What happens when you move into a tiny house and then later on plan on having
children in many cases a small space won't work for a growing family unless you
plan ahead. In today's episode of tiny house tours,
you're going to meet a young engaged couple and they're going to explain how
they designed their tiny home to accommodate their future children.
Hi, I'm Mary. Hi, I'm Sam and this is our house harvest moon, tiny house
We decided to go tiny because we definitely wanted to have a smaller footprint
on the earth. It's also been a dream of mine for a really long time,
but when I met Mary two and a half years ago,
we'd already started to talk about it.
We taped out our old apartment put tape on the floor and tried to imagine living
there. We even put stuff in the way to imagine. You know what it'd be like.
So a little bit about our house. It was built by Mint,
tiny homes out of Delta BC.
It is 34 feet long and 8.5 feet wide.
It's about 289 square feet on the bottom floor and
it gets pretty close to 400.
We definitely each had specific things that we wanted to incorporate into the
design. Um,
specifically since I was looking at tiny houses before I even met Sam,
I already had this kind of image in my head of what I'd want my tiny house to be
like. Then building one together,
we really had to adjust to each other and I think more than anything we actually
planned for our future kids. So we have stairs instead of a ladder,
the extra space just to have more rooms for a crib or a bed.
So I think we were trying to think ahead. We have two cats and a dog.
It definitely means we clean a lot more in this space,
obviously with the litter box, but then their hair, they all seem to shed a lot.
I do feel like we're constantly cleaning,
but I think we've gotten a good routine down for it.
We're parked in a campground a little bit South of Joliet, Illinois.
We've been living here for about nine months. We moved in last October,
so we're almost coming up on a year, which is really crazy.
We got this kitchen design from another tiny house that we saw and we really
liked the idea of an Island and I liked that it kind of sectioned off the
kitchen from the living room. We have a lot of counter space,
but if we're both cooking in here,
it's sometimes easy to just put this thing up and there are these bars on the
bottom that you can pull out.
I'll be standing of the stove cooking and Sam will be sitting here chopping
something and then it can just kind of tuck away so that when you walk in you're
not about to walk into the counter.
We have a pretty standard RV stove in our tiny house.
This is an Atwood Wedgwood RV stove. It's got three burners.
They each have a little bit of a different cooking power and then we have the
oven that's attached it, so
this is one of actually three stoves that we installed when we moved in.
We just kind of leave them on low when we're away maybe or leave one of them on
low and we're away knew that we were going to be off grid.
So saving water was huge to us and this faucet I think is low-flow but it's not
super efficient.
But one thing that we did pick up from another tiny house owner is using these
foot pedals,
you leave the faucet on and then you use your foot to either go hot or cold.
You could just kind of lift your foot and it turns off automatically.
So it's definitely helped us like not waste water because we can't get to the
faucet fast enough. Another great feature is these open shelves.
These actually didn't come with the house when it was built.
We asked for the exact measurements of these walls so that we could order them
and install them ourselves. It opens up the space for sure.
And I think we had a lot of kitchen items in particular that we wanted to
display versus put away even our dishes we really loved.
So we just wanted something to naturally show off the kitchen and versus putting
up shelves that would've covered everything up.
So we actually started out with a more traditional fridge,
but because we moved in kind of close to the wintertime and running solely off
solar power, we realized that it was like a bit too much,
particularly in the winter and even all the time. It was quite a huge draw.
We researched a little bit and we found several other folks who are doing this
kind of chest freezer conversion to a refrigerator and it keeps it at a
refrigerator temperature versus a freezer temperature.
We used to have a cabinet full of like spice stars that just seemed really
cluttered and like we could never get to the back of it to see what we actually
had.
So we ordered these and it works really well to just stick them right on the
front of our fridge. Who mostly does the cooking? Definitely me.
It's a little hard,
like we have a lot of dishes in the sink and I'm trying to cook and we're like
trying to kill two birds with one stone.
It does not work very well because we're constantly bumping into each other.
But as long as one person's back here in this kind of more narrow space and one
person's working out here either on this counter or on this flip up counter,
it works pretty well.
Already had these barstools from our last apartment and we don't actually use
it that much. We end up just kind of eating on the couch together, honestly.
Then we've talked about having kids in this house,
so if we do then it might be a nice space to,
for someone to sit because we're going to get too big for this couch.
So this kind of transitions into our living room space.
We have this couch from Ikea.
We did choose it because it has storage underneath here,
so this whole thing will just kind of lift up and we have storage under there.
This couch is kind of one where you can pick and choose the different pieces to
go together.
So we could have chosen two storage modules or we could have chosen this one,
which is a bed.
Basically the slips out and then you can unfold this cushion here and it becomes
like a twin bed. Well this is honestly where we hang out most of the time.
And then another, I think kind of important thing about our house is our window.
I mean one of the things that made us go tiny was wanting to spend more time
outdoors.
You could just open up onto our patio space or onto the yard is something that
was really important to us. No regrets there. So this is our woodstove,
it's a cubic mini grizzly.
So the last thing about our living room is our little projector screen here.
So this is actually just a roll out down blind from Ikea.
It doesn't quite cover the whole space,
but it was a lot cheaper than ordering a custom blind and it works just as well.
So across from it,
we have these shelves that we've mounted in the living room and the protectors
just sitting on top of one of those.
So we have a little Roku stick and we connected to our computers through a wifi
and just watch TV that way.
We didn't really want to Mount a TV in here cause I don't think it's that
important to either of us.
And it would just take up space that we could use for something that is more
important.
But it is nice if we want to just take a load off at the end of the day to be
able to roll it down and watch something. We have this sliding barn door.
This leads into our bathroom. We didn't want a door that opens, waste a lot of space.
Um, but we always have loved the look of a barn door.
This is our bathroom space. It's a little bit of everything.
This is the same butcher block that we have in the kitchen.
We have a sit on top sink, which is nice. Loved the look of this cabinet.
So this is just a little storage space for us to store things that we use every
day and we have lots of storage underneath our sink.
We don't have a washer dryer right now,
which is also another like challenge and thing that we might change in the
future.
But it does give us a ton of storage space and I don't know where we want to put
all this stuff if we didn't have this.
It was important to us to have a shower because we have a dog and we had thought
about having a family and a bathtub can really come in handy.
Definitely not a tub for an adult human to use.
We have this really beautiful but also really,
really functional low-flow faucet head in here.
You have to be pretty intentional about all the products we use because we
have a great water filtration system. But other than that,
we're not collecting our water or dumping into a sewer or anything like that.
So all of our products that we use are nature friendly, earth friendly.
We have a composting toilet, so we actually really wanted this separate,
but we ended up going with the nature's head because the space was a little bit
too small.
The liquids go into the front part of the toilet and then the solids go into the
back. Um, and the liquids are probably dumped every week at least.
And then the solids, we'd dump.
So our bathroom is pretty big for a tiny space. We definitely wouldn't,
didn't want to feel cramped in here.
We both get ready in here in the morning and wanted the space to do what we need
to do. So this closet contains like all of our hanging clothes,
all of our shoes, extra storage in the back of it, like random things.
And then our stairs are pretty unique.
All of the stair steps have storage in them so we can keep like all of our animal
stuff in here. The dog will just meander up there and sit on the pillows.
I think he likes to get away from us sometimes. Mostly their space?
Honestly it is, yeah.
We essentially have an upstairs because we did plan on growing into the house.
Um, so until that happens, it's basically it's a place to hang out.
I'm going to show you the upstairs.
So this is our upstairs loft.
It's pretty big compared to some houses because we have the downstairs bedroom
and the bathroom that it's covering.
We thought a lot about where we would put kids or how that would work.
So for now it's a sitting area.
I had a lot of books before and getting rid of my books was something that was
really hard.
I have a lot of comic books here so it's nice that these are pretty easy to
access if we wanted to look at them, definitely can't quite stand up.
So that's why I wanted to have a downstairs bedroom.
I knew that I didn't want to do that every day. Um, for me personally,
when we designed this space, we decided to put in this half wall.
This was one of our last design decisions.
And even though that's sort of closes off the space,
I think it's going to be really great when we do have kids to just put a gate
here, it'll be easier.
I have one of my favorite things back here on the wall, I unicycle.
I don't do it very much anymore cause we're on grass.
But I wanted to keep this but it has a lot of significance to me.
So we kept it and put it up here.
Something that was really important for me.
I wanted to have a downstairs bedroom. I have some chronic pain,
so crouching all the time is a little bit hard for me.
We actually somehow managed to find one foot bedside tables,
which was pretty hard.
They're not exactly like the exact design thing we had in mind,
but it works really well to still have bedside tables on both sides.
This is an Ikea storage bed, which is really helpful.
We put our backpacking stuff down there off season clothes, suitcases,
so it fits a lot of our storage down here.
I did not use to be super neat until I met Mary and then I learned the ways of
being more organized. So I'm now, as long as we fold everything,
it's not super messy. We also have a second sliding door here,
just a normal pocket door. Um,
so that if we have guests especially or just if we want privacy we can close the
other door to the living room. And this one, like in the front of the house,
we have a second set of French doors.
We did that one so that we would have cross breeze between the window over here
and the doors.
And then also we just wanted the space to feel as open as possible.
So theoretically we could just wake up in the morning and wander off into the
nature.
I'm super proud of our deck. We didn't have a lot of building experience,
but we've done a lot of projects after we got the house.
So I feel like we're finally learning how to do things. We just bought pallets,
um, like wood shipping pallets and that was sort of the frame.
And then we laid the deck boards on top of it and then put these ones on the
side to sort of frame it out and make it look a little more finished.
But we have had a lot of people over for barbecues.
We finally got a grill and so now we have been spending more time out here and
we've had maybe 10 people over at a time, which is pretty big for the house.
So it's nice to have this outdoor area.
All right.
So this storage box is where we keep basically everything for our water system
have definitely had a lot of challenges with the water system through our first
winter, especially since we moved in, right the winter started,
this is our 40 gallon tank.
It's actually connected to a 300 gallon storage tank,
so we had to plumb in some of that and didn't put our 300 gallon in because
it's just sitting on the ground underneath our house.
And then this pipe up here comes back into our little filter and then our shirk
low pump here and then it goes into an accumulator tank just to get the pressure
right. And then our hot water heater,
which is in this kind of silver box over here,
there is always going to be a portion of the winter.
I think while we're off grid now in this kind of climate where everything will
freeze and it's really hard to keep it from freezing.
But right when it's on that cusp,
we use this heat lamp and here to kind of keep this box a bit more warm and keep
it from freezing. So this is our solar setup.
We have six 200 watt panels and then we have two,
3000 watt storage capacity batteries.
All of our solar system is made by goal zero.
We got these little boxes to put them in so that they're protected from the
weather elements, so this is one of our 300 watt batteries.
The connectors for our solar panels just get plugged into these ports.
There's one here and one here that we use.
There's an extension cord along the ground.
It's just a 10 gauge extension cord that plugs directly into our RV port on the
house, and then also we'll plug in directly to the solar battery here.
We've been on solar full time since March.
Hopefully that will continue until,
I'd say maybe like October at which point I feel like we're,
we'll be getting a lot of gray days or overcast days and we're not going to get
as much sun starting probably around November, December.
It'll get really cold here and we'll have to figure out how long our batteries
can last before they get too cold and lose all their energy.
So we end up using our gas generator quite a bit and the wintertime and our
current setup. I think there are definitely things we could do to change it,
but it's just hard without much infrastructure here to figure out all of these
things.
We did get really lucky and finding this campground when we were first introduced
to the campground to the person who was showing us around the campground manager
at the time was kind of like, you know, whatever space you pick,
this is your space. You have to take care of it. Meaning that we have to mow,
we have to do all of the lawn chores,
but we can also make it as beautiful or not as we want.
We specifically chose this site because we saw how much land opportunity we had.
There was not another site here. The closest sites are, you know,
back behind us. So no one else was gonna utilize this space except for us.
So I'm really happy that we ended up with such a cool spot.
I feel like tiny living has helped us definitely have a smaller impact on the
earth. I think. We think a lot about how much water we use every day,
how much electricity we use. Living tiny is one chapter of our life,
but it's probably not going to be the only chapter. After a couple of years,
we will have paid off this house and we can save so much more for the next
venture than we would have if we were just renting every year. Until then.
I think that living tiny has definitely been a huge part of our relationship
because it was a huge planning process.
And then also living here together sometimes has been stressful being off-grid.
So I think we'd had to learn how to talk better and I've never felt like the
space is too small.
Thanks for watching this week's episode.
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