In this week's video,
we're going to visit one of the largest and best tiny house communities that
I've ever seen.
The owner is going to take us on a tour of the community and explain why he
focused on creating shared spaces.
Finally,
we're going to step inside one of the beautiful renovated vintage trailers that
they have onsite for nightly rentals. So let's take a tour.
I am Josh. I'm the owner of tiny tranquility.
We're a tiny home community on the Oregon coast.
We've got 43 sites,
35 of which I think are occupied currently by tiny homes.
Mostly people living here in the park.
We do have a handful of folks who are essentially using their tiny home as a
beach house.
And we also have 10 nightly rentals and then sprinkled in between the tiny
homes. We've got several vintage trailers as well.
I decided on the park here in Walport Oregon,
which is on the central Oregon coast. It wasn't an accident.
I had been coming down to this stretch of the coast for a number of years with
my family, and just really have always been in love with the natural beauty of,
of this stretch of the coast property
where the park is located now was the site of a nursery a large commercial and
retail nursery that was in business for decades.
And unfortunately went out of business during the last downturn.
So in 2012 and really just started falling apart for the next
four years or so until I bought it from the bank in 2016,
when I bought the property,
I honestly didn't know what I was going to do with it.
I just thought that it would be a great site for something.
And I kicked around a bunch of other crazy ideas,
maybe even crazier than the tiny home park idea.
Before I decided that this is really what I wanted to do,
that I wanted to create a community here
to create the tiny home park. It was almost like a complete redo. I mean,
I did repurpose a couple of the buildings, but in terms of the site,
none of the infrastructure was usable. So we had to completely scrape
you know, in some cases, two, three feet off of the site, um, to,
to create the park, put in all the infrastructure, the power of the water, uh,
the septic system,
I've got a fairly massive septic system with an acre of drainfield.
But even before the development period,
there was about a year of the planning phase where I had to go through a very
lengthy process with the planning department in Lincoln County to get them to
approve the park.
I would never say that was an easy process because as I'm sure a lot of tiny
home folks have experienced the local planners really don't know what to do with
tiny homes. Don't know what to make of them. You know, are they RVs?
Are they homes did the building codes apply?
And so there was plenty of occasions along this journey where I didn't
think it was going to happen.
Cause there was a bunch of derailers along the way.
And we had to navigate our way through those.
Basically this is approved by the County and is an RV park.
So all the tiny homes here have to be on wheels and they've got to be built in
conformance with nationally recognized RV standards
In sort of traditional RV parks. I mean, and of course there's a whole spectrum.
There's some real nice ones and there's some ones that aren't so nice,
but in a lot of them, the RVs are very close to each other.
And so when we conceptualize the park and design the park,
instead of sort of packing them in,
we wanted to give each site more space than you might find in sort of a
traditional RV park. The whole idea.
When the park was conceptualized, was that if you're going to be in a tiny home,
it'd be really nice to have some other spaces,
some other areas within the park where you could stretch your legs,
get together with people and really just have some shared space that was much
bigger than the space you might have in your tiny home.
This is our greenhouse whole bunch of different stuff going on in here.
Cause it is a 12,000 square foot space. Actually, when we got in the park,
this was about a 40,000 square foot greenhouse. Cause again, it was a,
it was a nursery in its prior life.
So we contracted it down to about 12,000 square feet.
So you can see we've got a mail slot and this is where their packaged deliveries
come. You've also got a little giveaway table that just sort of started up
organically. So people, people, uh,
the stuff which is they're downsizing and wanting to get rid of stuff,
it goes to the giveaway table first over here, we've got our community bikes,
just this past spring.
We put in some fitness equipment for use both by the residents,
the folks who were living here,
as well as our nightly guess we're renting this space out to a glassblower. Um,
so, uh, he's just putting a shop together and uh,
hopefully within the next month or two he'll actually start blowing glass and we
you know,
we've talked about him displaying his work throughout the park as well.
I'm hoping that he maybe has classes and stuff like that for people in the
community. And, um, you know, I think we've been,
I've been kind of selective about who's gonna come in here.
It's gotta be something that really fits with the community,
some formal storage for the folks who are living here.
So if they've downsized for a much bigger space,
but still need a spot to store some stuff,
either in the short term or long term, then we've got that available for them.
This is our community garden and where Helen Denton,
who really has done everything in here, I wish I could take credit for, for it,
but I can't. She's really made this a, this garden space,
a really awesome space for our, our nightly guests and, and,
and the folks living here,
Helen has her micro greens business.
You can see some of the trays over there called little Swiss farms.
She's been here since we first opened in July of 2018.
And basically, you know,
people want to come here and grab some collard greens or some or whatever.
Um, we do, um, ask that they contribute or volunteer in the garden or,
um, or make a voluntary donation, which we then put back into the garden.
So this is our Doug for lodge. This was a, a storage building for the nursery.
When we took over the property, the roof had collapsed in really, uh,
we had to completely revamp the building. So we did a bunch of structural work.
We put in three new trusses. Again, this is another,
I call it the shared living room. You can see here,
we've got a wood burning stove with a nice seating area,
People living here,
and actually the nightly guests have access to free laundry in here.
You got a TV room in here. Um, again,
some people don't have a TV within their tiny home,
so we wanted to give them the opportunity. If they have a, a game or a show,
they have to, they feel they have to watch them.
They do have an opportunity to do that within, within a shared common space,
ping pong, pool table, again, available to everybody, a lot of games.
And then we've got a little library area over here.
So we've got folks who live here, contributing their own books to that. Uh,
I got a bunch of boxes out of my own attic. Um, and again, just a,
a space where people can, can grab a book, take it for a couple of weeks,
bring it back, contribute their own books.
So then this is our outdoor space. During the summer,
we typically have some more seating out here.
This is where we get together for community-wide potlucks.
We have two grills that everybody can use a lot of nice big trees and just a
nice space to come out when the, when the weather's nice and just relax and eat,
get together with friends and family
So this is our Redwood commons.
I wanted to have a building that had some ocean views.
Some people in their tiny homes don't have an oven as an example,
to be able to cook a Turkey or something like that on Thanksgiving.
And so we have a fully stocked kitchen up there that anybody in the community or
nightly rendered guests.
This is the area in tiny tranquility,
where we have most of our nightly rentals we've we wanted to congregate them
together and put them close to some of our common facilities.
So they're right next to our Redwood commons,
about a five minute walk to the beach, you know,
we're up to about 35 tiny homes here, and there's a few that are the same,
but by and large, they're all different. And I think you'll see that within our,
within our nightly rentals as well. This one here we call the driftwood.
The shingles on that tiny home came off an old Masonic lodge,
and then we have some newer, tiny homes as well. Just a good, I think,
a good representation of what you might see within the tiny home realm,
if you will.
So we've got a combination of tiny homes and then three vintage trailers.
It's sort of a weird combination that you probably don't see very often, but,
uh, that was really just on me. I really like old vintage trailers.
I think aesthetically they're much more beautiful than, than the newer ones,
no criticism of the newer ones, but I just liked the old ones.
My name is Katie Wiley and I am one of the owners of stagecoach.
And we are in the dunes,
which is a 1975 Airstream located right here at tiny tranquility park.
It is available for nightly rental and Airbnb.
So we started renovating trailers many, many years ago, just for fun.
But we had done enough that we actually decided that maybe we should do
this for a living.
So we got our dealers license to buy and sell vintage trailers.
The owner of tiny tranquility actually called us. And he said,
I'm developing a park. Could you do my trailers for the park?
We couldn't believe it. It was just days in from starting our business.
And the rest is history. Here we are now. So altogether,
there are four stagecoach trailers here.
We saw someone putting a for sale sign on this beautiful Airstream,
right across the street from our house. And it said $1,000, we thought, no way,
that's not right, but I made my husband turn around and sure enough,
they were duct taping aside to the exterior of this beautiful trailer.
And it said a thousand dollars.
So we swooped in and grabbed it that very moment.
And here it is at tiny tranquility,
it was really important that we had a face that anyone could fill it home in to
make breakfast, lunch dinner. So we have a three burner stove, a sink,
large enough to do dishes for pots and pans,
plenty of storage space.
We also transformed this area in to a
twin bed. It's a custom mattress,
but we wanted to create a space that could double as a sofa area.
So you could put the pillows back here, have a seat, watch TV.
If you are a family staying in here,
there's an extra bed for a guest or children,
as well as the main bed upfront
on this side of the 1975 Airstream.
We have a large bar top that can double as a workspace,
whether you're here for vacation or for work, there's plenty of room.
And we also have a Sandy colored laminate flooring that we wanted to put in
here to mimic the Sandy tones of the Oregon coast.
We have really fun maps here of our town of Waldport
that have been burned to look like old treasure maps,
just some fun coastal touches throughout.
Let me show you the bathroom here in the back back here,
we have a full tile shower with beautiful hexagon tiles.
We have a flushing toilet and a beautiful tiny pedestal sink
upfront here.
We have the bedroom area and one of the only original features
of this vintage trailer, because it was in such poor condition.
When we bought it is this beautiful clock area,
which is iconic to all Airstreams.
You know,
initially we had people and still have people coming here from all over the
country. Many of whom had never lived in a tiny home before. And so I think,
you know, it's evolved quite a bit in terms of the, uh,
just the community coming together.
I'd say that's not something that I'd necessarily put a lot of thought into when
I was planning the park. I was so focused on getting the park done.
I didn't necessarily think about, okay,
what's the playbook for trying to make this a living, breathing community.
I just sort of assumed and hoped that it would happen organically.
And I think initially it, that sort of happened in fits and starts.
But now I really feel as though it's coming together,
like the community that I had envisioned it would,
You know, I've also thought about doing a second park.
I don't have any particular plans at this point,
but I have looked at a few properties. It seems as though there's,
there's really quite a demand for parks of this type.
I think if they're done right, I mean,
there's plenty of people who want to be by themselves in their own tiny home,
but there's also,
I think a lot of people who like the safety and comfort of having some neighbors
and enjoying that community peace as well.
Tune in next week as we come back to tiny tranquility to take a tour of one
residence, unique, tiny home,
also make sure to like share and subscribe and I'll see you guys next week.