Hi guys. Jenna here with Tiny house, Giant journey.
And one of the biggest questions I get about living in a tiny house is if you
could possibly do it with a family. Well,
I interviewed a family of five living in a tiny space that's less than 400
square feet. So let's go
see what they have to share.
I'm Kim, I'm Raul and this is our house. It's awesome.
They are known as the tiny house kids and so everybody wants to come and have
play dates as our house versus their house and sleep over.
It's a small space, maybe not sleepovers,
but no more than we had in the bigger house.
I owned a business for over nine years and I sold it in 2016 and we decided to
do something a little crazy. We sold our house pretty much,
got rid of everything we owned and built a tiny house so that we could come up
to see the Pacific Northwest without a mortgage,
You have to do it just to do it I guess I'll go along for the ride so.
right now we are on seven acres. There's a house not too far away.
And so we're basically sharing the space.
Well this is the kitchen area and this is basically where kids hang out mostly
cause we kind cook like a team and we have three kids so we have a lot of
cooking. We have a dishwasher that is hidden that is now steaming.
Oh it is a hidden dishwasher. Hidden dishwasher.
not very organized drawers but we have tons of space for stuff,
lots of collapsible stuff. We hire children to do most of our housekeeping.
So when you were designing this space were you like I need a big kitchen
cause I have three kids and a big husband who eats a lot,
but I really like to cook too. So this is,
pretty much most of the house is food and kitchen.
We've got four burner cooktop.
So I made Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner here we have an oven so I can cook a
turkey in here or whatever we need. This is propane and this is electric.
So if the power goes out,
we can at least have coffee and cook things on the stove top.
More random storage space here. Our Christmas tree,
I don't know many tiny houses that have a Christmas tree, but it rolls out.
So it's collapsible. Yeah. And then you'd hang it on the wall windows.
So this is our Smeg. Um, it's a Charming refrigerator.
Um, so this kind of, I designed the whole house around it.
So the yellow and the door and stuff were kind of inspired by this.
Um, it's like an apartment size, so we can fit quite a bit of food in there.
The freezer really sucks. You can't fit anything in it. So,
but it looks pretty, it's pretty. So that's all that really matters.
And then here's our stairs storage. It's got my apron.
As you tell tons of food and stuff, it goes really deep in there.
So we try to minimize our shoes.
But if everybody gets two pairs of shoes or three pairs of shoes,
that's still ends up being at least 15 pairs of shoes.
So we use this space for all of our shoes and boots. And flip flops.
you like living in our tiny house? Yeah.
Tell me what you like about living in the tiny house. Before we
had our separate rooms,
but now they each have our own room and play together more and we can have more family time.
So a washer, the dryer we looked at like the all-in-one,
but I've heard that they take a really long time to dry and you have to do like
half a size load. And with us and five of us always doing laundry.
So this was easier for us. When you have kids in a tiny house,
everybody always asks, how do we have adult time? You turn on the dryer.
that's all I'm gonna say. It's a kind of a loud machine.
We bought it for its decibel levels. And it shakes houses a tiny bit.
So our bathtub is going to be remodeled soon.
So we have a modified horse drop.
We are going to eventually make this tiled and make it into like a two shower
kind of thing.
Composting toilets with instruction guide because we have a lot of kids coming
in, you know, to play in stuff.
So we always have to remind them to read the directions because little kids
don't intuitively know how to use the composting toilets.
And some adults are confused by it as well. What goes where?
And we've had a few mishaps I'm sure, all around though.
Do you like this toilet? Yeah, it takes some getting used to.
as a family of five we have to empty it probably more than
most people. It's like every three and a half weeks.
It's three and a half weeks. Tell me about these glasses.
So I have a glasses obsession and I have a business where I sell glasses
so I found that thing on Etsy.
I thought it was really cool so I can hang all my glasses on there and have,
be able to pick and choose and not have the cases and everything.
We keep all of our clothes here. So all of this is Raul, all of this is me.
Um, we kind of have to do capsule wardrobe type stuff. So you know,
seasonal to kind of rotate out. Is that your only closet?
This is our only closet besides the hanging stuff here. That's Raul's. But yeah,
all of my stuff is there and then all of his stuff is there.
You both climb up without having to bend down?
Well I'm going to get about this far. I'm shorter than him. How tall are you Raul?
I'm 6'4
The tiny house is called, Idris which is an homage to Dr. Who,
Which is a very obscure Dr. Who reference,
there's probably one guy and going, Oh I totally know what that is.
I have to sacrifice half of my cool nerd tee shirts.
He didn't want to get rid of them.
So he had like 30-40 nerd shirts.
So we put it into a quilt. These are actually diapers.
Super Mario themed baby diapers and we couldn't get rid of.
So we decided to convert them into part of our quilt. You wore this when River was born.
This is River's newborn like dress.
She wore my little pony. Star Wars,
Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars, Goonies. That's kinda neat though.
You like have memories based on all of these and you didn't get rid of them.
Instead you turn it into something else.
Lord Vader, his dark majesty,
he's fierce right? He's, he could totally be evil, right?
No, we can't be evil.
We don't have any special tiny house couch or anything.
We just have your regular Ikea couch because kids ruin everything.
I didn't want to build something and then have somebody draw with a marker all
over it and then have to redo it. Pillows kind of going with our same theme.
They're all nerd shirts. This is my wedding dress. And they made it into a bear.
So since I didn't have anywhere to store it, I had to make it into a bear.
And this is Raul's
He wore a green lantern shirt under his tux.
So that's the green lantern shirt that he wore.
So it was hard for you to get rid of all your nerd stuff,
but you did keep books and games. And comic books and I kept all my favorite
stuff. There are some standouts that I loved very much.
RPG game, gaming books.
A lot of them are rare so you can't find them anywhere.
So Raul would not compromise on the,
well no he did. I did compromise. We had a
60 we had a 70 in our other house so he did downsize and I found these things and
they're called you hide it I think. Yeah.
And I found them on Amazon and so they're mouths for all of his game stuff so we
can hang the controllers and hang his game stuff.
So it doesn't actually take up any space anywhere else.
So that really kind of helped me let him keep all of that stuff.
We have the standard Ikea tiny house table. That everybody has.
We have six chairs that are hung on the wall so we can seat six at the table.
We open it up and then we usually put it like in the middle area.
We've even had house parties here. Where like,
we just put a bunch of food on the table.
We've had 20-25 people and it gets really cramped. I mean,
but I mean it's like an apartment party.
But if you don't like the person don't invite them.
Exactly. You have to really like the people that you invite. Right.
So this is the kid's room. This is all toys.
This is all clothes and then books and stuff.
And then we go to the library and all that. This is our oldest son's bed,
so he stays up here and got pillows and blankets.
This is the middle kid's bed and then the baby has a trundle bed that we can
pull out and it goes all the way out. Then we're able to put it back.
What's cool about this is that they are forced to clean their room every day
because they have to put the bed up and then they have to clear off the floor in
order to pull the bed out. So it forces them to clean their room.
How much time do you think it takes to clean your room?
Like 10 minutes.
And do you do it every day?
Uh,
At some point we planned to put like curtains here to kind of give them a little
bit of privacy and then we do have a plan for a bigger tidy that would be like
500 square feet. Well,
it's nice as we're saving money every cause we don't have mortgage so we get
a lot into savings to build our house.
So we plan to build that outright and not have a mortgage on that house. Yeah.
So cool. By the time Jackson's 13 we're gonna start planning his tiny house,
that's one of our main goals.
And we want them to go to school debt free and not having to worry where he's
gonna live until the moment.
Any tips for anyone who wants to live in a tiny house with the children?
I would say lots of food storage,
making sure you have room for toys and clothes and shoes, some
food, mostly food. They do eat a lot of things. Uh, shoes, shoes.
Make sure you like your children and your wife.
It's really
great to see how a family of five can live in such a small space and really make
it work. So if you liked this video, make sure to like share and subscribe.
And until next time I'll see you guys later.