hey there welcome to my channel where I take you on tours of unique homes and showcase stories of
people living alternatively in today's video we're traveling back to a Coney bell tiny
house Village to meet one couple who decided to downsize because they couldn't seem to find
happiness in their big home they're going to take us on a tour of their beautiful tiny home which
they share with their Saint Bernard and tell us why they found a new sense of Freedom by living
in a smaller home our expenses have come down significantly to the point where I don't have
to work as much and I have all this extra time that I've never had as time goes by and we get
rid of more and more things it's freedom and if you're curious about this tiny house Community
or any other tiny house Community we have a playlist Linked In the description that will
give you tours of tiny house Villages across the country with plenty of information about
where you can park a tiny home but right now let's jump right in and take a tour [Music]
hi I'm Kate and I'm Brian we live together with our Saint Bernard Jack
and we're excited to show you our tiny house that we've named Faith
[Music] foreign
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I grew up very very poor and so I kind of grew up with that belief that if you have more then
you will be happy my writing career took off and my books took off and so we thought that
that meant that we needed these big things and we this big house in this exclusive neighborhood and
we bought it and we did and I had never been more stressed out and I'd never had to work harder and
I'd never felt more inauthentic I would say it was kind of maddening because we I just
bought this big house we've got this beautiful neighborhood yeah we got all this furniture
check and we kept waiting to be happy when are we gonna be happy right and and in reality we
became more and more stressed as time goes by and we get rid of more and more things it's freedom
we were living in New Hampshire and our Builder was in California contract
s was 84 000 we've spent well over a hundred now partly because we had to move it across the
country and that cost us 9 000 to move across we've been here for just about four months
we are very much tiny newbies and we've had the great opportunity you know at a Coney
Bell we're surrounded by people with so much more knowledge than us and they are so kind to
share that with us moving into this community and the welcomingness has been a blessing
Welcome to our tiny house faith we elect to go with a 32 foot long 10 foot wide home with a two
foot bump out over the front of the house so our total length therefore is 34 feet we went with
the maximum height that would be road legal is 13 and a half feet so that's where we're standing at
we did go with a triple axle trailer that has an 18 000 pound capacity to handle all the weight of
our home our home has 13 total Windows including the door we have the majority on this side which
is the part that sees the most sun in the day so we have great sunlight throughout the day
and great natural lighting inside the house on the other side of the house we have some
larger Windows they give us some nice view of the mountains and the Oconee Bell community [Music]
the whole square footage with the tiny house thing it's very confusing to me
because technically we're 32 by 10 so I would think 320 but so that's like downstairs to me
because then you have the 10 by 10 upstairs so that's 100 and then we have eight by ten
up there so that's 80. so do we have 500 or do we have 320. I don't know
basically for our entire house the most important thing was function and so for the couch and stuff
like that the cushions lift up and so there's some functionality but I also wanted cozy so
we've got lots of blankets and we've got our candles everywhere and so this is kind of just
like the space where we mostly hang out [Music] so this is Jack the Saint Bernard and he just
turned nine on November 1st and so we've had him since he was about this big he literally had fit
in our hands which is hard to believe so Jack is a hairy dude I'm sure you you can see that
and so for him particularly he has these special cooling beds he sleeps all day [Music] that Loft
area belongs to our boys when they come home we have grown-up boys so they're both in the
military so they're not home very often but that is kind of their space when they are home and then
also I use that for an office when Brian is at work I work downstairs because Jack he gets a
little lonely on the days when Brian is at home I definitely go and work up there there's a very
mild pitch you don't want snow sitting up on top of a roof and you also want your water to
be able to drain we ended up going with eight inch mattresses so that we can maximize being able to
sit up here and be cozy and still have plenty of Headroom [Music] so this is a full mattress one
thing that we had learned before we went tiny is we didn't understand that mattresses have to have
like a little a little bit of a breathing space underneath them so each of the mattresses that we
have we have like this tiny little thing you put it under the mattresses and it makes it so that
the mattresses can breathe so that they don't get moldy the getting down is a little uh less Grace
[Music] Welcome to our kitchen space we are kind of in the center of our house and in my mind the
kitchen is the kind of the heart of your home functionality was key and then a little bit of
coziness with just a couple of decorations but we are big into you know cooking for ourselves
and so some of the absolute Necessities that we had to have in this house were a normal
kitchen sink and a normal stove with an oven at one point Once Upon a Time we'd had a 3
000 square foot house and our kitchen was enormous by golly we actually didn't need
almost all of those things so the pantry was the hottest of messes so I ended up ordering in a
bunch of like these these type of I don't remember what I think they're Rubbermaid Rubbermaid and got
these cute little labels for them and just kind of started designating spaces for all of these
things and I will say that my baking drawer is my absolute favorite so just because it looks
I don't know it just looks so neat and so fun and I just want to bake things going to an apartment
size fridge actually hasn't been a big deal at all it's worked out totally fine [Music]
this is just typically we've got a big old massive closet here that pretty much fits
everything that doesn't fit somewhere else I guess maybe you could look around and you see
all of this white and white kind of a sterile but I liked it let the accents kind of do the talking
in our home so I also am obsessed with flowers so we literally have flowers on the table every
single week to me sitting down to a meal with family and friends is vital so this was very
important I don't want to sit on the couch and eat our dinner my mood is very affected by if
I'm on yoga pants or jeans or if I'm sitting on the couch or sitting at the table like if I'm
paying bills or sometimes doing certain work it's serious and it's like time to sit at the
table so so that's kind of what I think of when I think of this space but mostly it's a place to
gather and enjoy food together we had to have it we wanted a normal size sink and we've got
the the double action here so you can keep dirty on one side and clean on the other in our last
space that we were in we didn't have a garbage disposal that was an absolute Must In My Mind
when you're going tiny you don't always know where you're going to end up finding your
parking spot so we just really wanted to be in charge of our water so we've got a really
cool filtration system that gives us really tasty water and I like knowing that it's Ultra filtered
this is one of my Prides and joys in the house I absolutely was thrilled that we were going to be
able to have propane again because we had been in electric I didn't want our our bumper the wheels
impeding in our living space and so what we ended up doing is you can see it here on the stove
the they had to bump our counter space out about it about that much to make up for the wheel well
space so with that bump out I think we got about maybe three or four in inches of extra space and
so that sounds wonderful and it's wonderful to be able to put our olive oil and salt and
pepper back there but one thing that we didn't realize is that when we get into the cupboard
to be able to reach things we kind of end up on our tippy toes so having that top shelf
isn't necessarily functional in this space unless we're going to be on a step stool so
so that was that was unexpected and unintended but [Music]
Welcome to our bathroom I actually love this space you know when I was thinking of tiny
house bathroom I was very concerned with how small it was going to be but this is actually
a very functional space we were able to go with a quartz countertop which we love and
I always wanted to do one of these cool little sinks here so it kind of has a farmhouse vibe
there are people that are braver than I am that you know they do the the compost thing I think
that's a wonderful thing but I am a toilet flushing kind of gal so so we went with just
kind of the traditional and we are so blessed to be at a county Bell where you know you can
have normal Plumbing I just wanted normal I just wanted as normal as we could have and so
that's what we got and so this is our fabulous little shower here
I wanted a bathtub although it is shorter it's a little bit squishier it's also very tall so
there's still plenty of room to get in here and just sink in and just really enjoy a nice bath I
don't know about you guys but I think of Sunday is self-care Sunday and that means a bath so
so when Brian and I first moved in together eons ago we did not have a washer and dryer
and that was the only place that we ever didn't have a washer and dryer
so like if we couldn't have a washer and dryer I wasn't going tiny so so we ended
up getting this is an apartment size model and we absolutely love it and it's actually
it it's really big like I feel like the dryer does the same size load that maybe a typical
dryer would do obviously maybe not one of those big kahunas but yeah it we love it
these are our stairs and we love them these stairs actually are a happy accident our original Builder
had run out of time to finish our build and so they had kind of had a skeleton of stairs
at a Coney Bell we are so blessed to have all kinds of fantastically skilled carpenters in the
neighborhood so our friend Mike he was so kind to build these steps for us and they do all kinds of
magical things so like this step opens for us and I keep some puzzles in there so that's not
a huge space but it's big enough for a thousand piece puzzle and then they just all lift up and
so we're able to kind of keep extra kitchen storage in them and then the the bottom two
are the super coolest because not only does this one lift up but you can also pull it out and then
this one it doesn't lift up but it just pulls out a super long way and this is where we have ended
up putting some of our extra shoe storage so from here we will head on up to the master Loft [Music]
this is a hundred square feet so it's a 10 by 10 Loft we ended up going with a queen size
mattress and again it's the one of those eight inch mattresses I wanted us to have room around
each side to be able to crawl because we do crop but we you know just have enough space
to kind of maneuver and get around and not be all squished the one thing that I do not love
about tiny living it's making the bed so a lot of crawling and I wanted to be able to to get at the
bedroom all the sides I love to journal in the evenings and so it was super important to have
a space to put a cup of tea and light a candle I could not find side tables so we ended up going
with one single Cube you know we were kind of concerned about the Privacy aspect not only do
we have pretty little banisters but then also we ended up going with like an eight Cube system from
Ikea over here and kind of decorated those up the boys have a four Cube system on their side and so
there's privacy if you just open up these windows you have this gorgeous Breeze that blows by and
not only does it make your bedroom comfortable but it also just kind of pulls through the whole
house especially if you have Lofts on the other side and you open the window goes on in the other
Loft too it just pulls this fantastic Breeze through the entire space so we do that often
so one of the considerations that go into the home is you know what are you going to put on
the siding and we knew that our preference was not to have a metal or an artificial looking
siding we wanted it to look at very much like a house so we elected just to go with wood we put
a nice high quality paint on it to protect it from the weather but we elected it just to go with wood
one of the requirements for living in a Coney Bell is that we cover up the bottom of the house
we have a temporary skirting on for now so our long-term plan here is to actually enclose all of
our Underside insulate it and waterproof it when the temperature drops we can feel it in our feet
all right so our external storage uh was in our design from the beginning our storage actually
arrived unfinished and it turned out to be a good thing because when they installed our hot water
heater there was a mix mix up and they actually installed an external water heater inside of our
storage which is a complete and total fire hazard so we had to rip all of this off we now have a
three sectioned storage this first section just contains our hot water heater you're not going
to be able to see too well into it because we had to put a metal blanket on the inside of the wood
because we still have that external hot water heater and it has a pretty decent exhaust so we
wanted to protect and thermal protect the inside of the wood we did go with propane for our hot
water heater and for our oven all of our lines we insulated and we heat wrapped so we do have
a plug in here that has a thermostat in it that will kick on when the temperatures drop here in
North Carolina to keep all of our exposed water lines uh heated and from freezing so in addition
to the hot water heater we also have actual storage here between these two compartments we
bought all the same size bin so that they're easily stacked and we kind of designed this
storage container to have this bin in it and you can see we have pretty decent amount of storage we
do have access to our electrical panel back here we elected to go with 50 amps this neighborhood
Coney Bell is fantastic because they do give you the option of hardwiring and you add a hundred
so here's another area that we should have done a little bit more research into we did the research
into which mini split that we wanted to have and where we wanted the placement in the home because
we have double loss we were concerned that one Loft would be super cold or super hot during that
particular season and the other side of the house would you know not be feeling any of that so we
we definitely wanted to have a middle mounted HVAC unit what we didn't know and didn't anticipate is
that when the fan kicks on we get a really low tone Rumble inside the house you can't hear it
out here it's not like our machine is loud it's just because it's on our wall down the road or if
we had to install it again we definitely would not have mounted it on the side of the house we would
have mounted it down on the ground and just run longer tubing up to it our home came with scissor
Jacks installed at six different points throughout the house but the majority of the weight was
sitting on the wheels and so we found very early on that after the home was leveled that we had
sway up in the Lofts whenever people were walking down below so we very quickly changed course
and we are now sitting on concrete blocks six different points and our sway is completely gone
you know sometimes I feel fraudulent saying that we live in a tiny house
because it doesn't feel tiny I just want to keep you know being more
and more simple and it's very relaxing and and soothing and I just I love it
our expenses have come down significantly to the point where I don't have to work as much and I
have all this extra time that I've never had and that's a pretty cool thing yeah yeah [Applause]
thanks for watching this week's video don't forget to check out a tour of a
Coney bell tiny house Community by clicking on the link in the
description and I will see you soon with another tiny or unique home tour
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