At 22, buys & customizes lofted home in Pocket Neighborhood on a budget

one of the things that's tough about this area is you'll have an investor come in here and buy up seven or eight homes as a first-time home buyer or you know just a single person you can't compete with those kind of prices so this was nice to have this in the heart of Tempe this is like some sort of little Oasis at the end of the street it is yeah you kind of you come in you're not sure kind of what to expect in this area as you're kind of coming down here with all these either duplex homes or single family homes and then once you get to the end of the street here with the fruit trees the neighbors the storage container concept it opens up to like this huge Oasis in the in the summer this place is a jungle all the you know all the trees are fruit trees we have orange trees lemon lime apricot Peach all free for the picking and the cool thing is we actually planted all these ourselves as homeowners it's interesting it's they're definitely not traditional houses no they're not you know they're they're micro they're kind of micro homes they're tiny homes it's nice that everybody does their own thing like there's a a table like you're allowed to build your own you can have your like yeah yeah I think it's a 4ot fence that you can have up in the front yard so um it it's having that space where you can have your own personal space and then kind of enter into the community side of things over here I was kind of looking for a house I was 22 at the time and you know for a 22 year-old to be in the market looking for a house is very tough and at that point none of this was really here this was all a dirt lot and I I applied right away it was actually the 13th so there's 13 homes I was the last person to get in this looks like houses like little houses right and that was the plan cute little houses that are small enough to be affordable in perpetuity uh and yet actually have them individualized where they're all separated so that each person feels like they have their own plot of land which they really do did you get a pick which one yeah so well actually cuz I was the last homeowner all of them um were pretty much taken at that point actually I kind of like my unit as one of the the best not not to be biased at all each home has it like a little sidey yard so the front yard and the courtyard areas are all HOA managed but the the sidey yard is kind of our own personal taste so this is the estate part of the micro Estates yeah this is you yeah so this is all my personal taste everyone started with just a dirt lot um and then you kind of kind of got to choose whatever you did so I wanted to have like a little bit of grassy area for if I do get a pet or something and then wanted to kind of have some vegetation and such ended up installing this spine back here over time hopefully having this kind of shoot out into both directions right it's just a small patch yeah it's it's nothing large where you're sitting out here with the lawn mower or anything and it go again it goes back to affordability and the Market's just it's so hot right now and as as a young person 600 square ft of a home is plenty of space for one person so what's cool about the place is you kind of walk straight into the uh into the kitchen area the homes came fully stocked with appliances and then to kind of as you kind of make your way through uh it opens up until this is I think at the lowest point is 16 ft and then at the highest point if you're standing from the bottom all the way up it's 20t at the other end so it's a huge space when you think of like a tiny home or a micro home you automatically think oh there's probably like a ladder to The Loft you probably have a mini fridge the cool thing about these homes is that they're full-sized appliances one of the cool things about this area so you know you have the bathroom on the other side of the stairs which is a great use of space like right about here is where the bathroom ends from here on over you still have a ton of space under the stairs and the original plans had this as just dry completely drywalled out the builders as they were building the place the standard 2x4 they actually went around this whole area and left this open with no 2x4s coming through here so that the homeowner could come in and just without you know needing any handyman to come in here could actually pop this open themselves break the drywall this they had specifically designed Ikea cabinet and it actually opens up to a a storage space down there cuz like so in a way it's kind of like your craw your craw space it is yeah it's the crawl space yeah the crossplay SL storage for everything whatever you're not using on a day-to-day basis if you look around they're just where do you store the Christmas tree where do you store some of the stuff that you would normally have in a normal house and so that's actually a huge at the at the highest point you can stand up it's probably 6 feet and it comes all the way down it's a most people on first you know when their first their first time looking at the place they don't really notice it cuz the it it does a good job of kind of hiding itself you really have to kind of focus when someone's sitting on the couch for a while then they start to then they notice that you know hey that bookshelf doesn't doesn't look too normal but um like first time walking by you don't really notice that there's a whole storage room back there the other thing too is because it's such a small space being able to make the the Home Smart proof and you know like a whole smart home is was pretty inexpensive to do originally when I bought the house all the switches and everything in here were just standard toggle switches everything in here now um is all smart home so I'm able to I'm able to control 90% of the home um on on my on my tablet uh you know voice activated um it all everything here is kind of activated in one way uh the blinds also are all smart home activated and that's the cool thing with the smart blinds too is in the morning as I wake up I have them programmed to you know come up right before my alarm clock comes off to start to let some natural light in and then in the evening and night as I'm driving in the lights are already on the shades are already down um and it's just a smooth transition into the house you know when a lot of people come up they think that it's a very small space but they're actually shocked by the size of the insides you know I've had 10 people in here all at once and you would think that 10 people on the at on the first floor only would just be just completely packed but it actually has a decent amount of space where you're able to still kind of move around in there I'm such a minimalist when it comes to a lot of stuff I try to keep everything kind of tucked away as much as possible so most of the time this kind of stays stays open do you like the material difference there it's noticeable yeah and so I growing up well my my dad was in construction and so I always got to see like blueprints and stuff of places and so growing up I was a huge architecture fan and this is so it's different in the future I might kind of make a couple changes down thead Road I I thought about maybe open up opening up little slits through here to kind of let some of that natural light from up here flow down into the main area I mean I like that you're talking about the future like this isn't just a 20-some house yeah that's the nice thing I think the the age range here is pretty dramatic but you know we're all firsttime home buyers being first-time home buyers we all are kind of in the same bucket we all kind of didn't understand like you know okay well you know what do you do for blinds you know what do you do for closet system this was actually an idea that was bounced off of another homeowner what I ended up doing was putting in a ton of Ikea closets here so you have yeah yeah you have a ton of space yeah you have a lot of storage space for clothing yeah that's the nice thing too is that it's so customizable so underneath the bed you have a ton of drawers to keep everything in there extra bedding and such and then and then kind of you're off I work from home space so it's kind of nice to be able to work from home here on most of the time you'll actually catch me downstairs working at the dowy table cuz it's the homes because they're new and because they're so efficient one of the worries was how do you get fresh air in here when you don't open the windows you know they're they're sealed up so well that vent right there actually is a fresh air vent so it's timed with the exhaust fan in the bathroom certain times the night it'll turn on and start to suck air from downstairs and then pull fresh air from outside so you con conly have some fresh air in here the whole place is all about efficiency you want to share what you pay for utilities yeah we all have solar on the roofs it's not our solar it what we do is we actually we lease quote unquote our roofs to the local electric provider and they give us a credit each month on our bill so all the solar goes back into the Grid on average and again keep in mind we live here in Arizona where it's 118 in the summertime the average summer bill is probably somewhere around $65 to $70 a month and in the in the winter I think my most recent bill was $25 so very very efficient homes very efficient no gas it's all um all electric in here um but you can't beat that all electric $25 yeah exactly yeah you can't beat that at all and I think that's what shocks a lot of a lot of people it's like $25 a month how most of what we did was economical in order to keep the homes as affordable as possible the homes are all um designed with as much biophilic design and as much of the high performance kind of systems and they are quite high in air tightness and everything else I knew to keep the envelope very very simple the framing in these houses is actually Advanced framing techniques where normal you would have a stud every 16 in on Center and you put the insulation in between that the all of these are framed at 24 in on Center which is perfectly fine structurally but we reduce the amount of wood we need by 20% and we get more insulation so we get better insulated walls with less framing members and you want to limit the amount of size of the windows for two reasons one is to look keep the cost low because windows are more expensive than than walls and the other is is that you want to limit the um heat exposure that you get through them as much as possible we chose a placement of Windows that maximizes daylight where you need it hey again so the the four Windows had to do a a great amount of work you know they had to bring in a lot of light and where you really want it and so that's where it got really fun with trying to experiment with where those windows should uh should be there's a window on the back at the bottom of the stairs and this provides light the corner where the at the bottom of the stairs so it it reflects light all over the place in the corner and then the other windows are in the opposite corner so you get light kind of all through the space on the inside just from those couple of Windows there no window on this side which is this is west west side okay but this is right against the property lot line and so you can't it needs to be 1 hour rated so you don't want to put a window in it because then it gets really expensive you know economically we really chose carefully where to put the windows and where not and West you definitely don't want a window in Arizona because you're working with climate which is which is like what somebody was saying 117 degrees sometimes in heat waves in the summer oh it gets up to 122 but this last summer we had it was um over 110 for 31 days straight we're not totally unused to that but not for 31 days it was a lot and I big fan huge fan of the uh of the glass door wor this is the glass side I mean it's just like all right here yeah yeah so you know in the evening here in Arizona it's the hottest time of the entire day so having all of the windows and doors facing uh to your East you're not getting all that hot you know light coming into the home yeah and this is a huge part of like just the all the amount of natural light that you get inside the house I'm a huge fan of it personally the window placement are kind of at these Corners so that there's always natural light no matter where you look this is or it all is now that I'm back here I'm like w there's a lot of window here you know this is where you want it so the window that you can't see here is bouncing natural light around and then um when you're looking this way when you come down the stairs you have light there and then you turn around and you've got lots of daylight there if you're when you're walking up the stairs here there's a the fourth windows up in the bedroom up there you get natural daylight there and just even using the um inexpensive Lumber is really you know something that you wouldn't normally find in affordable housing to actually have exposed wood and one of the things about bleck design is natural materials and so we did that handrail as a oak for instance these are actually wood that is used for form work for concrete walls and it ended up being a little less expensive and a little better looking as a finish to use this and it's pretty expensive material and it's very very hearty and the other thing with the windows too I mean he's got this open right now so again you can release Heat at night and when you look around like you can really tell there's plenty of daylight right there's the lights are not on which is odd because there's so few windows and they're small but it's a small house how big is this each house is 600 square ft that includes the mezzanine okay so down here is what I think about for roughly 450 and 150 okay it is small but like Christian lives here alone still right but um Danielle who lives a couple doors down it's her and her husband so they share it and they say it's plenty for them too so and then of course we wanted to have some connection between the main window which is at the kitchen so so that there's some sense of being able to keep eyes on the neighborhood and being able to say hi to each other the land ultimately belongs to the land trust everybody that buys one of the homes has a 99-year lease which they can renew if they want and when they sell it they have to return 25% I believe it is to the next buyer so whatever Equity they brought in 25% of it goes back to the land trust in order to hand it to the next buyer in order to keep the houses affordable and perpetuity you buy but you're not on it's not a market rate right correct so the homes they were you know between 175 and 210 they appraised obviously a lot higher than that uh the whole idea is again affordability so at the end of the day you know when you do want to go sell new town which is the owners of the land lease will be the people to likely repurchase your home right away it's kind of giving back to the community in terms of again letting another first- time home buyer come in here so I'd say like 80% of the homeowners do our laundry in the community center there's I think one or two homeowners that actually have their own laundry aside from that 80% of us all kind of do it in there um you would think that it would be a pain but honestly all of us have gotten really used to it and haven't had any problems on rare rare occasion you'll have overlap where you know multiple people want to use it but and you would think that it'd be on the weekends but in reality sometimes that overlap happens like on a Tuesday night so huge space uh Community Center and this is kind of where you know again CU it's a smaller home having some of those larger Gatherings kind of makes it tough to do in a small space um so you can host a large event you can have friends giving or or like a Friends Christmas party in here a full-size Kitchen in here with the appliances and then we have the laundry here so this is kind of where this is the uh home away from home as we all like to call it as I said look it's 5:00 on a Saturday and open um these two are the are the gray water um systems there So eventually what'll happen is when we do go through the final install process that'll be the switch there'll be a switch here for homeowners to be able to swap that on and off so the gray water from the laundry it goes into the Landscaping correct and even with you know the fruit trees and everything people will ask us about the watering of that but right there is a large water tank that collects roof water and that goes to these fruit trees yeah so there's a slanted roof it all flows to the back where there's a pipe system around the whole complex it takes it to an underground storage system under the parking how long do you think you would stay here I definitely see myself staying here for at least another 5 years it's a space that I'm still kind of growing in because it's small it gives me the opportunity to do a lot of of the stuff that I dreamt about like making it a smart home to test some stuff out here before actually taking it and when I do purchase a you know a big boy home I can kind of use some of what I learned here so it's just the old idea of a starter home yeah it is 100% yeah a starter home yeah

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 373,163

Keywords: affordable home, starter home, humble home, tempe home, college town, walkable home, bikeable home, colab studio, tempe micro estates, micro homes, mini homes, communal laundry, communal gardens, passive solar, daylighting, biophilic design, lofted home, greywater, greywater laundry, tempe, arizona, community land trust

Id: 404lzQ1hw1c

Length: 18min 32sec (1112 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 24 2024