When I was in my teens I really liked being outside a lot and I spent a lot of
time in my summers like sleeping in a tent in the backyard and I really liked
just being as close to the outdoors as I could. So in my late teens I decided to
build a tiny house. It was kind of before a lot of people had heard of tiny houses.
I didn't call it a tiny house, I just called it a little cabin. It was years
after that that I started hearing people say even the word like the "tiny house
movement" or anything like that. My name is Jesse and I live in a tiny house in Maine.
I like that my tiny house was built by hand. I did it mostly with a saw
and an ax, help from my friends, my parents and the community. This for me
has been a way to live a somewhat minimalist lifestyle and be very
involved with nature. Every time I walk out my door, I have to walk through the
woods to get to my car, and when I come home from wherever I am at the end of
the day, whatever's going on in that day, I have to get out of my car and walk
through the woods to get to my house. I love that. As opposed to being able to
like park right there and walk inside and not even have to get a rain drop on
my head. I appreciate that rain drop.
So this is my tiny house. This is the mudroom I built a couple years after I started it
because I needed some more space. I have a lot of skis and gear and what not for
winter time and different activities that I do. I also have a closet in
here. This is like all my clothes that need to hang and then camping gear and
I'm really into like bulk food storage. I have quite a bit of food stored in here
dry different oats and beans and things like that.
Welcome to my house.
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This is part of my kitchen. I just have a really simple water setup. Five gallons
at a time. I use it for hand washing and drinking and what not. It drains into a
five gallon bucket and it's kind of really simple. It's basically like, I feel
like, living in here is sort of like really fancy camping. My electricity
comes from solar. I have been messing around with solar
for quite a while. I've got a really efficient 12 volt solar chest fridge
that works really well for me. I've got some different solar components behind
this wall. Most of the time it keeps me in light and energy. Once in a while, if
there's a lot of rain, I just have to not work on my computer anymore and take a
break and light a candle and I don't mind that. Over here is the rest of the
sort of food area. This was like the very first thing I built in this cabin was
this corner and it was before I even had any heat source in here. This whole
cabinet is insulated from the outside and from the inside and I used a really
simple thermostat that's designed for people who go away in the winter and
they have a neighbor watching their house. They can have a light on this
thermostat and when your house goes below a certain temperature that you set, the
light comes on. So your neighbor knows like, "Oh, your furnace stopped working".
And so what I did is I kind of jerry-rigged one of those thermostats through my
solar system to turn on a car taillight bulb, which would heat up this cabinet
and keep my food from freezing. Over here I do have a stove now. It's a Three Dog
Stove from the Four Dog Stove company in Minnesota. Has a nice little stainless
steel water jacket on the side. Gives me hot water in the wintertime. It doesn't
retain heat at all. It's very thin, the whole thing weighs about 50 pounds. It's
designed to go in wall tents. This winter I'm working on a mass heater for my tiny
house, which will hopefully hold a lot more heat. This is the rest of my tiny
house. This is my tiny office over here and library. I do photography and video work.
Have a little editing station. This is soon to be the someday love seat/bed
convertible table area that is also going to have some storage in it, which
doesn't exist yet except in my head. It's something that I need in here
because I don't have enough good seating so I'm going to be working on that.
So this ladder takes me up to the loft. It's very cozy, makes a lot of sense to
sleep in the loft. There's not a really a lot of other things you would do except
just store stuff up here. However, it gets really hot up here in the spring in the
summer in the winter and in the fall. All the time, it's a little bit too warm up
here. My buddy, Will, one day was helping me work on this and I said, "Hey, you're a
good carpenter, I like what you do. I don't really care what it is, but I want
you to just make something cool in my house". And he looked around for a while and he
said, "Hey, you need a catwalk". We poked around and we found this piece of wood
that isn't quite as wide as I would have liked, but it lets me go over to that
window and open it and close it and have kind of a way to get across that part of
my space. I kind of lived by the philosophy of no matter how big your
backpack is, you're always going to fill it up. The house is the same way and even
though it's a small backpack, I definitely have filled it up and learned
where that edges of too much stuff versus quality of life. I feel like
if I'm running into those hurdles in a place this size I can't even imagine
living in a 3,000 square foot house and having to deal with that because when
you have to change something you're doing with like a huge amount of stuff.
So I'm grateful for the opportunity to be able to practice that exercise of
figuring out how much stuff is too much and it's a constant process. I would not
say I have it figured out. So I have this wood-fired brick oven here that I built.
It's mostly made out of clay and sand a little brick, little flour brick, on the
hearth. Great for making pizzas when your friends come over. This is just my really
simple little rocket stove that I cook on. It's basically just a big number 10
can. This happens to be kind of a tall number 10 can. It's got some smaller
soup cans stuck inside it, a little shelf here, sort of rocket combustion. The air
feeds in underneath the can. Couple of these sticks is enough to cook a meal
easily. It really is very efficient and in between the smaller cans in the
middle and this outer can is some insulation material. You can use wood
ashes. I use some vermiculite and it helps really keep the heat in and focus
all of the heat that's getting produced by this combustion. Once it gets going it
does a pretty good job at not producing much smoke,
contrary to the smoke you're seeing right now, but if we give it a minute and
we come back to it you'll see. I have a composting outhouse over here that works
really well. Pretty effective, pretty simple.
So something I really like about scything is that it doesn't use any fuel of any kind
except my own. The grass cuts the best first thing in the morning so it's
really great routine to just wake up, run outside, mow for half an hour,
and then come in and have breakfast. It lets me kind of get tuned in with my
body, get some exercise, make some mulch for my garden, keep my area around my house
clear. I can trim around things. I can make hay. I can harvest grain with this
thing. It's just a lot of fun.
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I think something I would share with anybody who is interested in building a
tiny house, building a tent on wheels, building a tree house, setting up a van,
whatever they were doing is don't be afraid to try things. I mean my first
solar system was like a junk car battery somebody gave me and a little solar panel
from somewhere and a light bulb out of a tail light of a Volvo and some wires
that came from the dump and I just started playing with it. And now I'm
helping friends design solar systems. So, I think, I think that's really important
to just, if you have a vision for something or you're really interested in
trying something or say, "Well, I'd really like it to be this way, but maybe
somebody over here is telling me I, I can't make it that way".
Well pay attention to that, but still don't forget about you dream. Try to not
worry about it being perfect and just go with it. It's amazing how things can
happen if you just say, "Well, I don't quite know what I'm doing, but I'm just
going to give this a shot". And don't be afraid to mess up. If you go examine
that thing with a tape measure and a level you're going to find that there's
some little crooked bits here and there and there's some joints that don't quite
line up, but the darn thing hasn't fallen over yet, and I don't think it's going to
in a hurry.