>>DANIELLE: Hey everyone, in this video we're going to give you a full tour of this tiny house cottage.
It's 24 feet long.
It has a loft with a staircase and a railing. It's got two heat sources,
lots of natural light, and it has a really "cottagey" rustic kind of interior design.
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We just met up with John, the owner;
and he was telling us that he bought this tiny house from a couple who built it
and lived in it for two years off-grid while they were building their own home.
And so John bought it and at the time, it was pretty bare-bones.
So he did a few upgrades to make it more functional: he added plumbing; he plugged it into the grid;
he added the second heat source;
and then he also did a lot of interior design work to give it
this cottage aesthetic that it has now.
He used a lot of recycled barn wood and the floor and walls are done in a pine tongue and groove.
Now, he's got it on his property by this beautiful lake.
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So one of the first things you notice when you come in here is there's a lot of natural light.
So there's actually 10 windows in this house
and most of them open so you can also get a lot of nice fresh air in the summer.
This is a ladder John built and added on
to be able to access the loft up there for storage;
and he used some hardware that he found, he wasn't sure if it would work,
but he designed it so you can pull the ladder out and then run it along this galvanized pipe here.
We really like this because this way it's always attached so it's really safe to use.
One of the heat sources in the house is this wall-mounted electric heater.
It's a 1500 watt heater and it has a thermostat
so that's really nice in a tiny house. A lot of people only have wood stoves
but that means there's a lot of temperature
fluctuations in your house and sometimes you come home and it's really cold.
So it's nice to have at least one heat source with a thermostat
to prevent everything from freezing.
The bathroom is at the far end of the house.
So basically,
it's just a standard flush toilet in here, sink and shower and he has an on-demand hot water heater under the sink.
For gray and black water, this wasn't a great area to have a septic tank.
So what he has is a 360-gallon holding tank under the tiny house and
the tank is insulated; and
the pipe leading down into the tank has heat tape around it to make sure nothing freezes.
He just has to have that pumped out a couple of times a year.
Like I mentioned, it's on the grid, so it's getting water piped from the main house.
One of the main challenges
we've heard from other tiny house owners in Canada
is that the fresh water line coming into the house can often freeze.
So what a lot of people do is they'll insulate their water line and
wrap heat tape around it and have that heat tape running
all winter long.
So apparently that works pretty well, but John has a different system that we haven't seen yet.
I just heard about this today so my explanation might be a bit simplified.
But basically,
he has a heat line running inside the pipe
and when ice forms inside the pipe, it
triggers the heat line and turns it on in that spot
where ice has formed.
So this sounds like a really efficient way to keep your water from freezing.
We'll put a link to this in the description because I know a lot of you will probably want to check it out yourselves.
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This is the kitchen. You'll see there's lots of counter space.
John actually swapped out the original stainless-steel sink for this nice big
kind of country-style
ceramic sink.
He added plumbing and you can see all the pipes are exposed.
Part of that was because he wanted a rustic look but also
I think it's pretty practical to have access to your pipes all the time; and that way if you need to fix anything
you don't have to dig inside the walls.
Another thing that I'm starting to appreciate more and more
especially in a space where the heat might fluctuate more than in a typical house is
open-concept storage.
I find when you have cupboard doors, cold air and moisture can get trapped in those spaces.
Whereas when it's all open-concept, the air and the moisture and the heat are all more evenly distributed.
I also really like how he's got most of his kitchen utensils and
cutlery and things like that all on the wall so it really frees up the counter space.
To eat, he's got a little nook here with two stools that you can eat at
and lots of counter space for preparing food and doing dishes.
For cooking, we have a two burner electric hot plate and the bar fridge is electric.
The second source of heat in the tiny house is this
small wood stove. It's a Marine wood stove and it's solid cast iron.
It's pumping out a lot of heat and it seems really efficient.
He says that he really likes to use these logs and they're basically just
compressed sawdust
and they can burn for a few hours.
This was originally here but he had it reinstalled to make sure everything was safe and up to code.
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The living room is super comfortable. He has the sectional here and it turns into a queen-size bed.
So you can actually sleep four people in here pretty comfortably along with the bed upstairs
and then these three windows at the end of
the house give you a great view on the lake.
Over on this side is the staircase. So the original staircase had all of this storage underneath it.
There's these great,
kind of recycled barnwood doors.
John widened the staircase steps to make them a little bit safer to go up and down
and he added this railing as well which
is really great.
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The loft is up here so there's a really comfy bed.
There's a bit of storage on the back side of this knee wall, and there's two big windows.
So you get lots of nice light up here. A lot of people have said that they might feel claustrophobic in a loft.
And so I think having windows that you can either open or just see-through
kind of opens up the space a little bit more.
Another thing here that you'll notice is there's a shed style roof
and so that allows you to be able to sit up in bed.
Some lofts can also get really hot in the summer
and so what's great here is that you do have those two windows up top
so you can get a bit of airflow
and there's a fan above the kitchen. So with all of those elements working,
hopefully, it doesn't get too hot here in the summer.
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This tiny house is 24 feet long, 8 1/2 feet wide, and 13 1/2 feet tall;
and those are all the exterior measurements.
It's built on a drop axle trailer.
So the advantage of that is that the floor sits lower to the ground
and you actually get a little bit more interior space.
The drawback is that you do have to
frame around your wheel wells so you lose some space along the two walls
where the wheel wells are.
This tiny house weighs between 15 and 16,000 pounds.
It's insulated with Roxul in the floor, the ceiling, and the walls.
It's built with a 2x4 frame. It's sheathed with plywood
and then it's got cedar shakes on the outside and a corrugated metal roof.
In case you're wondering, John isn't living in this tiny house.
He bought it as a cottage and that's how he's using it.
He also rents it out sometimes.
He did a beautiful job making this tiny house feel like a tiny home though
and we're so excited that we got to check it out.
We've got a lot of ideas and as usual, whenever Mat and I come and visit a different living space,
we think this is the one so that's how we're feeling right now.
It's also a really nice time of year, when it's so cold outside, to come into such a little space and have the
fire going in the wood stove and everything. So a really great place to check out and we hope you've enjoyed
checking it out with us.
If you want to learn more about this tiny house,
we'll put a link to it in the description of the video. If you enjoyed this video and you want to see more videos like
this, we post a new video every single week
so you can subscribe to make sure you catch those new videos and we've already shared
dozens of other tiny house tours and alternative living videos.
So if you want to see those, check out our playlists.
Thanks so much for watching. We'll see you next time.
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