What is minimalism and can it be achieved with two small children?
In today's episode, I'm going to introduce you to Hannah and Josh,
who have recently downsized to a tiny house with their two young boys,
ages three and one. Without further ado,
let's take a tour of their gorgeous home located on a farm in Northern
Washington.
Hi, I'm Josh
and I'm Hannah and this is our tiny house.
We recently moved to the area after living in a big city and we tried to buy a
house, but after placing a lot of bids that fell through,
we looked into alternative living situations.
We decided to go tiny after we saw this tiny house on the Facebook market page.
We were able to pay for it with cash because it was a secondhand, tiny house.
Having two kids in a 280 square feet is challenging at times,
but it's also really fun. Family time is 100% of the time.
What is the plan for as they get older? Put them in a tent.
This is kind of our five year plan,
so because we're able to pay with cash to buy this house,
we're trying to save up more money so there'll be elementary age kids.
When we probably decide to expand our home size a little bit,
all we really need is inside 280 square feet and if I have a smaller house to
maintain, then there's just less worry
come on into our home.
It's 34 feet long, eight and a half feet wide, 13 and a half tall,
so legal to go down the road as a trailer.
We cook full time three meals at least here every single day.
We did not want it to feel like a tiny home galley kitchen.
We wanted it to feel like a full size kitchen and when we looked at this,
this was the reason we bought our tiny house.
All of our drawers are deep and the ones on top have secondary drawers,
all soft closed drawers. So our two little kids can't slam them.
And we have butcher block countertops. We have floating shelves,
which are fun to decorate and make the space seem a little bit larger.
We love our farmhouse sink. We love that it's white.
Our one year old and three year old often take baths in this sink.
And I love the fact that it has a window right here where I can look out and see
the kids play. We can look out and see the farms in the area.
We have a full size oven and range with five burners.
These are nice spice, little jars.
They're magnetic so you can just put them on any metal surface.
It's kind of fun. They have a really pretty honeycomb shape.
So this is our fridge. It's 10 cubic feet.
So technically an apartment size fridge, but it fits our family.
of four's food for two weeks. Just fine.
Like we don't feel like we need a huge fridge to be okay here.
This is our barnyard door. It rolls on gliders. It is a chalkboard. But, um,
our poor child who used it didn't realize you couldn't use anything other than
chalk on the chalkboard here we have a washer dryer combo.
I at first I wasn't quite sure about it because we had a separate washer and
dryer in our last house that had higher capacity.
But now that I have a washer dryer combo,
I kinda love it because I just put the laundry in, I start it,
and then when I come back a couple hours later, it's washed and dried.
There's no switching it over. There's no forgetting. And honestly,
I'm doing a load of laundry every day anyway,
so I'm not feeling like I need a high capacity machine anymore.
This was another huge selling points.
I've never seen a shower this big and in any of my tiny home adventures
Under here there's another three tier rack where we store all of like the toiletrees
My hair care right next to it is a diaper pail.
We diaper,
our youngest child and it works just fine in this space.
In fact, I think we like it because we don't have to find storage for a bunch of
disposable diapers in the house.
We just have one set of cloth and it works great.
The last thing in our bathroom of course is our toilet.
This is a separate composting toilet.
At first I was a little weirded out by the toilet but now that I've used it I
think it's really efficient.
It's pretty clean and all of our guests are weirded out by it because it looks
like an actual toilet versus a lot of other composting toilets that are more
like a bucket with a lid so to speak. The kits use it.
We have a little separate pun intended seat for them and it just,
it actually sits right on top.
They do their business and then they pick it up themselves,
wipe it down and set it in its corner.
And then the last thing on this end of the house is a his and her closet.
It came with the rod on the top and when we purchased it we outfitted it with
some additional shelves to create more storage.
Over here is the desk that I do all of my social media work on when I'm not
doing my business work here.
Oftentimes I'll pick my Mac up from the base here,
move it along this wall. It sits on our counter here.
We plug it in and is what we use for our TV. So we use Netflix,
YouTube, different things like that.
Instead of standard cable here we do have central heat,
it's electric. We have three units in our home.
The first unit that we primarily use is right here by the front door. Um,
it's easy to adjust.
The second one is currently behind her couch for obvious reasons we don't use it
because our couch is in the way. And the third one is in our bathroom.
And when we needed air conditioning,
we purchased a unit that can be placed in this window here.
So we just recently took it out because it's coming into
the fall and winter time. But in the summer,
having a window unit was plenty again for this space,
keeping it nice and cool for ourselves and for our kids.
This is our living room. This is where we eat.
This is where we watch TV. This is where we just hang out.
side table you see over here is from Ikea.
It's actually folds out to be a table that can seat up to six people.
We eat right in front of this couch right here.
We have a few chairs stored in the back.
Every stair here has storage,
so we store like our little children's shoes down where they can reach them.
You know,
we have things forward and all of these which have hinges and then under the
taller stairs we have storage for larger possessions here.
Things for our dog or coats which get wet here in the Pacific Northwest all the
time and our cleaning supplies
We have our boys sleeping both on one bed.
We found that they sleep better when they're kind of sleeping closer together
versus being on two toddler beds. All of our kid's clothes
are stored on this little shelving unit.
So when we tell them to go find a shirt or go find a pair of pants,
we give them the responsibility of finding their own clothes,
even in this small space at a young age.
The first project we did in this home was to put this gate up, just buckle it.
And our three year old who is competent on the stairs can get down from the
stairs. But our one year old who is not asked to ask for help.
This is a King size bed here and as you can see there's still a little bit of
space on each side of the bed. What we love is the skylights.
We love that the windows let some air flow appear.
I think each loft has eight outlets, which is a huge perk of this house.
We're never vying for outlet space.
So we've been here for about six months.
All this dirt here will eventually be grass and we'll have a nice yard and
probably a small little chicken coop up in the corner.
And it was just kind of overgrown blackberries and old farm equipment that was
just kind of stored here. Um, but we've cleaned it up and leveled it.
There was actually kind of a ditch right here.
We're kind of cleaning it as payment
for rent, for the plot of land.
It's pretty great living on a farm. The boys love living on the farm.
What's the alpacas name? Allie. The alpaca.
If you were to ask us a year ago, if we'd be living in a tiny house,
that's not what our plan was. Our plan was to buy a large house,
but it wasn't an option for us. And if we weren't open-minded,
we would never have had this opportunity to be on our way towards our dreams of
having a little homestead.
And I would not choose it any differently for our two little kids.
I wouldn't choose it different for us. And I don't know,
I just feel like these six months have really flown by and have been just a
really fun experience.
Thanks for tuning into this
week's episode.
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