Hey guys. Jenna here. In this week's video,
I'm going to introduce you to a young couple named Laurel and Brandon who built
their own tiny house and have been living in it for several years and since
building their tiny home they've been able to focus more on their hobbies and
career dreams, even building a couple more tiny homes and selling them,
creating their own business. All right guys.
Let's do a tiny house tour.
Hi, I'm Brandon. Hi, I'm Laurel and this is our tiny house.
I think we found out about the tiny house movement online.
Somehow we ran across the idea, well we were living in Seattle at the time,
hang about $1,100 a month or a one bedroom apartment.
We were both working seasonally and it just wasn't really cutting it in terms of
yearly income and we needed to pay rent every month.
The idea of a tiny house kind of solved a lot of the problems that we were
having at the time.
We already kind of realize that the impact of living a really large house is
just more than we wanted to have. This is really simple.
We don't use a whole lot of electricity. We don't use a lot of space.
It's just a lifestyle that we feel like works well with our values in terms of
preserving the environment and also appreciating nature.
Living in a tiny house has allowed us to pursue our hobbies a little more.
We're always out birdwatching, hiking, backpacking,
living in Seattle in an apartment where we had to work all the time.
We didn't really have the opportunity to do that.
I've always been pretty close with my parents. They live on 30 acres.
The perfect location for us to start our build.
The building process was pretty slow at the start because neither of us had a
whole lot of experience. We kind of learned as we went. We made some mistakes,
but we corrected them.
I think we learned pretty quickly and it turned out pretty nice.
I'd say my favorite part of the tiny house is probably my desk area.
I have the surround windows around the entire thing,
so it's always really bright there and when I'm sitting there doing art,
I can look out at the field and see deer running through.
I would say my favorite part about our tiny house is that a lot of the wood that
we used came directly from the property.
There's even wood in there that my grandpa sawed probably 50 years ago that we
still had laying around. So there's a lot of history in the house.
The living room area. We've got our little storage couch.
We built the couch based on what we thought would fit in the space.
Made little cupboard doors for shoes, storage and cat food.
There's actually a litter box under here for kitty.
If you come around this side,
you can see the little port hole where he goes in.
Initially he was more of an outdoor cat,
but we kind of wanted to encourage him to become more of an indoor cat.
So we tried to put in some stuff that would, you know,
make him more comfortable.
This is an Ikea Norden I think is the name and it folds out.
It is kind of the perfect dining table for our needs and fits both of us really
well and then it's got the drawers on either side for storage as well,
so this is the a heat pump and it does heat and air conditioning as well.
We originally had a little space heater,
electric space heater that we had on the floor,
but we decided that we needed air conditioning last summer because it was just
way too hot. We love it because air conditioning is wonderful. It works great.
It also space really quick and it's very, very quiet for detail work.
We ended up making our own light fixtures and we just used Mason jars and then
spray painted the tops spot like Ikea fixture things and just screwed them into
the jars.
We have a ladder here that we installed some hooks to hang it to get out of the
way and that's how we get into our storage loft. The floor is bamboo.
We decided on that just because renewable and also we thought it was really
pretty
storage stairs as you can see. Um,
we've got like camera equipment and stuff down here and our,
all of our books, this actually goes way back and I have a lot of books.
We built these ourselves.
People who've never been in a tiny house or use like a ladder really that much
might be a little bit uncomfortable.
You just have to watch your head for this thing. This is structural.
We ended up adding to our loft.
Originally it only went out to this beam here.
After we started using the loft area,
we decided that we needed more space for kind of like a nice little area to
change our clothes or whatever. Up here, this is our bed.
We have a queen size mattress. Brandon has his clothes storage over here.
He gets most of his stuff right in this little side area.
So if you are a person that has a lot of clothes, there's plenty of room.
I have a ton of clothes and I'm able to fit everything in here. Um,
but if you didn't have a lot of stuff you could fit a King size bed in here.
Just fine. Got our skylight. I can open this up.
So we got a bunch of more storage up here and we do the whole Marie condo method
of folding stuff. It's pretty simple.
Her whole thing is she wants stuff to be shaped like a rectangle in order to
stand them on end so that way when you store them you can actually see
everything in a row and you don't have go digging.
So it actually makes it easier for keeping stuff folded,
can see what you're pulling out and you can actually get quite a few things in
here in a very small space.
Okay, let me show you the kitchen.
So we've got butcher block countertops.
I've got a nice deep sink.
This was not the standard sink that was recommended at us when we initially
bought plans. We wanted a deeper one and this one has been awesome.
This is awesome.
It washes and dries and works great for more storage
we did this little open shelving spice rack sort of thing.
It kind of just makes the space feel more open.
But we ended up doing closed cabinetry for the lower part.
We've got our pantry for food storage and these go super deep in here.
And then we've got our little apartment size fridge here. And then the oven,
which is actually a little convection toaster oven.
Sometimes like I'll be in here cooking and Brandon might be doing dishes or
something and I can fit over here,
chop and cook or whatever with him next to me and it's fine.
All right, let's look at the bathroom. So we have a composting toilet.
It's a nature's head. The way it works is it separates the solids and liquids.
What we did here is we actually changed it up so that there's a hole going
through the bottom so we don't have to empty the liquids anymore.
We dug a hole and there's like rocks and stuff down there.
So it kind of just drains into the nature.
We've got our teeny tiny sink. This is our little shower.
Um, in order to maximize space,
we ended up going with these metal sheets.
Instead of doing a cabinet, like a standard shower cabinet,
this is a dehumidifier because we live in the Pacific Northwest.
It is very wet pretty much all year.
So we have this thing running almost constantly just to keep it around 50%
humidity because otherwise we could have mold issues inside here.
This is the front of the house. We have our desk area,
I am an illustrator,
so I spend a lot of time here doing my art and business stuff.
And then Brandon has this little tiny mini desk. Um,
and then we watch TV usually off of one of these.
I have some artwork hanging in here.
That's actually the only one of mine that I did.
I do a lot of bird stuff and that kind of thing.
So how long have you been doing that? Forever. But professionally,
I guess maybe around six or seven years.
Just this past year I started doing it full time.
So another thing I really wanted was a stained glass window. I don't know why.
It was just something I got in my brain and had to have it,
so we ended up commissioning a stained glass artist to make that for us.
Our door is also just totally custom, obviously in a tiny house,
especially this one, we had to have a weirdly sized door,
not the standard wide door because of this bump out here,
so we had to build it ourselves and we ended up just using like a bunch of
scraps from the property.
All this stuff is just really old boards that were kind of laying around
decaying and then this was an old farm house window.
There were two of them and they're both kind of in rough shape.
This one was a little bit better off,
so we ended up sanding it down and filling in all the little insect holes and
then getting new glasses for it.
We built this house using plans from tumbleweed.
The plants were for a 24 foot Cyprus.
The cool thing about the plants was that it came with a porch,
which is nice because it's always raining here and when you come home,
want to get inside the house and you're fiddling with your keys and stuff,
you're not getting soaked. This is our little garden area. It's very small.
We have lettuce, kale, zucchini,
and we have some strawberries growing right now.
Our house is sided with Cedar and we stained it a natural color just because we
thought it would fit in nicely, but we also wanted a little bit of color.
So Laurel decided on green window trim.
This house is 24 feet long and it's about eight and a half feet wide.
It's got three axles. I think the estimated weight is around 14,000 pounds.
Square footage is about 240 that includes the lofts.
Currently we are parked next to my parents' house,
which is nice because we can run water and power and a cord for internet.
We've been in this house for about five years now.
So after we built this one,
I enjoyed it so much that I started building a second tiny house and that one
sold just finished the third house actually. And that one has a buyer as well.
It's all because we started with this one.
I've had various jobs,
but this is the one job that actually is fulfilling to me.
Just seeing the final product is very rewarding.
I feel like half the time people still don't understand what a tiny house is.
I'd like to encourage people to build their own tiny house rather than buying.
Honestly, it's not as scary or difficult as you think it's going to be. I mean,
you have to have the tools and the space for it,
but if you really want to learn how to do it, even if you have no experience,
you can do it.
I'm actually surprised that more people don't pursue living in a tiny house.