hey there welcome to my channel where I take you on tours of tiny and unique homes and showcase
stories of people living alternatively our tiny homes truly a good investment that's the question
that we get a lot on this channel so in today's video we're going to take a practical look at
finances with a couple who's been living tiny for some time they're going to break down their
expenses and explain why they believe their upfront costs will pay off especially if you
consider location and the Alternatives rent or a 30-year mortgage for a very expensive home but
don't worry this video isn't just informational they're also going to take us on a tour of their
Gorgeous Tiny home and 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 foreign
because we watched so many videos on Tiny House giant
Journey like the theme song so like we always come up with a remake make
this house our tiny home tiny home tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny home
foreign I'm Destiny and I'm Bree and this is our tiny house that we call Matchbox
I wanted to own something before I turned 30 but I knew I couldn't afford like a 500
000 house nor did I want one and so we were just like yeah that's
like really look into the tiny house movement and here we are
a lot of the people that I was doing Outreach to and talking with they were like yeah like
I bought mine for 60 000 but this was like five years ago so we were like okay we could
do like 85. that was if we went over yeah and I stumbled upon a page called tiny homies we had
like a consultation call with them and they really just like let us know okay like your
budget is low compared to like what it actually takes to build a house and it turns out that they
had built a home a year before and that person was selling it we went into the house measured
everything we're just talking like it was our house and honestly manifested that foreign
loan and it's a personal loan we paid a total of 90 000 for our house but
because we have to take out loans we're gonna end up paying a hundred thousand
we're still young we're still in like entry-level jobs that aren't paying a lot of money even though
everything else is going up we have other debt like we're not only paying two thousand dollars
a month like that's what we were able to budget because we were likely going to be paying that
for an apartment so we had to make it work it's possible but I just want to be realistic that
it's not like this glamorous life that we're just like vacationing every other day because
that's not that's not happening it's gonna hurt up front it's gonna be a lot of money
maybe for the first four or five years but at least it'll be hours we can do what we want
with it and we're also not stuck in the one place we can move it in a couple years if we
want to a different city and explore that now we're investing and we feel like adults laughs
so our tiny house match box is 30 feet long eight and a half feet wide and 13 and a half feet tall
with the house being so large it's a triple axle trailer that it sits on and it has about
10 Windows counting the door one of the things that we liked about it is it's got this kind
of two-tone look we didn't get to choose the colors but we thought it was different when it
rains we do get a nice little sound on the house it's pretty peaceful we fall asleep very easily
all right so here's our garden we started growing a few things we do not have green
thumbs so this is a first attempt and it's going pretty well I think it's because of all
the rain here in Portland but we have some green onions some kale have a potato bag we're trying
to grow some potatoes we also have some green beans and then some various like chili plants
over here we have this hammock that Nana bought us so we like to come out here sometimes and just
lay in it when the weather is actually nice and it's not raining so it's been good for like the
last couple of weeks so this is the back of the tiny home back here is where we have the water
heater panel and also the electrical panel inside this little door we have a tankless water heater
so that's where this is stored our house runs uh hot water on propane tanks so the only thing that
we run using this is the hot water but we've been here three months and we've switched it out three
times so about once a month we have to go and fill up both tanks so if you're thinking about using
propane to heat your water just know that it's an extra expense anywhere between 30 and 60 dollars a
month depending on if you're filling up both tanks or not and if they're completely empty so on this
side of the tiny is where we have our connections so our hosts already had the water power and the
sewage set up for us so we just had to get someone to come hook up all of our lines for the plumbing
the water was just a regular like water holes that we were able to plug in ourselves and then
the power is plugged into a 50 amp plug here so we run the house on a 50 amp we looked at a lot
of tiny home communities but a lot of them want certifications or they have like a two-year wait
list we got lucky we found somebody in a Facebook group she said that she was looking for you know
a tiny house or RV to park we currently pay 650 to run the space it comes with uh water
electric sewer right now Wi-Fi and it's a great spot so I think we got a pretty good deal here
welcome to the inside of Matchbox when we were looking for a tiny house it was really important
that we had something that was spacious especially in the kitchen area because we like to cook also
something that was kind of like a blank canvas all of the walls are white right now we plan
on painting the future but it's really nice and opens up the space one of the cool features in
the kitchen area is this table it actually is a chalkboard that we like to use sometimes and then
it comes down as a table and so we eat our meals here this is just kind of like the chill Place
sometimes we'll put up our little iPad and watch TV here we just use it as kind of like a standing
desk sometimes too this is our kitchen space and first when I saw the kitchen I was like there's
no way we're going with this tiny house because as you can see there's no stove and there's no oven
but right now we just use induction stove tops and we just take them out and put them up here
we cook all of our food there and then honestly we use our ninja foodie like every single day it
bakes things it makes everything crispy you can use it as an instant pot make soups like there's
so many things you could do with that we saw a thousand tiny houses and we always wanted like
a farmhouse sink it's just nice and clean it just seemed like something that would make the
house just like pop and so we were really happy that the house came with this unfortunately it
did break during our move so we have to just like repair that or replace it it's whatever it still
works this was definitely like a dream for us and then we also like the open shelf concept basically
because it makes you minimize and like get rid of all the unnecessary cups that we had in the other
apartment we had so many mugs and plates and just things that we didn't need for two people
so now we broke everything down into two beer glasses two wine glasses two mason jars and you
know it's more than enough for just us and then you know having all of like my cooking supplies
and the lentils and food up top is really helpful as well I kept this little New York Cutting Board
that one of my girl scout sisters gave me a while back so that made it to the tiny house there are
a lot of things that we had to declutter and go through but this is definitely something
that has sentimental value and I was like oh represent New York in the kitchen so it stayed
on this side we have our refrigerator and our microwave this is actually a
normal size refrigerator so it's really nice because we're able to store a lot of stuff
one of the other things that I really love is our pull out Pantry we've seen them in so
many tiny houses and so when we saw that this tiny house had it we were like yes we need to
get that so right now we just store you know condiments canned food and things like that
in total we have 37 drawers and pull out pantries we came from a two-bedroom apartment we had a lot
of stuff so it's nice to just have that extra storage space back here we have the
bathroom it's also our laundry room our closet obviously our shower and toilet are in here as
well so over here we have our washer dryer combo we have a love hate relationship with
it you can only watch but so much at a time and dry so much it's steam dry stuff so it's
harder for it to dry the clothes a lot of times you'll have to leave it running for like three
plus hours and that uses a lot of electricity so we end up just hanging our clothes sometimes
we have a standard toilet we were not trying to get a compost toilet I think a lot of tiny houses
do have compost toilets which are great because you can be off-grid but we were not trying to
deal with like a composting toilets so we just went for the traditional one and it works for
us like this is all we've ever known and I think we're gonna stick to it Welcome to our shower it's
really cool the doors open and close this way it makes you feel like you're kind of just in
a spaceship and we bought this like extra thing to put our soap and shampoo so that we wouldn't
have like all the stuff on the floor because it is a smaller shower we didn't want to like
you know clutter up the floor and have to show her like a Tiny's face it's like a cruise ship shower
my favorite part about our bathroom is our six foot long hers in hers closet so Brianna has
her own side I have my own side we actually bought these little like 50 Cent hooks just
so that we could have a place to hang our towels because we didn't have that before but we hang
everything in here so we have all of our winter coats raincoats robes Brianna stores all of her
military gear in here as well we have suitcases and then these are her drawers with you know
her everyday clothing and the other side is with my clothes but we also have our cleaning
supplies like our vacuum ironing board our Swiffer there's kind of like our cleaning supply section
so before we head upstairs we have to say hello to Scotty because this is his area
but this is a pretty large step even for me especially for Scotty and something that
the buildings did that is really cool is they need these pull out stairs that actually have
storage in them and then it also has a drawer these are really cool because we can you know
put them in all the way take them out and this is how we get up and down the stairs foreign
so as you can see Yazoo kind of has to hunch over to get inside the bedroom but what I really like
is that we can sit on the bed and we still have enough space where we're not hitting the ceiling
so this is where Scotty sleeps he likes to be on top of us when we're sleeping in the
middle of the night so usually he'll sleep on his bed sometimes he'll just throw himself in
the middle of the floor so it's nice to kind of have like this big space for him
something that I really wanted to do was put a nice mural on our wall and I painted it I think
three or four times first it had flowers then it had kind of like a camel look and now it's
just kind of this like boxy look I think it's kind of relaxing and who knows how long it'll
stay like this but I do enjoy painting walls so we'll see I might change in a couple months
I usually work from here if we have meetings that are at the same time I'll come on this side of the
tiny Mansion into my meetings um but yeah a lot of people usually like comments on my wall in the
background so it's just like a cool space to have you know work meetings and stuff and sometimes if
I'm just doing like my budgeting and stuff I'll just sit up here by myself and kind of go through
all of that as well the one thing I'm not a super fan of with this space is the fact that
it gets really warm up here our AC is on the other side of the house so a lot of times it just won't
blow on this side if I could change something I would definitely put like another AC on this
side of the house so that we could have like a cooler space up here but I think for now it works
over here we have our storage units we keep things like sheets in here we also have just
like paperwork and just like you know things that we need to store and this is also a place where
we kind of use as like the open section for like sentimental items so Brianna has like her football
helmet this is definitely something that we keep as a memory down here we have our memory jar this
is just little things from events we've gone to since we've met tickets from shows and things
like that so we'd fit everything in this little jar we also have like a larger sentimental box
under our couch but this is the one that we kind of display on top we have Brianna's longboard and
this is honestly the only place that we could put it because there's really not many other
places we could store something so large but it kind of matches the aesthetic and you know when
she wants to use it she'll just take it down but this storage unit came with the house so
it's just a nice place to just put some of the things that we love another cool thing
that we added to the house is our motion sensor light strip this one goes from the bottom of our
staircase all the way up to the bedroom and it's just really good because when I go to the bathroom
at nighttime I need to see where I'm going so we just put this on and it works for us foreign
so welcome to our office Loft this is right above the living room as you can see I can fully stand
up I'm about five seven Destiny's about five four so it's very important for us to have somewhere
where we could both stand up completely to stretch our legs throughout the day since we both work
remotely from home I'm a software engineer for my day job and I'm also in the Army National Guard
so I'll go I'll do that once a month and that's an extra check it is then it comes with Benefits
yes uh for me I do social media management for work and I also do event planning with both of us
working from home we obviously have meetings and they're video meetings so uh the desks that move
up and down are pretty good just in case one of us wants to sit while the other one does a video
meeting we can get out of the shot also noise canceling headphones are the key with a little
mic so uh that's been a great help for when we're having meetings at the exact same time kind of
counts out the background noise and it also helps for the people you're talking to on the phone
so I've been teaching myself how to DJ so I have this cute little DJ controller and I
say cute because obviously it's the smaller version of it but it comes with two little
decks on it so I got this I got the speaker set up and then obviously it just connects
to my computer and there's some DJ software that came with it and yeah just kind of teach
myself something new so DJ content coming soon on this side of the office we have my record player
my favorite one is J Cole I have some movie soundtrack ones like boys in the hood
down here we have our dehumidifiers so we use this pretty much to pull moisture out of the air in the
house because we're in Portland for one so it rains a lot but usually we just plug this in at
night and we just kind of let it go throughout the night to pull in all the moisture from the
house so that it doesn't start to mold and crack our mini split provides heat and AC especially in
the winter time it did heat the house at least in the office and into the bedroom Loft but
downstairs it didn't really reach but now we're kind of wishing we had one for the summer time
in the bedroom Loft because it gets really hot over there at night all right and this side is
where Destiny sits and works she uses a yoga ball to sit on not my favorite but it works for her
and then here is what we use for internet so this is actually part of what's called a mesh internet
basically how it works is it comes with a basic router and then two extra parts which are called
nodes and so our host has the main router in their home where they have their Wi-Fi and then we use
this node to basically extend their Wi-Fi to our house so with using this node the good thing about
it is we have our own separate network from our hosts so they still have their own private IP
and password to their internet and we have our own internet um password to get into our Wi-Fi
all right so downstairs is where we have our living room slash movie room slash
guest room it's right below the office space we can't stand up in this one but
there's still enough space to sit down have some headspace we have a futon under here
this actually turns into a bed so if we have a guest they can sleep here we use
the underneath for extra storage you can put your feet up but we also have extra blankets
sheets pillows in here right above me is where we have our projector so this is what we use to
watch movies we just projected onto the clear wall over here kick back watch a good movie
when we were doing our research we didn't really see people that like looked like us
as a young couple of color I think we just grew up thinking that we had to have like everything
large and spend a lot of money and just really breaking that cycle is something that can be
done and I just love sharing our story because it just shows that it's achievable we don't have
to be giving it to the system we can make it happen and live a life that is joyous we don't
come from generational love compared to how our families live like we're doing something extreme
tiny living isn't for everybody but it works for us
thanks for watching this week's video I hope you guys enjoyed it please make
sure to like share and subscribe and I will see you soon with another tiny or unique home tour