Hi, I'm Jenna. I'm here in Asheville,
North Carolina here to see Laura and Matt's tiny house.
They've graciously decided to give us a tour. So let's go ahead and check,
get out.
Welcome. Come on in.
All right, so this is Laura. You want to go ahead and show us around your house?
Sure. Well, it's very small so it won't take long. Here's the house. Um,
we have, you know, basic living space, a couple of closets, loft,
kitchen, bathroom. Cool.
And so is this based on your own design? It is an original tumbleweed design.
We bought the plans back in 2008 uh, when, uh,
Jay Shaffer was still doing the designs. Right. And, but it's not on wheels.
You decided to build on a foundation. Correct.
We wanted to have it here in the mountains and a wheels were impractical here,
so we thought we'd build it on a foundation.
And I noticed your foundation is a little, uh, not level.
Let's say you had to sort of come up with a way to do that. Yeah, we had to,
you know, building a foundation like that is a, is a,
an art of building in four dimensions because you have to make sure it's level
and plum and square and all the time working on a mountain.
So it was probably the hardest thing we did,
but it was probably the most rewarding too. Right.
And you have this excellent view of all the mountains and it just snowed here
last night. So we've tracked up here in the snow.
I can only imagine what trekking up all of that material must have been to build
the tiny house. Yes. Yes. We don't, there's no road to get up to our house,
so we have to carry everything, uh, up,
which included all of the materials to build the house, two by fours, windows,
everything. We just had to carry it up. Great. Okay, well let's take a look.
So starting at that door, you have two closets here. Two little closets. Yep.
His and her closet, his and hers closet. And we also have, uh, for our cat,
a little litter box access for her.
Your cat's name is Piglet. Very important. The cat named Piglet. Very cute.
And there's a couple other cat things in here,
I believe what we're going to check that out and just a little bit.
And so that's your closet. And then, um, this is Matt's over here.
Yeah. So you can just see how much storage she has.
Take off your shoes, you know, um, little mud room area.
And then we go into the great room, right? Yes, absolutely.
Where we have a basically a dining table slash,
desk and a sofa. Um, I work at the,
the dining table, uh, which is a full dome table that you can get at Ikea.
I think it's actually one of the most common things a tiny houses use is this
table. Several other tiny house builders have used this one.
We did built-ins for some shelving all over the house. Yeah,
I like that. And I like how you hang your guitar.
It's a good way to get things out of the way.
And it's nice that you decided to use these director's chairs because they can
fold up and you can have all this open space if you wanted to.
So that's a good little space saver right there. Yup. Absolutely.
And we talked about this a little bit earlier.
You made this a futon base and bought a futon topper, right? Yep.
It was like a dorm style futon. Uh, that was the right dimensions. Uh,
but the frame actually stuck out from the wall too far,
so we had to kind of redesign it. So we built the frames that we could, uh,
store some things under it. We want to close that off at some point, but, uh,
doors and drawers and things under there. But uh, for now,
this is what we've got and we can still store stuff under it. Excellent.
And I love the pillow. Get a good look in the pillow.
This is Laura's blog life in a 120 square feet,
which is what I'm assuming is the square footage of this place approximately.
It's actually a little bit more than 120, but 120 sounded better as a blog name.
What's the length? Uh, it is, uh,
No, it's a 16 by eight. 16 by eight and eight is the interior, right.
So this is, yup. Yup, yup. Yeah. So it's actually wider than, um,
if it was on wheels cause you'd have to make it a little bit less to be
roadworthy. Okay, cool. Well, and then make sure you get a shot. Her.
Awesome. Uh, storage up here.
Those are some cool little containers and nice way to store in a beautiful way.
All right, so let's go on past. Show us your kitchen. All right.
Well once you get through the great room, uh,
we have a very simple kitchen. Our entire house is designed to be off the grid.
So we have very simple kitchen systems. We use a butane stove,
so we have one out now, but we actually own two. Uh,
we use a Berkey water filter system, um, and we didn't do a sink,
so we just use the space and for it we don't have an oven,
we don't have traditional refrigeration. So it's all pretty simple. Minimal.
Yep. As the house is. And then you have this heater here.
I don't think we talked about it yet, but it's a little propane power heater,
correct. Yes. We rarely need to use the heater. Um, you know,
this is completely crazy. In November that it snowed. Right.
Normally this would not have happened. We broke that guy out,
so we don't normally have it on at all. Um, you know, in the South,
just in the winter, you don't need it very much. Right. Cool. All right.
And then I think, uh, you should go and check out the bathroom.
I love the doors. This is something I haven't seen in a tiny house yet,
which is a doors that open like that. Double doors. Yeah, we did that.
So they would optimize the space in the kitchen basically. Um,
it's pretty straight forward bathroom and we built in a little cabinets and the
walls and shelves here. Typical composting toilets,
lovable loo. I have the same bath mat in my tiny house.
And then go ahead and open up the shower show and talk about how the system
works in there. So what we have in here is, um, you know,
we put in the little fiberglass shower and we have a, a system.
It's a manual system. Basically it's air pressurized pump for the shower.
So fill it up with hot water and pump it and then use a little nozzle for a
regular, basically a regular shower. Excellent.
And the cabinetry in here is very, um, it's minimal,
but it's also like well-built and the way that it's completely spacious.
They have a lot of shelving underneath the sink area, above high shelves,
corner shelves, you know, those are all hanging your mugs.
These are great ways to save space.
And I was talking about it with Matt earlier.
I really like your windows cause they're exactly proportional to the house.
Exactly. Some tiny houses don't do that, but it really does give you, you know,
just that homey feel to it instead of a, something that's not proportional.
And then I think the last place that we need to explore, Oh wait. Yeah,
we do need to talk about these Those are designed for our cat
Piglet. Um, when we first moved in, we tried to get her to climb up the ladder,
but she was having none of that. Um,
so we had to figure out real quick how to get her up to the loft cause she
sleeps with us. So that had to happen.
So we built these platforms so she can go from the floor to the sofa to the back
of the sofa to the platform, to the other platform and up. So she, you know,
now she runs up and down and up and down. However, about two, three weeks in,
she figured out how to use the ladder. Now she can climb up the ladder.
She can't get down off the ladder, but she can climb up.
It's nice to have that option though. Okay.
So Nabil's checking out the loft there. You want to talk about it at all?
Yeah, I mean it's a pretty sort of loft. We kept the roof pitch, you know,
very simple. We didn't do dormers uh, you know,
since we were first time home builders,
we kind of wanted to keep it as simple as possible. Um,
so it's just cozy enough for the two of us and our cat to sleep up there. Uh,
you can sit up and read a book. Uh, sometimes I would computer game up there.
Um,
the bed is only a full size but we're not tall people so it works for us.
It looks like a queen to me if it's a big full size,
plenty of room I think up there and I,
I've been in others that have very small loft and I really like this note here
of your spice rack. Um, hidden spice rack on the uh,
on, I don't know what you'd call that, just the, the top of your grade.
It was just a empty space that we really didn't have any other use for.
So we put spices up there. Yup. And you're very, uh,
efficient here because um, you have the solar, so you're off grid.
These lights you, I think we counted them, six led lights. Uh,
yup. Yup. Six led lights. And that can be powered easily with the solar.
Yeah. And yeah. Yeah.
I think that's about it because you have the composting toilet,
you have the propane for your appliances. Yeah. Yeah. It's a,
it's off the grid and very straightforward.
We both work from here and it has everything you need to power laptops and
charge phones and all that sort of stuff as well as the lights. Right.
And you bought this property, this land, and you decided to build on it.
And so far it's been working out for you. I see you've extended,
you've made a little patio down there. We did. It was a nice spot to, you know,
we live outside or outside most of the time.
It's just a beautiful part of the country and we picked it for a reason,
so we want to be outdoors as much as possible. So we built the,
the deck outside so we could spend time out there as well. Cool. All right,
well I think that's about it. Um, don't forget to check out Laura's blog and,
uh, see you next time.