out and interact with your friends and family and nature,
just a different pace happens. We're just spending a lot of time, you know,
building memories here together with the people that we love both through
connected conversation and activity. It's been wonderful.
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