thanks to this week's sponsor jackery
hey there welcome to my channel where i take you on tours of tiny
and unique homes homeownership is an important part of every adult's life
but in recent years with skyrocketing prices becoming a homeowner in your 20s
has been practically impossible but in today's video we meet a young couple that was able to
build their first home together and of course it's a tiny home if you like these kind of videos
make sure that you subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you know every
single time we publish a new video but right now let's take a tour of this young couple's tiny home
hi welcome to my home this is fala thrantini my name is nicole
and i live here with my husband jamie
we finished building the house in april 2020 we started our build in april 2018 so after
two years we have now been in here an additional two years so it's been quite a process of building
we first became interested in tiny homes probably
at least five years ago before we started building i had kind of found them on instagram we watched
all the shows and it was really enticing living in massachusetts it can be really hard to find
housing that's affordable as a young couple as young people we really want to be in the area but
it's expensive so this was a great opportunity for us to own our own home have no home debt we
built this completely out of pocket and it's allowed us to have a really great foundation
to start our lives together and to be able to save to eventually have land in a slightly bigger home
before we started our official build jamie had done a very extensive google sketchup that really
placed out every scrap of framing every piece of siding and we were able to tweak it as we
went along but we really were able to minimize build waste for the build we really wanted to
stretch our money as far as it could go so we decided to do as much ourselves as we
could we ended up hiring out the insulation job electric we had help with and we also
had a family friend help with the propane lines but other than that we did everything ourselves
so jamie and i met in high school so we are high school sweethearts we've been dating for
almost 13 years now we've been married for almost three moving in we was our first time moving in
together so we i kind of like to say we didn't have any bad habits to break from a larger space
we kind of moved right in coexisted really well in the space we sometimes bump into each other in
the kitchen but other than that we really have found our groove in this 300 square foot home
so for the outside of our house we chose to do cedar siding we liked the quality of the wood we
like how it ages we really wanted to do this shosugiban method on the house it helps with
pest control it makes it less flammable it was definitely a labor of love it's a long process but
we really love how it turned out and the two-tone of the house really pops moving along this way you
can see where our water input is we fill up about once a week our tank and this is the vent for our
incinerating toilet moving along this way you can see where our electric input is we just are hooked
right up to my parents house next door for now we originally were hoping to do solar panels but
it was a little too expensive to do right after building an entire house so this is good for now
this seems like a good place to talk about my personal experience with solar power in my tiny
house and we're going to do that thanks to this week's sponsor jackery so i'm inside of my tiny
house right now without power and i wanted to see if the jackery explorer 1000 could power
my entire tiny house so what i'm going to do is plug it in and see if anything turns on
all the lights came on in my tiny house one of the heaters
i heard my bluetooth speaker power up i also have a refrigerator running
and the fan to my composting toilet and it looks like we're using about 650 660 watts of power now
so if it was a nice sunny day i could plug my jackery solar panels into the checkered
explorer 1000 and it could receive power at the same time that it's powering my tiny house
and of course you can still plug the unit into the wall or into your car charger so there's multiple
ways that you can charge you don't have to use the solar panels but it's nice to have that option
jackery is unveiling their new product the jackery solar generator 1000 pro at the ifa expo 2022
the first 300 people to pre-order will receive a free gift so follow the link at the top of the
description to find out more about this exciting launch and for a chance to win a flagship product
now let's get back to the tour moving along this way we have our propane shed right here
when we got our trailer originally from tiny northeast foundations and trailer made trailers
we specifically asked them to do this bump out on the trailer and it allowed us to bump out
our secondary loft inside as well to create a little more storage space we had a bird nesting
in here this spring which was a new addition we weren't really excited about but we let it stay
moving on to the back side of the house we really wanted this to be a really dramatic kind of moment
we got some inspiration from a lot of tiny houses online to kind of create this pattern
here we wanted the windows to have a different kind of pop to them a different kind of trim
we did also get these metal plates for our trailer for the jacks we were finding that it was sinking
into the ground because it's obviously very heavy and those have done a really great job
so when we built the house we knew we wanted a lot of really nice big windows to let in a lot
of natural light and also our surroundings are just beautiful so we wanted to really
take advantage of that all of the windows we got were stock size so we didn't have to
wait very long we have 10 windows total one of them was a hand-me-down was free
everything else we got from a company right in town here where we are
all right coming into the house now the first thing is the door this was a wedding present
that my uncle made us the arch has been a favorite feature of mine but also has made
making the trim and finishing this piece a little tricky which is why two years in we're still not
quite done here and we also when you step in have a step down which is where we put all of our shoe
storage under here we wanted to take you know use every piece of space that we could coming in
i knew i wanted it to feel kind of like a nook and enclosed and cozy
so we have a nice big tv here we've got art everywhere from our travels and from going around
we kind of spend a lot of our time here watching movies hanging out this is one of the
ikea sleeper sofas so we have had a total of one overnight guest but it's nice to have that option
another thing that was really fun to work on was this dresser this is a dresser we found on
the side of the road just down the street jamie ended up cutting it and kind of piecing it back
together again and then from the pieces that we cut off we made some of the shelving around the
house that you'll see and it's served us really well it's most of our closing storage is in here
so one of our heating sources in the house is this dickinson marine heater we don't use it
super frequently just because the flame doesn't always stay on which doesn't feel the safest but
if it's a really cold night it's great to turn it on and really heat up the house otherwise we just
use electric heaters and that really is fine for the space i've got a lot of books in the house i'm
a bookseller i love to read so that was important for me to have that kind of storage in the space
another big feature we knew we wanted in the house was storage stairs i know a lot of people like
a ladder to kind of save on floor space but we knew that we weren't going to have a lot of other
storage options in the house so jamie designed these stairs by himself we used walnut plywood and
then a walnut trim finish to kind of make it look a little more finished so each space is fully used
i've got letter writing we've got our clothing storage tech gear they pull in and slide out
another great thing is it kind of doubles as counter space when we're doing any sort
of cooking this is perfect for my height and kind of is a nice
surface to add a little bit of space since our kitchen isn't huge another great thing
about them is it's really easy to get up into our bedroom loft which is up here as well but we sunk
the bedroom loft down which is why it's so deep up there so the bed sinks into the framing so
we climb right onto the mattress we don't have any hard wood that we're climbing on jamie had
broken his leg uh six or seven years ago now and so it's still kind of painful for him to crawl on
that leg so we knew that that was a priority and so easy access up and down helps with that as well
all right so now we've flipped around so you can see the kitchen a little bit better on this side
of me we've got our pantry space in our counter top this was also another special piece that we
found we got this slab from a local person in massachusetts and it spans the entirety of our
kitchen we've got a piece at the end that lifts up so we can fill our water tank from the top if that
needs to happen or if there's overflowing we need to clean up and then we moved all of our plates
bowls special pieces upon to these shelves these are part some of the shelves that we made using
the top of that dresser from the living room some of the other things in the kitchen to note our
toaster oven we knew we didn't necessarily need a microwave but a toaster oven was
a need for me for sure this is our water heater it is a propane water heater moving to finish the
kitchen we've got our fridge it's not quite a full size but it's plenty of room for the two of us
we also bumped it up a bit so we had some storage underneath so under here we've got
pots and pans and things we've got an insta pot on the top really using all of our vertical space we
have a full size sink we didn't want to compromise on the sink space we really wanted a nice large
sink so we could fit our drying rack in here and i can water my plants with plenty of room
we've got this beautiful wood burn sign that my friend micah made for
us we originally were thinking we might do tiny house fares and things and really move around
but we decided that it's a small house but a big thing to move so we also knew we wanted an oven
and a stove we do a fair amount of cooking we cook in most nights of the week the backsplash was
another thing that we really wanted to spend some money on i used fireclay tile which i love i think
it's a really special piece we do have a vent hood as well and our cabinet above hides the kind of
components of that and it offers a little bit of storage too these doors and all of the drawers
in here we were originally going to hand build but after two years of working on the house and
pushing so hard to get it done to move into it was one thing that we were okay hiring out so these
we just recently put in a couple of months ago it's really nice to have drawers in our
kitchen now i feel like a real adult when i'm excited over drawers but here we are
one of the lofts is for our bedroom the other one is a lot of storage up there
part of the bump out from the outside we've got an extra foot of storage up there which is great
all right into our bathroom this is a smaller space but we didn't really want to take up a
lot of real estate in here it's just enough room for us to get what needs to be done done
we have an incinerating toilet which we were going back and forth with what kind of toilet to
use but we wanted one that was kind of the least maintenance possible flipping over to the other
side of the bathroom we have our shower we have a nice big space in here we have our ladder that
we used to get up to the secondary loft not the fanciest but definitely the most convenient for
the shower we ended up going with this versalite tile it is a stone finish but it is very light we
really were concerned about making sure that our weight distribution was good and that really saved
us a lot on weight another special feature that we added was this extra storage space back here
this has our extra household things it has tools this is because of that extra bump out on the
outside of the trailer we were able to really get a lot of usable space back here with this feature
i think overall we spent somewhere in the ballpark of thirty thousand dollars
for the house we do have a bag of receipts that we've yet to go through our favorite
part about living in a tiny house is definitely being able to own a home in our late twenties
we have a home that will always be ours for as long as we want we can move it if we need to
it's really freeing to not have mortgage debt yet eventually that will be something that we
take on but it's nice to have our own space that feels like us that we can really be in
and not be super rushed into our next step until we're really ready
i hope you enjoyed this week's video make sure that you check out that link in the description
to be one of the first to order jackery's new product and receive a free gift
and i will see you soon with another tiny or unique home tour