(upbeat guitar music)
- If you asked me if I thought that we would end up
in a tiny home or in a small space,
I'd say probably not.
- When we first intended to move into a garage
we thought our neighbors would think we were crazy.
But, instead, people love it.
If anything, people seem to mistake our home
for a bar or restaurant.
And so at night, when we're hanging out
with friends drinking a glass of wine,
there's a little confusion as people walk by
and see this well-lit space with people drinking.
You know, they walk up and go like,
what are you serving?
- When we first had this idea
to turn the garage into our home,
we decided that we wanted everything
to be tucked away in a space so that
when you walk in it's very clean,
it's very sleek, it's very minimalist.
- The overall look and feel, or aesthetic,
of our place has somehow become very industrial.
It wasn't part of the intent,
but we built everything by hand
because it fit what we had available
and it fit our budget at the time.
We found a community wood shop
to go work at and I taught myself to weld.
Started creating some small pieces of furniture
and bar stools, chairs, end tables,
and that aesthetic of the steel
and reclaimed wood kinda spilled over
into the cabinetry and the rest of our space as well.
Our concrete countertops are a perfect example of that.
The most difficult conversation
when it comes to small space living is storage.
What am I going to do with my stuff?
Where am I going to put everything?
Luckily, for us that was a bit
of an easier conversation because we had already
purged most of our belongings.
- The process of downsizing
was over the course of many years.
At first, it was just putting stuff in bins
and tucking them away and if we didn't open them
for a few months, then we would just go and donate them.
From there we sold even more and gave away even more
because we were gonna road trip
and our road trip was open ended,
we didn't know what we were going to do afterwards.
So to store stuff just didn't feel right.
When you downsize and you get rid
of a lot of stuff, there's a real freedom there.
A real simplification.
(laughs)
- Jen and I left our nine to five jobs
to go travel and explore and take deep breaths.
We moved into our 1967 old split-window bus,
very romantic idea, but only about 47 square feet
as we calculated it.
So that was our smallest living situation.
After a year and a half on the road,
we came back to Portland to say hi
to friends and family because we missed them
and realized that we actually love Portland
and we love our home here.
We still had a three bedroom house
that was sitting here being rented to another family.
It was time for that lease to expire
and we asked them to leave, they begged us to stay,
and we realized that we don't have the stuff
to fill a three bedroom house anymore anyway.
And so it finally hit us that there's
this garage that's going unused.
That we weren't using, the tenants weren't using,
and we could just convert the garage and live in it.
- Because Brian and I live in the garage,
we are able to rent out the main house.
It's a three bedroom, two bath.
They pay, essentially, the mortgage
and so Brian and I live in our garage
rent free, mortgage free.
- We both had jobs that probably should
have been perfect jobs, you know?
They paid well, but we just never quite felt right.
70 hours a week, it just didn't seem a good fit to us
and Jen is kind of a hippy at heart
and was always kind of saying we should just run away,
we should run away and I don't know.
I come from an upbringing and society tells us
that's not okay.
And so I was like, that's not okay.
What about our 401k?
What about our savings
and our retirement and the plan?
We kind of compromised and set a plan in place.
For me it wasn't just run away,
it was have a buffer in our finances
so when we came back we didn't have to go beg for jobs.
We could actually try to do something that we wanted.
- Freedom is really our mantra right now.
Freedom in our schedules,
freedom to make choices that make us happy.
As we're talking about the designs
and what the space should be,
we talked a lot about our lifestyle
and what we wanted to do in this space.
So we love to drink wine,
we love to have people over.
Brian fabricated a wine rack for us
so that it's not just functional for holding wine,
but it's also a beautiful piece.
The house numbers are made out of screws.
We had a whole bunch of screws left over from a project.
- We wanted everything to have more than one use
and so the bar on our island, for example,
is an island bar and great place for sitting,
but then can spin out so that we can actually
sit six people for dinner when our friends
and family come over.
That type of transitional space,
or flexible furniture and uses,
just allows our place to live much larger
than it actually is.
The stairs that allow us to get up to our loft
is actually a set of cabinetry as well
and so they actually push into our closet
or our cabinets and then pull back out
for us to climb up to the loft.
- They were designed primarily with our dog
in mind so that she could climb up and down.
But one of my favorite places in the house is the shower.
It's feels like you're outdoors,
which I love, and there are two shower heads.
So (laughs) it's a bit romantic.
- Basically our living space is intended
to just spill out to outside.
And so our largest luxury item
in creating this space was this
very large accordion door system
that folds open to kind of remove
the wall between inside and outside.
Most of our living space becomes kind of
our front yard as we open the doors
and kind of hang out inside as well as outside,
talking to neighbors and people
that are biking and walking by.
We met people who said, hey can you help me do that?
We want to live in a similar space
or we want to remodel our home
or our garage to do the same thing.
And so we eventually started helping them do so.
Zenbox Design was born.
Which is basically a small side business we have
of helping people design tiny spaces.
- You can do anything you want in this life.
Just go after it, Whatever makes you happy.
Don't settle.
It's this beautiful little like zen sanctuary
and it's cheap livin' too.
(laughs)
(mellow bluegrass music)