The grassroots of the tiny house movement started with DIY,
learning how to build challenging themselves with teeny tiny layouts and even
smaller budgets. So in today's video, we're going to head back to our roots.
You're going to meet a couple who challenged themselves to build a nontoxic tiny
house for just $20,000. So let's go take a tour.
Hi, I'm Andrea I'm Megan. And this is our tiny house.
We're bi-coastal Andrea is from the East coast and I'm from the West coast.
One of the reasons why we wanted a house on wheels was so that we don't know
where we're going to be. And we couldn't take the house with us where we go.
We were thinking of moving to Portland, Oregon,
and we looked up the cost of rentals there,
and it was outrageous and we could even hardly even find anything.
So we decided to go tiny. Andrea does have woodworking experience,
and has a talent for it.
I just kind of done some stuff here and there in life,
but definitely not engaged in anything like this.
We anticipated taking about one year to build our tiny house and we ended up
taking four years.
I like to say we were actively not working on it for about two of those years.
This project has definitely improved my skills.
Think that there's just so much room for creativity and doing
whatever you want, whatever you can.
After four years of building and then moving it across the country.
We've been living in our tiny house for about six months now,
welcome to the cow as we call it. Our cabin on wheels.
Our cabinet itself is about seven feet,
four inches wide on the inside.
So this couch is probably about six and a half feet long.
If we had a guest,
they could definitely sleep over because this does pull out into a bed.
This floor is from leftover wood.
I would have the opportunity to work on a building crew building
someone's 6,000 square foot, fourth house.
So I saved a lot of the scraps that were going to the dumpster,
this with the wormholes in it, that's butternut this reddish is cherry,
and we've got maple and Oak in here as well,
but they were different widths and they had different
levels of tongue and grooves.
I like how it turned out and I think the time was worth it.
It did take the majority of a summer though.
These are the last of Megan and my stuffed animal collections
from when we were kids.
It's kind of funny in a small house to designate two feet of
shelving space for animals, but I just couldn't leave them behind.
So I love books. I am an English teacher.
We had to downsize crates and boxes of books just had to go.
This is pretty much what's left. We do have more upstairs.
Megan is going to school for holistic landscape design.
So we also have a ton of like herbal medicine books and gardening books.
A lot of light was really important to us while we were designing this house.
Most of the ideas for the light came from Megan.
So this is a sliding glass door provides ton of light,
and we got this off Craigslist.
We've also got our skylight up here,
got that off Craigslist,
these lights we found at a local craft fair.
We really did our best throughout the house to buy local buy
eco, um,
and try to reuse as much reclaimed material as possible.
I would say about half the wood from this house is either reclaimed or
upcycled or found wood. I could give you an example.
These stairs used to be a cherry dining room table.
We tried to put as much storage as possible into the stairs as most people do
with their tiny houses. So we have shoe storage down at the bottom.
Let's see, we keep our hats and gloves in here.
Keep clothing belts in here.
This is our super secret drawer, although I guess it's not anymore,
but we keep our dish towels in here and we found that
we just can't have enough space for our shoes.
You have even more shoes here and we have even more shoes in here.
We've got a construction still going on in this house. Uh, here's our closets.
We recently purchased some
pull out drawers or waiting for four more of them to come in.
So it looks like this right now. And so we're, it's always a work in progress.
Welcome to the loft. We did incorporate some pretty big beams.
Andrea's dad is an chemical engineer, but also a physics nerd.
And he helped us redesign the roof part so that it
could hold up to four feet of wet snow.
Cause we definitely lived in snow country when we were in upstate New York.
One of the things that we were excited to put is an octagonal window and just
cause it looks neat.
Our cat's name is Riot. This is Riot's bed up here
Our dog also sleeps with us in the bed. It's pretty tight.
It is just a full bed. We were three of us in it, but we make it work.
I'm going to take you through the kitchen. Start with the stove.
It's an RV stove.
It was one of the smallest ones that we could find with an oven.
The oven was particularly important to Andrea.
It is nice to be able to bake pizzas and this is our heater and it's,
it's small. Um, it just fits in this box. Under here,
we chose for heating systems to be propane so that we could be off grid
potentially if we wanted. And also we found out living in our last space,
the electric heat is extremely expensive.
We went for a big sink again in the last place that we lived in we had a
very small sink. And, um, it, it didn't really inspire us to do dishes.
So this is like a, uh, kitchen supply type sink.
We decided to go with a half size fridge instead of a full size fridge so that
we could add to our counter space and make sure that we had plenty of working
area in the kitchen. This was supposed to be our bathroom.
But the last piece that we lived in,
we were so used to going outside and we decided to use this
space for storage instead of for a bathroom.
Also I'm interval ism. And I have the herbs shelf.
We did decide to just take the natures head
composting toilet out of the house and put it into an outhouse
just cause it's just as easy to go.
And we don't have to worry about the smell or anything in there shower.
We haven't hooked it up yet, but our hot water heater that goes to our sink.
We have a shower head that can attach to the side of our house.
So as soon as we just hook that up,
we'd have an outdoor shower right outside our house.
There is a shower that's available on the property, which is really nice to have
Actually like living in it after working on it for so long,
it just felt like a really good sense of accomplishment that it finished.
And we did it.
I have to say one thing that I really appreciate is the quality of materials
that we were able to use are much higher than if we had a larger
footprint of our house. We're not surrounded by drywall.
We're not surrounded by chemicals.
We chose every material that we used
and we were able to use nontoxic materials.
And it's beautiful.
Some of you may have noticed that my dog Selise actually made an appearance in a
few shots in this tour.
That's because these are my neighbors out on Whidbey Island.
My tiny house is parked just a hundred feet away. Please subscribe.
And I'll see you next week with another video.