Welcome. My name is Michelle and I'm here in my empty nest. My life has been a
series of unfortunate events. I have been married twice. I have been divorced twice.
I have built two houses and I lost the houses basically in the carnage of
my divorces. So I've been a single mom for 13 years and basically living
paycheck to paycheck. My kids are getting older and they're getting ready to go
off to college and do their thing so I'm looking forward to retirement, but I
don't have any retirement money. I don't have a retirement plan. So I had to
really start looking at and thinking about my life in the future from an
entirely different perspective. I got involved in the tiny house movement
originally just to build a tiny house that no one could take away. I figured
doing it the same way I did it the first two times that wasn't working out really
well so I wanted to do something entirely different. So I built my first house, this
house, basically using cash and sponsorships to make sure that I have a
paid-for nice comfortable house when I retire. Now I'm building a few more tiny
houses that I look forward to renting like on Airbnb or a try it tiny or other
VRBO kind of platforms and create some income so, that's next.
My house is eight and a half feet wide by 24 feet long and I built it with some
help from a few contractors and friends, but mostly myself in the driveway of my rental.
By far my favorite room in the tiny house is my kitchen. I think that people
sacrifice their kitchen when they go tiny and I wanted to show everybody that
you can have a really cool and stylish kitchen. All of my appliances are circa
nineteen mid 40's early 1950's. It took me two years to collect and refurbish the
collection. It truly was a labor of love. My design theme is modern nostalgia and
I think I really accomplished it. It's one of my favorite rooms in the house.
I do a ton of cooking. I do a ton of entertaining. Also my tile wall, if you follow my
blog, you'll remember that it actually sent me to therapy and there's a little
tile up there right on the wall and he's a little skew and his name is little
bastard. One of the things I would do differently it would be these stairs.
Although I love these stairs and they were really designed from the
perspective that I wanted them to be minimally invasive to the space but at
the same time be really architecturally striking. Underneath of the stairs is the
cat box which is a really nice place to hide it as well. But, one of the biggest
critiques I get from most people is how narrow they are. So, out of all the
mistakes I actually made, I think that my stairs would probably count because if I
had to do it over again I might make them a little more wide because I
completely underestimated the width of my ass. But I love them anyways. One of
the things that I did really differently from most people is I actually adjusted
the ceiling height of the loft according to where I'd be spending the most time.
So you probably won't notice it on camera but my kitchen has a pretty high
ceiling because the guest loft is over the kitchen and so I don't spend a lot
of time in the guest loft so I wanted the actual space to be in the kitchen.
Conversely I spend way more time in my bedroom than I actually do in the
bathroom. This loft actually has about four more inches of head
room than the guests loft does. My quilt is really really a special memory for me.
My grandmother died just prior to planning the tiny house build and I inherited
the entire contents of her entire sewing room. This quilt is
actually made from all the fabrics that my grandmother had given me when she died.
When you live in a tiny space utilization of vertical space is
actually way more important than utilization of horizontal space. People
that fill horizontal space actually creates clutter, but when you create
intentional storage in a vertical space you create architectural interest.
One of the things that I don't like about most tiny houses is they don't have like real
furniture. People take boxes and they put cushions on top of them and they call
them couches. And so one of the things I wanted to create when I created the
living room was a real what I call proper living room. Living room chairs
and an ottoman and a bedside table and an entertainment center. I'm really super
proud of the space that I've actually created here. It's very comfortable and
it's also very functional. What you can't see here however is a couple of things.
First of all, these chairs were actually designed to add additional storage space
and on top of that if you actually pull these chairs apart there's a table
that's tucked beside the refrigerator that goes right here that actually
provides dining and table spaces. So first and foremost having a glass door
on a bathroom is really unique but I love the feng shui. I love the light.
I love the space and I love the architecture. This is an antique door, but
right behind this door there's actually a curtain so if you do have to go to the
bathroom and there's someone else in the house which there's only people here
when I have parties which is regularly but you know not every day. I
actually do have a stackable washer and dryer. I can't do all my laundry here.
I can't do my jeans and my towels and my blanket. I have my kids do that. We sort of
like this reverse roll thing going on. I call my daughter my laundry fairy. I drop
off my dirty laundry and then it appears on my front porch all folded. But, for
day-to-day laundry I love the fact that I don't have to run to the
laundromat every five minutes. I can literally go weeks upon weeks without
having to go to the laundromat, which is really great.
Another myth in the tiny house movement is that you have to sacrifice and
downsize like a ton, but the truth is you can do some really cool stuff when it
comes to built-in cabinets and sort of unutilized space. This is three pairs of
my 47 pairs in the house. This is three pairs of dress shoes. They fit perfectly
in the 2x4 framed wall. I'm very much a girl I have like 200 pairs of earrings
and necklaces. I have tons of clothes, tons of shoes. So there's only certain
things that I was willing to sacrifice and being a girl was definitely not one
of them. Agh! He's back! Look. Is that at frog? His name is Ralph and I suspect that he's
actually crawling up the drainpipe behind the washer and dryer. Like that's
the only space in the house that's probably big enough. So he's swimming
through the pee trap, he's crawling up the drainpipe, and he's coming in the house
and he loves nothing better than to hang out in my shower. I take him out in the woods
and I set him free and then it takes about two to three days and then he comes back and
hangs out in my shower.
This is an amazing sink from LaCava.
This is actually a hand-carved all one-piece Italian marble sink.
Like a lot of tiny housers in order to stay off grid and in order to live a more
sustainable life we embrace composting toilets and my favorite by far is
Nature's Head. Basically, there's three types of waste. There is grey water and I
handle all the grey water in my house by sitting on top of 18 inches of gravel.
Long story short sort of a modified grey water treatment system I've got going on.
But then the toilet actually separates the liquid wastes from the solids. Out
back of the tiny house I have a 25 gallon garbage can. In the bottom of the garbage
can I have little teeny tiny holes that are
drilled all the way around. I fill the garbage can up with 24 gallons of water.
I pour the 1 gallon of urine into there. I put the lid on and then it leaks very
very slowly down, it's fully diluted at 25 to 24 to 1, it leaks down through the
holes down through the gravel and actually returns to the ground water
itself. That concept came from the Humanure Handbook. The solids my land
host is not really keen on composting humanure for very very understandable
reasons. It's a really really kind of high-tech kind of scientific process. So
I called the local garbage people and I said, "How would you like me to dispose of
the contents of my composting toilet, my dry flush toilet?". And they said, "Put it
in a bag and put it in the garbage. We deal with diapers every day." So that
was sort of a compromise on my part because you know I'd like to utilize it
as soil, but my land host they're not really keen on the humanure concept, but
my garbage company was more than happy to take care of it.
When I started building my tiny house I had no money. None. I had to finance my
tiny house in a way that actually did not consume any of my paycheck to
paycheck existence. I had to create really really creative ways to finance
my tiny house. First thing I did was I actually got an old vintage RV from a
neighbor for free. I put about $700 into it and I turned around and I sold it for
$3,700. I did an ombre dresser that I got for free on Craigslist and I sold it for
$325. Just all kinds of separate little things that would help. And then I
ventured on the whole sponsorship thing. I first discovered the whole concept of
sponsorship, Andrew Odom wrote a book called Your Message Here.
My advice however for sponsorships is you don't have to get
twenty two corporate sponsors. You can get a very very simple sponsorship for a
sink or for a toilet or for flooring or for siding. Whatever it is that you
really feel either passionate about or you feel comfortable advocating and
promoting. I really feel like I found my people. I really feel like I found a
group of people that get me and that's really rare. I have never really had a
sense of home. I grew up in foster care. My birth parents were divorced
when I was four years old. I went into foster care as a toddler. I was adopted
as a teen and then left that house when I was 18 and I'm now estranged from my
adoptive family. We're all just making it work. We're not necessarily legal. We're not
necessarily rich. Maybe not all of us are really really smart. We're all sort of
pirates. I'm literally living illegally in my
tiny house on the down-low like below the radar of legality, but we're just
making it work and supporting each other and finding a way to make this life
of ours the best version that we can make it without sort of conforming to
what society tells us we have to do.
I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. If
you did be sure to LIKE comment and subscribe. If you didn't get quite enough
of me, you can hear me also every single week
on tiny house podcast www.tinyhousepodcast.com. if you like the inside of
my house and you want to see more pictures you can go to www.gotinyorgohome.com. And be sure
to check out the podcast cuz I was just a guest. I know! So fun. It's so cool.
Peace! have a great day.