Seattle, Washington is now the third most expensive city in the United States to buy a
house.
I recently just checked prices and the average home is sold for over $700,000 in
today's video,
I'm going to be featuring a house in one of the most coveted and popular
neighborhoods in Seattle,
but the homeowners are doing something a little bit different.
Paul and Caroline decided to build a 400 square foot backyard cottage and move
into it while renting out their big house.
And while this isn't as tiny as some of the other homes featured on this
channel,
I still think it's an important story to feature about a couple that's living
alternatively and simply in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the
United States.
Hi, my name is Caroline. My name is Paul. This is what I call the happy house
Our cottage. It's a mother-in-law apartment above a garage
technically, it's about 400 square feet of living space.
Originally I was playing ping pong in the garage and there was not enough room,
so I wanted a bigger space. We realized, Oh, you could put something on top.
So we ended up with the apartment on top.
I think people have expectations about why you would want to build something
smaller and I think the way I see it,
Paul's a builder and so you know, people would say, well are you building,
you know because you want to do Airbnb or are you building so that you would
have, you know, a new place to live? And it's like, no,
Paul just wants to build something. You know, it's,
it's how he likes to spend his time.
The other house is two bedroom,
two bath on two floors and all though we had stuff to fill it up,
we weren't really using it.
We moved over here what we needed and what we wanted and left things over there
and we ended up renting out that house. It was a gradual thing.
We stepped down in size if we needed some, Oh yeah, that's in the other house.
I'll go take it and bring it over.
It's almost as if you're required to think a little more intentionally about
what comes in your house and what goes out.
And I think for me that feels better, you know,
more engaged and you have to think about your relationship to things,
to money, you know, to space to other people.
It took us about two years to build,
we built this house for a lot less than most people build a backyard cottage.
So I built this entire thing for just over $70,000 I did a lot of reuse,
which if you hired a contractor,
they will never do because all those things take time.
I had time and I'm a cheap bastard so I wouldn't spend the money that benefited
us. And now by building a $70,000 house,
our property value has gone up a couple of hundred thousand dollars. They have,
the thing is just how personal it is, which you know,
sort of a combination of the two of us.
Then he was able to make all this stuff to me is just incredible.
And so it's an, it's inspiring in that way. You know,
that we have something that's self-made.
It's mostly his project and whatever he wanted to do I was pretty sure I'd be
happy with. And so the decision making was relatively easy.
I think it's kind of funny cause I think it's mostly her project.
This obviously is an external way up and our railings are here.
We've put these together with parts and pieces. We had to fill in some spaces.
So these are farm implements from a piece of property we have over in Eastern
Washington. There's a lot of little things that are ours.
We've kind of dragged in or brought in from someplace else.
So this is our kitchen and dining room at the same time.
Counter tops are all Paperstone so they're recycled material.
And actually this came in one big sheet.
I bought some decent wood for the face front,
but all the cabinet itself under everything is just shipping pallets.
We have some small little details like these are baby spoons from Goodwill for
all the doors have spoons. All the cabinets have forks.
That's actually our hot water heater.
It's an on demand electric hot water heater.
So you can't hear it when it turns on. And it provides everything we need.
The showers just on the other side of that wall.
Also the entire house and our other house as well is all solar panels.
This used to be a a freezer, sorry,
a deep freezer and I've rewired it.
So it's now our frigerator because getting
the refrigerators is 300, 400 bucks when I can do this for 150. And you
didn't feel the need to have a full size? That feeds two people.
We don't need anything else. We just,
we tend to shop relatively every other day or something.
Relatively short span in between trips, so that's plenty.
My wife wanted a table and she likes the live edge of that.
So I went out and found a slab and made this table.
This is my first experiment creating something that actually workable and
livable. It came out pretty well,
but everything in this kitchen is kind of a one. It's like, eh,
we'll try that. See what happens. That's a spaghetti pot.
Cheese grater. They just seem to work.
I needed something and then that came to my mind. We have a cork floor,
all the lights and sensors are automatic. So when we walk in they turn on.
When we leave a minute later they'll turn off. The best part about this house,
in my opinion, actually is the windows. I didn't realize this when it started.
That was kind of a Caroline suggestion. She wanted more windows.
Whenever I put a wall in, she put windows in it,
but it turns out the sunrises behind me that's facing East and we get a very
nice gentle gold light that kind of fills this whole place and as a result of
that really does fill up the room.
It's amazing how many people pick out details that are not really important for
the house, like the windows.
The little detail of that arrow has been commented on by every person who's come
in here. The floor itself is actually Brown paper bags.
So I did it literally with Elmers glue and some paper bags ripped up and
put them all down and smooth it out.
And then just a quick water-based polyurethane on top.
I put in the drawers here you can see more spoons, but
yeah, but they're actually quite deep and do most of our storage
but I haven't put in the small ones. I'm still working on those.
There's lots of little details that I'm going to get to one day.
Is this where you store all of your clothes?
Those four things, those, those two drawers. Hers is slightly bigger than mine.
I kind of got ripped off on that one.
So you had one comfy chair, right? Do you guys fight over it?
No. Caroline gets it for some reason. I don't know how that works.
Well that's where my office is. Yeah,
I have my little stack over there and his office right.
You got you asked earlier.
So this desk actually folds down as well like that.
Drop it down and get it out of the way if we want. And then store the computer.
So the bathroom, the door is an old door we found at my brother's garage,
we took down the refinish, but all of this was kind of custom made.
I found a few red ones. And then I thought, I have no plan. So I said,
what's the cheapest, easiest way to do it?
And I got about 27 different white tiles in there of all kinds and I just made a
mosaic and built it as I went.
The countertop was all scrap wood that people were throwing out,
um, pallets and such.
And I tore it up and glued together and then waterproofed it.
This used to be a mantle from a neighbor across the street.
There were thrown it out over a fireplace mantle. This is another part of it.
I turned into our backsplash
everything in here is custom made just because I had a certain space I had to
get it full and enough room for us to maneuver.
We have parties over, you know, anywhere from 10 to 25 people or whatever.
They don't notice that there's no bed. It's like they're on the way out.
Where do you guys sleep anyway?
I just put this clip on so we can keep the pillows in place as we're folding
it up. Good to go. Okay. This is
There's a lot of things we didn't think about ahead of time.
For instance,
this originally was going to be a a couch kind of seat here,
cushions all planned out and designed,
but it's Caroline's bookshelf now so I don't know if it'll ever get converted.
We might someday put cabinets up here if we decide we need them,
but we just haven't gone through our plans.
This roof is only has about four inches of soil in it.
This will become completely solid with all kinds of seeds and there's a few
flowers planted in here. Um,
it absorbs a lot of our runoff. We have no gutters,
so the rainwater comes in,
drops through here and actually filters all the way through this before going
off the house and all that comes into our property and actually waters our
trees.
This garage, technically it is a garage.
You can get the car down from the driveway in here and it's a parking space
because by regulation we have to have parking space.
But we told the inspector and everybody knows we will never use it as a parking
space because it has been
our friend who did the painting,
he owns a apex painting and he did all the paint job in exchange for free pink
pong. So you definitely do some ping pong tournaments here.
Yeah, we tend to public dinner and ping pong tournament
If I were going to give any advice to somebody building a house, start doing it.
This is something anybody can do. It might take you longer.
It might mean you have to adjust a little bit and get some friends to help in
certain aspects, but start it.
There was no manual that said you have to do it this way or you have to do it
the way a contractor wants you to do it. Be creative.
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