hey guys jenna here welcome back to my channel where i take you on tours of unique homes
in today's video we're going to meet the smith family as they take us through their journey with
downsizing into a non-toxic tiny home to improve the health of their young son this heartfelt
story of living small while achieving financial freedom will have you thinking about the harmful
chemicals that we encounter in everyday life and that could even be hiding in our own homes
so let's learn more and take a tour with this charming family
but first i'd like to thank nomad internet for sponsoring this video nomad is the only truly
unlimited internet you can use in rural areas and while on the road stay connected wherever
you are without any extra fees to find out more check out the link in the description
hi we're the smiths my name is taylor i'm mason and this is our tiny home
so before we moved into the tiny home we had actually bought a regular house lived there
about a year it was actually full of toxins our sun started regressing and so we just decided to
go tiny for financial reasons and also to have a certified green tiny home as well so i think what
inspired me personally and then family the most was the fact that i really didn't have any time
with the family i was working nights at the time i would you know try to stay up all day
on my day off and then sleep normally and then it just was messing me up really bad so when
we finally got into the tiny home it's literally i'm with them every second that i'm in the house
so just a lot more time with the family is what inspired me personally
and then also a good bonus was the fact that it drastically reduced our bills
so we've been in the tiny house just over a year we got her a week before christmas 2019
and she was a perfect christmas gift for us but so we decided to go with tumbleweed tiny homes
based in colorado and they built it in five weeks i think the main reason why we didn't build the
actual tiny home is because i don't know that much about construction i think if we did it it would
have taken closer probably like six months to a year it's probably way longer right as opposed
to the five weeks that we got it in the total cost of the house after or not including like delivery
and setup and hookup and all that stuff was about 93 000 and then you know a couple hundred dollars
for us to you know trench and get the electrical setup and the water and all that stuff what we
have in here is pine and it's just milled there's no stain there's no paint or anything on it
we decided to do that our youngest son doesn't process toxins so we wanted to keep the inside
of this as natural as possible that was super important with our house is to have a space
where he could be himself and something wasn't harming him over and over and over without
us even knowing about it so right now we are stationary we are on a trailer so it is able to
be moved we are fortunate enough to be on my mom's property she has about an acre of horse property
so i think one of the main big changes in our lives would be probably our youngest
son's progression so all the toxins that our body usually gets rid of through sweat or going to the
restroom his body doesn't do that and either does my husband's so for asher it goes straight to his
brain so if he eats something he's not supposed to i can tell because he overstimulates he regressed
in our old house had mold exposure on top of he didn't have as clean as a diet he's he has now
and then with his gene mutation it makes it worse for him we love him no matter what but he wasn't
always this way he used to talk he used to say dada and mama and everything and we moved and
he slowly changed and became like a zombie but now going back green figuring out the issues and
changing everything about our lives he's coming back around he interacts with his brother
they get to play like they have the best time and i just think that he's excelling in everything
right now he goes to therapy once a week he has ot and speech but we've also made a lot of changes
in our own lives for him and he hugs us he makes more eye contact than he ever did i mean i never
thought that he would look me in the eyes and just have that connection that he does now am i crying
i just feel like everything's happened at the right time we found a great doctor that
has assessed him has worked with kids before like him and also just helped supplement
anything that his little body needs so he could be the best version of himself
come on in
so this is our living room we decided instead of doing a little porch which they usually do offer
to extend it all the way out so we had as much room as possible this is something my son just got
for christmas it's his therapy swing and it works perfectly with the beam here we move it usually
over and it's an extra seat for him and there's plenty of room for all of us here on the couch
this is our ac unit it does ac and heat but being here in arizona we don't really use the heat that
often so before we get to the kitchen this is actually all kinds of collection stuff that my son
has a plant that i've kept alive and our calendar these are all our bills that's why it says not
today so this is kind of our little decorated area that we have here in the tiny home this
is our kitchen we decided to not do the upgrade with the oven we kept it pretty simple as far as
the money and things like that we knew that we don't cook as often as we wish but the two burner
induction cooktop has worked great we also have a juicer and a berkey for our water and a microwave
just like everybody else in the tiny homes we got a magnet strip from my mom for christmas and it's
worked out great whenever i need to cut fruit up for the kids or anything like that it's super
easily accessible plus the kids can't reach it we have a toaster oven down here whenever we need to
toast anything we have all of our pots and pans and rice cooker down here
all of our silverware and extra things our sink is just a single sink but believe it or not
a year ago we used to bathe the baby in here and he fit just fine
he loved it now he's a little bit too tall but that's what we have the shower for now
and across from the kitchen we have our closet so this has all of the clothes for my husband and i
so in here we have everything organized plus storage down below for our shoes
this is our fridge it's an apartment sized fridge we got a lock on it again have kids if you don't
want mustard on your couch you get a lock it has enough room for everything that we need we go
grocery shopping about once a week and it's not for lack of room it's more of the kids eat it
everything and then across from the fridge we have our stairs for the upstairs loft
but also storage for all of our food
this is our washer and dryer combo it works really great as far as drying goes
though sometimes it takes a little bit for the clothes to get completely dry but my husband
bought me a clothesline that's actually in the bathroom that i'll show you in a little bit
this is our bathroom we do have a pocket door to close for privacy we have a single sink a mirror
and behind the mirror we have you know a medicine cabinet things of that nature and then we also
decided to go with a composting toilet the reason why we did that is in order to stay
where we're at right now on my mom's property we probably would have had to put in
another septic tank or something and we didn't know how long we were going to be here we have our
dog food in here and we usually keep her bowls in our shower because our youngest likes to dump her
water all over the ground so we figured just keep it somewhere that if it does get dumped it's not a
big deal we have a regular shower nothing fancy i would have liked to have a tub that's probably the
one thing that i wish we could have had but as far as everything else goes i think we got everything
we wanted a tub just would have been nice but that's okay mom's right next door we borrow her
tub occasionally and that's okay well she says it's okay so under here we have our water heater
again we've lived here year never one out of hot water we're also in arizona it's 119 in the summer
so it's always hot this is the clothesline that my husband bought for me so you pull this across
and just hang your clothes up if they're not completely dry works out great
we also have a pocket door for our bedroom when we first bought the tiny home my husband used to
work nights and that was another thing that was important to us was that i could close
this off and still you know home school be with the children and he was able to sleep back here
this is our master suite it's the size of a king sized bed we have a queen so we have a little bit
of walkway we have a little cubby here for you know underwear things like that since we didn't
do any stains or paints i wanted to add a little bit of color so i picked up this wallpaper it's
just a peel and stick so our electrical closet is in here i don't have to mess with it we are
plugged in here we put in 50 amp plug-in so we are plugged in and don't have solar that's
something we want to look into for the future is hopefully get some solar panels for our house
so we decided to go with stairs they are a little bit steep
but our son figured it out super duper fast like how to get up and
down we haven't had any issues any kids falling down the stairs nothing
so this is the boys loft this is their sleeping side plus all of their books back behind their bed
they have two windows on the side so this summer it got way way way way too hot up here for them
to sleep at night we did have a fan but then we found a perfect ac unit that rolls around and
gets this place super cold i think it's for like 300 square feet which is our entire home
these are two twin sized beds and if they ever don't want to sleep next to each other the loft
is 18 feet long we opted to get it extended that way the boys had enough room up here to play have
a separate toy area and when they're older you know have their each separate area so now we're
on the other side of the loft where we keep all of our kids toys and then in here is the cube cubbies
so it has all their clothes organized you know top rows big brother bottom rows little brother
we also have this netting that we put up again another safety feature for the
kids so if the kids do like i said ever not want to have their beds side by side
one of those mattresses actually can fit over here and we could rearrange this whole space
so this has been the complete inside of the tiny home i'm going to have my husband kind
of walk around the outside and see what we've done to the property to make it more home for us
so right now we are on our deck my brother-in-law and i built this we only started off with this
one section here and we wanted the stairs built in because that's a bit of a leap to go from uh back
and forth really all it is is pavers then pallets and then just the wood on top and we got the
weatherproof that way you can stand the sun and the rain even though we don't get a lot of that
in arizona so after we built that i had a little bit extra so i built this nice little bench for
our shoes so with the design of our house we had the metal roofing it works really well also we
wanted the white picket fence stream you know so my brother-in-law also helped me paint all
of these things here we put the nice fake grass up because arizona doesn't really keep real grass
well we put up the awning that way again arizona gets really really hot so we wanted our dog to
have a little bit of shade even though right now she's trying to enjoy as much sun as she can
we had to run our electrical from the main house to here that way we had some way to plug in so we
had to trench all the way around come through here and run 250 amps all the way here that way we can
plug in we also have our water hookup same deal we had to run it from the main house and then we
have our gray water tank that goes right in here and it goes to a gravel bed just right underneath
we do have the composting toilet so it's not black water we just run our our normal shower and sink
water through there overall going tiny has made us appreciate a lot of the small things i always
get asked how can you you know you must like your children or you must love your husband to live in
336 square feet like well of course that's why i had them and why i got married but it's made us
just spend a lot more time together as a family my kids are outside more than they ever were
when we lived in a traditional home i mean they're out riding their bikes we're able to financially
pay for a lot of things we need medically for both my husband and for our son therapies things like
that and when i look back i'm like gosh i did not think we'd be having a compost toilet living in a
tiny when i look back i've always loved tiny homes but i'm like i never thought i would convince him
to go tiny but it's been pretty easy and made us a lot more conscious of the little things
i hope you guys enjoyed this week's video make sure to like
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