Probably about five years ago
We became just interested in tiny houses. There wasn't that much of a movement so much back then or a trend.
We just always lived simply so we were looking for how we might live simply in
Our next iteration of doing that. And about three years ago
We got to the point where we felt like I was working too much
I was working about 60 to 80 hours a week, and that wasn't what...
We weren't living our priorities or our values as much as we want it to be so we wanted to put our relationships
And the family and friends in the natural world come back into the center and one way of doing that was to
have
Really low overhead expenses every month so that I could work part-time.
And we can open up that space and so between been to California. We rented one [for] a while
Just to make sure it was going to work for us. We started to look more seriously at building a tiny house [and]
Eventually [we] ended up deciding to do it. We didn't build it we designed it with our builder and then our builder
actually built it for us. He's really...
He's an artist. Really, we feel like we live within a big piece of artwork.
seeing the tumbleweed homes and
the beauty of them combined with the practicality
Was one of the things that really started us thinking
Well, we might be able to do this. And we'd lived tiny a lot before we lived in tents
and we lived in Twelve by Twelve and
small Cabins and
We wanted that same
Kind of experience, but instead of being totally off the grid [we] wanted to be able to
have really good light in a house and
we didn't want to carry our water we wanted to be able to turn on the faucet and
We seemed to move around a lot and the other thing about
Tiny houses on wheels is that it gives you that option
We've lived off grid quite a lot in our lives and when we were
thinking about
how to design tiny we were really trying to think about who we are now and
rather than who we were five or ten or fifteen years ago, and what are our what are our current needs and
What's realistic in terms of us staying in tiny Long-term.
And so, you know, right now we actually are set up so that we're connected to septic and a well
And that's...
That's what works for us right now there there was a time in our lives where [we] would have wanted to have every single
Sustainable technology possible and there's and there's still a large parts of a part of us that would like to incorporate more sustainable technologies
But at this point in time and also felt like moving in
275 Square feet was probably a pretty big sustainability move in and of itself.
Our tiny house is 25 feet long
By eight and a half feet wide - which is the maximum width you can have and pull yourself - by thirteen and a half feet high
which is the maximum height that you can pull in a road and
we are on a three axle trailer. Each axle can hold six thousand pounds, and it turns out that Tiny actually weighs 14,000 pounds
So we've got we had plenty of weight to play with.
Probably the most unique part of our design is our doggie elevator
That has to do with our
Soon-To-be ten-Year-Old corgy. (His birthday is on Monday)
He has always slept on our bed and
originally we thought "he's only nine and a half we can retrain him to sleep downstairs" and
We sat with that for about two weeks, and we thought "no no no it's not about him. It's about us!" Yeah! [gigles]
We really want him to be with us and we did design stairs up to our main loft
Because I tend to use the washroom at night
and I didn't want to be climbing down a ladder
But they are a little bit steep for him, and he has a little bit of a bad back, so
Matt our builder is fantastic and he
stared into open space for a long long time and then he eventually came up with this idea for a doggie elevator.
It's on a winch that pulls up an anchor, essentially. And so Shanty steps into it get down in the bed
to us
Wanting to think about living in a tiny home, and it's a totally different one to actually
experience it so we wanted to experience it and the one that we were in didn't have very much storage and
Even though we knew that we are going to give away a lot of what we owned
We still were going to need some storage so we have lots of little nooky places
And where we have storage both into our stairs
Underneath the fireplace underneath the couch
We have tow-kick drawers in the kitchen really anywhere where there is any potential extra space we built in storage
I think we also we didn't want to lose the richness of our lives
we wanted to bring with us the kinds of things that are important to us, so
We have a place for some of my family's dishes from like the 1800s
Which I thought I was going to have to give up
But as we did the design it turned out that there were little places for that and we have
art supplies because we like to do things like visual journaling and
we knit so we have a
place for our yarn
Yeah, we did a lot of repurposing so we had a dresser drawer
That was a little bit broken and it turned into our bathroom cabinet and shelving
We did as much local as we could so most of the wood
Not all of it, most of it is local the beauty I think was important to us
We we didn't want to feel like we're living in a cabin
Not that there's anything wrong with that, but we want to feel like we're living in a real home for
[people] who are thinking about tiny homes? I think though living in it for a while like we were talking about earlier and
Really thinking about who you are and what you value and not in a superficial way
But in a really deep way. Ya really designing it for your own needs
so the kitchen was really important to us we have a full-size fridge which many tiny homes don't have
Some people don't have ovens we wanted an oven. Why do we want an oven?
French fries. Because we make french fries! French fries are our junk food
So we had to have an oven.
Also, I have chemical sensitivities, so we were really careful with making sure that air was going to circulate well
We do have an HRV. Which is a bit of an expense. It's like a human nose in fact. We call it tiny's nose and
essentially it expels
Used-up air while while holding on to about 80 to 85% of the heat from that air
And then it brings in cool air from the outside preheats it and brings it in so there's always circulation
We were also really careful about material so a lot. I slept with a lot of materials for a couple weeks
to make sure that nothing was going to off gas and
Which of course brought up the expense that plywood for example any plywood on the inside of the house is
formaldehyde free and wears on the outside
It's fine, but that plywood cost four times as much here as it does the regular plywood
So you know there's there are compromises in that that we made along the way too, but never in relationship to our health
we have 17
Windows so loss of natural light and
Which also means that we need to work a little bit with
it not getting too hot here in the summertime and also having not too much heat escape via the windows in the wintertime and that's
That's something that we're still really experimenting with and figuring out for ourselves
Mostly we came up against minimum size limits. Part of the challenge in Cape Breton anyways
Is that a tiny house isn't a designation in any kind of codes or anything
and so after a lot of conversation with
with the City planner we came to an understanding that we are designated as
a Travel trailer which meant that we could live anywhere that is, we can live rurally, we couldn't live in in the city
But we didn't want to anyways and and we could live in places that were not designated as a rural residential subdivision
Other than in those places, we could live and as long as we were connected to septic
So even if we have had a composting toilet it wouldn't have mattered for the greywater
We would need to be connected to septic. We found
this piece of land which was for sale at the time, and we couldn't afford it and
But we contacted the owners, and we said well, how about we pay you a little bit of rent per month
and that'll pay your taxes until it sells, and then you know we'll figure it out from there, and so we went to the
Planning folk and they said that's fine. You're only there temporarily because you're renting and there used to be a mobile home here
So there was already a well and a septic in place
So we really just we you know put a little bit more gravel down on the Pad
But essentially we drove in and connected to systems. It was really important to me that we were
That we were set up in a legal way
we had read a number of logs about
Tiny houses who were you know sort of hidden off into the bush and and good for them
Totally support that too
and we read this one blog about somebody who had been living in Iowa city or something and pretty much illegally for six years and
Nobody had ever asked him to leave
but it just got more and more stressful for him knowing that somebody could ask him and he found that he was hiding himself and
eventually he chose to leave on his own so we want it to be legal because we feel like
Part of our living tiny is to help people understand that you can live a different lifestyle, and we don't have any
Expectation that people would live in 175 square feet, but maybe by our living in that size someone who's living
in 2,000 square feet might be able to see oh
I could live in a thousand or 800 or 600 so so we're hoping to inspire people to live smaller though, not necessarily
tiny. I also think that that being legal was important to you because we want to educate. Exactly. And
what happens when you are stuck away, and nobody knows you're there is that nothing changes. Right. And
While we're not out working in education actively as teachers we want our lifestyle to be teaching
Yeah, I don't think this is a caution so much as just something that we're encountering and still trying to figure out how to work
Best with and that's high humidity levels. So we are
Well practiced that whenever we're in the bathroom the fan is on and whenever we're doing anything in the kitchen even if it's just boiling
water our
Hood fan is on so and we have an HRV that
we don't use in the summertime, but in the wintertime the air is circulating and
yet our humidity levels are incredibly high and it's really all because of two people and a dog breathing and
In the summertime and in the spring it doesn't seem to be that much
of an issue, whereas in the wintertime we found a little bit of mold in a couple of places where
the floor meets the wall
In areas where there's extra metal on the trailer, so the wheel wells for example
And so it was just a little bit colder there
and the humidity was
condensing in that area which then started to create a little bit of mold so we we posted on a tiny house Facebook page
and just asked if anybody else had this issue. What are you doing? We got over 150 responses
And apparently people have been experiencing which is not talking about it much for some reason and off of it somebody another
Tiny house builder wrote a really nice article actually bringing together
He had he showed a picture which looked
what had happened in his house and it looked exactly like our wall
Really so and brought together some nice potential things to try and all which we have tried, and it hasn't reduced our humidity
But part of it is that we we live in a very humid area and so in terms of living in Eastern Canada its
Probably just something that you need to deal with as best as you can
I'm not sure it's something that we're going to resolve so to speak
But it's still part of our adventure
Well the other thing that was interesting was as we started to look at how do you deal with?
Moisture and mold issues. We thought it was a tiny house issue and we discovered that
It's an issue for people in big houses, too
and
In areas that are high humidity. And one of the responses to us, when we posted on the
Facebook tiny house page, what do you do with
high humidity levels was somebody from I think was maybe living in Ontario, but was from Germany, I don't remember but
her solution was
called "lüften" and it was basically a process that you do in Germany where depending on the month
And how cold it is relative to the humidity you open all your windows for a certain amount of time
Several times a day and you just exchange the air now we have an HRV
So the air is exchanging anyways
But in the wintertime we ended up doing we ended up opening our windows for three to five minutes
Two or three times a day and it did help bring down the humidity
So we weren't able to find insurance for the actual moving of tiny so it might be out there
We just weren't able to find it
Which is why we decided since it wasn't a very long move we actually hired a tow company
And they're insuring whatever they're towing so tiny was insured in that sense
and then in terms of actually insuring tiny as a home and
again, tiny houses don't Exist on
insurance people's screens, and so we're actually insured as a mini home and
To be a mini home
We had to skirt tiny so you can't actually see her wheels right now
but they're there and we had to tie her down which means that she has a
pieces of rebar that are going down into the ground so we're not just going to go up and and
Drive away in the middle of night we're hoping that
Tiny house become a little bit more common, so that house insurance
Becomes a little bit cheaper because again they've never heard of a tiny house
But there was actually only one company of all the companies that our friend explored. He's an insurance broker. That would even
Attempt to insure us, so we were incredibly grateful that somebody would
I think a lot of people got themselves in pretty deep with home ownership
Big homes take a lot of money to keep up and a lot of life energy and
I think that people have started to rethink the big house and
big expensive life and
somebody was pretty smart and
Began to
publicize tiny houses and
I also think because
And Tumbleweed was one of the first
People to do that because what they were presenting felt like a house
people who maybe wouldn't have considered
Whatever you want to call that and cabin living
said, Oh I could live in that, that's beautiful
And it has everything that I need. I think that's one of the reasons that it's been attractive
it's like almost like a pendulum where
people lived in sort of
Normal size houses smaller houses a thousand square feet and then they went to these massive
McMansions McMansions
And I think the Pendulum is is still swinging. We just read a really interesting thing that said that it might be that the
most efficient
Size in terms of how much it costs to build and to live in is around five hundred square feet which I thought was
interesting
Data that wasn't even around
Before the tiny house movement. I think tiny houses right now are mostly attractive to a
two segments of the population I'd say and we actually
Kind of aren't in either, but so a slightly younger
Segment of the population where real estate prices are just way too high and their salaries aren't
You can't do it
and
Also very much to the retirement population. I've met a number of people that are afraid to leave their work
They're afraid to return because they don't think they'll be able to afford their lifestyles, and they probably
many of them won't be able to but they could afford and
be in a tiny house and and still live in a beautiful space
and do what they want to be doing with their lives. You know in terms of the future. I don't think it's a
Be-all and End-all solution to the housing crisis
At all it's a solution for some people. I think tiny houses are being used in some good ways and in the u.s.
in particular in terms of Homelessness
There's some really interesting projects happening down there
how it will evolve you know I think a lot of a
Lot of that will depend on how zoning and regulations evolve