Hi there. I'm Jenna with Tiny house, Giant journey. We're here in Vancouver,
British Columbia at Laura and Rorys tiny house. Let's go take a tour.
Hi. Come in, welcome. Thank you.
So this is Rory and Laura and they decided to show us inside their beautiful,
tiny home today. Welcome Jenna. Thank you. Great to have you.
How long have you guys been living here and living here?
About four and a half months now. Four and a half months.
How long did it take you to build? About a year. A year.
So how good does it feel to be in your tiny home? So good.
And why did you guys decide to go tiny? Well, that's the question.
So many reasons. One is practicality with housing in Vancouver,
but we're both the creative people.
We wanted to learn to work with wood and the size of a tiny house is a great
project to take on when you don't have any experience.
Plus it was always his dream to live in a one room house and you got it. Yeah.
You guys designed your home. Yeah, that's right.
The coolest thing is to see it manifest around you as you're building and kind
of saying, well,
I put this together and now it's something in my head and I'm living in it and
it's kind of really turned out exactly how we had envisioned it.
I think I was a complete beginner. Rory was a concrete finisher before,
but you didn't really have any experience.
So a little bit of construction experience, but nothing like this. Yeah,
a lot of YouTube videos I'm sure. Definitely.
So I love that you guys did a gambrel roof line.
What was the idea behind that?
It was really just to give us more space and to give character.
I can already tell that you have so much more space in your lofts because
that decision to do the gambrel.
So one of the things we really wanted in our design was like a seating area
where people faced each other. This is a folding table.
It's made with the maple and mahogany and we want to fold it away from the
space. We just disengage the bracket,
tuck that away. And then I fold this up underneath
and lower the table.
And now we have a space where we can do yoga or put up an easel or just have
more company.
The second part of this folding experience is the storage chair.
This part,
there's storage under there, but we can unfold this.
Oh, do you want to grab the box?
We have a special box that's built to support it that fits right on the staff.
And then we have another cushion
that creates a second love seat
and there is a four person or three people and three little kids visiting area.
So there's lots of storage under this bench here. Actually,
this is where we tuck away.
A lot of our things when we move and we have a printer under there as well,
which is connected to this shelf bookshelf, heater area,
which also doubles as our office.
So here we have our direct vent propane furnace. Uh,
it's a Rinnai and it's what, 8,000 BTU.
We wanted to kind of get the max that would keep us warm.
The warmest on the coldest day. So we're really happy with this. Uh,
unit over on this side is our little charging station for phones and little
knickknacks and things. And then over here is our office.
So we have a little file folder holder here,
keep our papers and things fold up
desk still needs a bracket.
And then we have our little office here with our stationary and a corkboard.
So laundry is kind of a tricky thing in a tiny house and we decided to get a
retractable clothesline.
These come out like this and they connect to hooks that are on the wall at the
top so we can put three of them up and secure them.
And then we've got lots of drawing space and it's right above the heaters so the
heat rises and things dry pretty quickly.
You build the storage loft to also double as a guest bed if we ever want to have
someone stay up there.
But for now we've got all our things crammed up there and it's about three feet
wide and we've got a window and an extractor fan up at the top.
So it holds quite a lot of things and it's quite accessible.
So these are our storage stairs.
We wanted to make it so that if we ever have a dog or there's a pregnant lady in
here or we have future family,
it's an accessible a way to get upstairs, but it has to double for storage.
So we keep our little box for extra sofa and here work bags in here.
And then we have um, little containers for our clothing and such.
All in here
We have storage down both sides of the bed. Um,
so these lift up and there's storage underneath.
They actually work really well for little tables for your laptop or,
knickknacks,
people ask us too a lot about moisture up here and whether or not we get like
drips from the ceiling. And that's really never been an issue.
We spent a lot of time designineg the ventilation in here. So we ha
a lot of fans, but we also have the skylight that opens.
One thing to probably mention is with the gambrel style roof,
you are limited to the size of skylight you can put in there because there's a
hip like the size of this what it's one foot by two feet I think.
And that's like one of the smallest ones you can get
as far as framing it in. Yeah, I did that and it was,
it was really difficult but totally worth it.
It's really nice to have the natural light up here. And also when we,
when it gets hot we can um,
crack the skylight and turn on that vent fan and it creates a really nice uh,
cross breeze through it.
I'll show you the bathroom.
So as far as the hardware for the pocket door, um,
we got that from the home Depot. I think it was $150 or something.
But it works really well. It's a nice space saver. Yeah, yeah,
Luckily we sourced the shower and bought it kind of just at the right time.
It actually just barely fit through the rough opening for the door.
So if we had have waited like another month,
we would have been chopping out bits of doorframe to get it in.
So that was something that we just about. Um,
it was a bad situation. Yeah, we got lucky.
We got lucky with probably a lot of things
Our tiny sink was super hard to find and very expensive,
but really worth spending money on.
Okay.
Composting toilets, really simple. It's basically
just a bucket with sawdust, um, urine separator,
which makes it so much easier to deal with.
So this folds up and it's full of sawdust in there.
Okay. So tell me a little bit about this uh, piece of stained glass here.
We don't see a lot of stained glass in tiny homes.
Yeah.
So that was a piece that my grandfather had made for me when I was a kid and I
was really into fishing and he was into stained glass at the time,
so he made me, um, a nice little stained glass fish.
So we decided that that might be a nice feature piece for the door and spent a
long time kind of searching for someone,
a company that could actually press it into a proper double-glazed window.
And it came out really nice.
Yeah, there's two things I really love about this.
A lot of people can't do stained glass in tiny homes because they're brittle
pieces of art. You know, going down the road,
it's something that could definitely get damaged.
But you found a way to actually do it where you have double pane tempered glass.
So that's great. And then I love,
it's something that a lot of people struggle to downsize,
especially with personal items when they're going into a tiny house and you have
probably carried this around for 20 years or something, you know,
and you found a way to integrate it into your tiny home.
So you found a way to make it into something new. And not only that,
but make it a centerpiece of your tiny house. So that's really great.
This is a, I would say our luxury, it's a concrete countertop.
It's about 200 pounds. We chose concrete because, um,
I guess that's my old trade. I used to be a concrete finisher. So, um,
it's something that I could do. And um,
I think there's a lot of features that make concrete a great material for
countertops. So I was eager to give it a try.
One thing I hate is where the backdrop, uh, hits the counter.
You got that little, that little corner that's always full of dirt and stuff.
So with concrete I was able to make this little kind of a rounded edge in there,
which is easy to clean and I love it. Another great thing about concrete,
you can kind of sculpt it how you want.
So this area all slopes into our sink and we've got these little metal strips
that hold the dishes up and let them kind of drain out while they're drying.
So a three burner propane stove. Yeah,
very simple but really works well and it's um,
kind of the perfect size for what we need. And then we have a small, um,
laundry machine.
So that just comes out like that
and we plug it right into the, um, faucet.
And the drain goes into the sink drain and yeah,
very simple but super effective.
The total cost of the whole thing was about $30,000.
So we did get a new trailer that was about all together with importing,
$4,300. We splurged on the shower,
400 bucks, you know, but a lot of the stuff,
a lot of the money actually went into the wood.
So as far as the hookup, right now we're,
we've been here a couple months and we're just with a standard potable water
hose. running over the lawn and same with the cable,
just kind of standard, uh, heavy duty cable, um,
into a 15 amp breaker. So all the appliances are propane. Um,
so like the hot water and the furnace,
which means we have very low electrical draw. Um,
so we can get away with plugging ended.
Basically any kind of outdoor outlet on any house.
Our trailer is an iron Eagle custom trailer. We went across the border,
we ordered it, we picked it up, we imported it.
So it was a bit of a complicated process because there's no,
not a lot of information about how to do that because technically you import a
trailer like this as a vehicle.
So we have it insured at the moment as a park model mobile home because our
intention is not to move it a lot, just to stay in one place most of the year.
So tell me a little bit about your parking space here. Cause it's beautiful.
You're like in agricultural area sort of, but you're also really close to town.
That's right. So we're in an area where there's a lot of farm land,
still about 25 minutes away from the city center, which is great for us working,
but we kind of get the best of both worlds where we're quite private. Um,
and it feels like being in the country,
we've got all these beautiful blueberry fields here with coyotes and herons and
that kind of thing that visit us all the time. So it's a beautiful quiet spot,
but it's really accessible.
Do you have any pieces of advice for people in British Columbia for finding
parking for tiny homes? I think it's just try every angle, you know,
to get the word out that you're looking,
like speaking to everyone you know about the fact that you're looking for a
space and just putting yourself out there and being persistent.
And I think making as many contacts as you can and then kind of having backups,
kind of a black book of potential spots. All right guys. Well,
thank you so much for taking us through your tiny house regulations on finding
such a great the spot. Thank you!
All right guys. See you later.