Couple Built $25k Tiny House then Nomadic for Yrs - now Homesteading!

hi I'm Alexis and I'm Christian and this is our tiny house that we built in 2014 and we're in dut County Oregon on a beautiful snowy day our trailer is 20 ft long but we have a 3ft deck on the front so the inside of our house is actually 17 and 1/2 ft long we built our tiny house with the help of friends and family and it took about 9 months and it was that quick actually because Christian was able to work on it mostly full-time and after we finished we hit the road and lived nomadically for 5 years we criss-crossed the United States multiple times went into Canada and ultimately the house went about 55,000 miles which is a lot for a tiny house while we were traveling around for 5 years we were always keeping an eye out for a cool place to live and we went through Central Oregon a few times and really loved it so we ended up settling here and luckily it was just before the pandemic so we found a really great parking spot and we were able to save up a ton of money that enabled us to buy this property where we are today creating a little Homestead a lot of people think it's crazy that we towed this house around so much and in fact there's not that many wooden tiny houses on wheels that move around like we did totally true but we can honestly say that the structure held up beautifully we never had any problem with the structure at all nope we did go through probably four full sets of tires and had I think about six Flats over those 5 years so you know that was something yeah and the house got filthy on a regular basis so like once a year we used to power wash the sighing we would bring it through a car wash and I would power wash the whole thing and then reseal it um for the next year now we'd love to give you a tour of the inside come with [Music] us Welcome to our tiny home it's about 130 square ft Plus are two Lofts and one of the coolest things I think about the house is that we built it with about 80% recycled or reclaimed materials there is so many different stories in this whole house because of that yeah and you will not believe how much storage that we packed into here it's amazing it's places you probably wouldn't even think we also built our tiny house with full-time travel in mind and you'll notice our house is a little bit narrower than most tiny homes you'll see it's not just a little bit it's a lot cuz like I am touching my fingertips on the left side and I can almost if I just lean over this way I can touch it on the other side so it's literally 6 and 1/2 ft wide on the inside where a lot of other tiny homes are more like 8 ft wide yeah and I will say we did miss that extra width it's amazing what you can do in just a couple feet mhm and we've been in so many other tiny houses that if we had this to do all over again we would do it very different so we we tweak things over time but a big thing we changed um was the floors because we also participated in a ton of Tiny House events we've done so many Tiny House events that it's at least 75,000 people that been through our 130 foot tiny house and they wore down our floors yeah so there was a big Groove in the floor from front to back so we decided to change it so starting here in the living room well it's really kind of our everything room it's yeah the tiny house is one room but this is the section of that one room which we call the great room because look how great it is and over here is our entryway and because we built such a specific tiny house I mean it is literally specific to us the way we live how we go about our lives we wanted to make everything in the tiny house work just for us so it was really important for us to when we come home to our tiny house to have that place to put our keys our jackets our shoes that are out of the way and we don't have to deal with until we're going to leave the house again and because it's winter we have our bulky jackets up here so I'm going to take those down so you can see this better and I'm going to take my hat off because it is warm in here I didn't want to use anything boring in the house at all so even hooks I didn't want want to get just regular old hooks to put on here so we found these hooks at a flea market in Raleigh and they hold important stuff not just jackets but like every tiny Houser we have the headlamps you know just in case and behind me is our shoe rack and everybody loves this thing because it is a small space a little 1 by 6ot space this holds 20 pairs of shoes I think I found this like idea on pin interest it's basically just a toe in so the toe of your shoe goes in that's what holds it up it works really well when we were traveling I always knew how bumpy the road was by how many shoes fell off of this rack it would be like oh it was only a you know a two shoe Road or sometimes it was like Dallas it was a 20 pairs of shoe Road it was so bad and over here we have our massive sofa it's as big as me because I wanted a sofa to be able to lay down on and take a nap so that's why it's this big and this sofa is top loading you know it still has little things under there where you can open up and get to whatever's underneath but it's such a pain in the neck you got to take all this stuff off and throw it over there I didn't like that so I ended up taking the fronts off and making drawers oh so I made massive drawers to go in these guys and this is so much better so if you ever do a tiny house sofa like this like a built-in sofa do drawers don't do topl loading life can get stressful so a little me time at the end of the day can go a long way to help me relax this busy busy brain and a little bit of gaming is a good way to reset so I can enjoy my evening June's Journey has been my game of choice lately it's a free to download fun and intriguing murder mystery game that immerses you in the Roaring 20s search for objects include hidden in beautifully crafted scenes it's kind of weird how satisfying it is to find hidden objects in between helping June Parker solve her sister's murder enjoy customizing your very own tiny mansion and Garden Island mystery meets Ice spy meets Home Improvement what's not to love this game keeps me in the moment and that helps melt away the stress of the workday download June's Journey for free by clicking the link in the description below or scanning the QR code on the screen June's journey is available on Android and iOS mobile devices also available on PC through Facebook games Alexis and I both feel like you absolutely need a really good table in a tiny house because you need somewhere to sit and work or eat dinner you need a table and we have gone through a couple iterations of this table right here and this is it just pops up like that right now and has a piece that slides out this is so it would you know so somebody could sit here and I would sit here all the time and work on my computer and Alexis would sit there and the first table that we had was one piece with a leg that kicked out that came all the way to here so if she was working over there and I was doing something else the table was out so far I couldn't get by I'd have to like go like this to get by but with making it at a slide now I can just walk by and this made everything so much better so adding functionality and saving space was a real important part of this table and one of the cooler things that I was able to do was hide something inside of it and that is our television so right here is our TV so it's on a couple drawer slides I put in this little pin at the bottom and it holds it up and then I go ahead and can put this back that's what that's why this thing is cut out like this it's so the little slider could go up and then I can still use the desk and if I want to put that back up it's all still the same height and the cool thing about that is it's not just straight like this it's on an arm so I can move it if you're in the kitchen you can watch it or if I'm sitting by myself on the sofa I can sit here and watch is great so that really worked out well and it was really hard to figure out how to do that it took me many many times to figure out that mechanism and it's actually on drawer slides and the pin is what holds it all together another useful part of this table is the storage I made underneath and what that's for is for our hard drives and on this side of the great room is another fantastic multi-functional space that was something that we added a couple years after living in our tiny house and it's this awesome standing desk so in this space between our kitchen counter and the end of the sofa we had a dead space and the first thing we thought of was it'd be really great if we had a couple more hooks because you can never have too many Hooks and we didn't have a good place to put our backpacks so first we added these we do use this space in the wintertime for our electric oil radiator heater the great thing about this is it's super inexpensive I think like 50 bucks it Heats our whole house beautifully and you don't need a whole lot of clearance on either side of it so it makes it great for small spaces so here on our standing desk cabinet uh we have a whiteboard which came in handy for riding to-do list and then there's a little latch that you unhook and T little table space perfect for a small laptop and then inside we have a variety of shelves where we could store both of our laptops uh paperwork odds and ends that everyone has that you just don't want cluttering your space and just over here is our kitchen which is one of my favorite places in the entire tiny house and it's what we like to call a one and a half butt kitchen yeah but you got to show them you can't just like look it's cuz it's kind of small as you can see like one butt one way one butt the other way no one yes one yeah half a butt I have kind of a half a butt so so yeah so yeah so it's kind of small it's a little type so what else you can tell them about the kitchen is this weird it's a little weird little it's little awkward little too much little awkward but this a tiny house living why don't you like this but we yeah we we actually did stuff like this a lot this is like Portlandia uh but over here are these gorgeous countertops that Christian made and this there's a special story behind these yeah there's always a story like we like we said I want to say that the countertops were fun to make but it took so much time to make these and these are from wood that we actually call tornado wood and what happened a few years before we started building our tiny house a tornado an E4 tornado jumped over my parents house and landed in the woods on a farmer's property next door and tore down all of these trees and what the farmer and a buddy of his did was decide to Mill them all a year or so later he heard that we were doing this project and he's like I have so much wood I don't know what to do with it so take as much as you want so we did so almost every single 2X4 in this house is from the tornado wood and it's dimensional so it's 2x 4 in that's one reason the house is so skinny on the inside but there's like six different kinds of wood in these countertops which make it look so pretty and right here this is actually the cutout that we used from cutting out the sink it did have a functional use sometimes I have used it on occasion when I needed a little extra counter space it's always great to have a pull out a flip up or in this case a drop in the other great thing about these counters is we're both tall people especially Christian he's 6'2 is the height these are above standard counter height and it makes it so much easier to as a tall person to cut to wash dishes so you're not hunching over so far so great job Christian thanks another benefit of having extra tall counters is you get more space for storage beneath and right over here is where we have our fridge and over here is under syn cabinet and our trash and recycling drawer that you can conveniently pull out with your foot I really like that oh and here you'll see our curtains I just love these because I love the woodsy Cozy charm we have going on in here all the curtains in our house came from Remnant fabric there was a Furniture Market that happened in North Carolina and at the end of the show they just had boxes of boxes a leftover Goods so we got our hands on these remnants but a single piece was too small so we actually had to choose two prints that we liked that we thought went well together and then we could make curtains and credit goes to Chris's mom thank you Joyce she's the one who seed these for us over here we have two large open shelves also came from reclaimed wood and we got a little creative with the storage here we found this like grilling accessory basket and took it apart it happened to fit our plates just perfect so when we traveled these would always stay put so that was really convenient and then you got this handle perfect for paper towels and down here is a whole lot of storage behind this curtain uh we have a series of these metal wire drawers that we use for a pantry could fit tons of stuff in here Christian actually found these on the curb uh in New York City when he was living there someone was just throwing these away perfectly good and down here is a big deep drawer which is great for pots and pans we have an apartment siiz propane range love this thing it's so cute and I'm so happy we had four burners because apparently I cannot cook unless I'm using three of those burners so really glad we went for [Music] that we've been together about 11 years and working together for about nine of those and the whole time we've been working together we've been probably about this far apart we're documentary filmmakers and we're the creators behind the tiny house Expedition YouTube channel and this whole journey got started with us taking a road trip um within the first few months of dating MH I first got introduced to tiny houses through Christian yeah it's totally my fault uh since I was a kid I've always been a lover of tree houses and Forts and I built quite a few as a young person but it was after that Michigan road trip we took that and as we were thinking about how to do more of this we were like maybe we could build teardrop trailer m and then Christian was like have you ever seen a tiny house on Wheels I think the first tiny house I ever saw was the Outdoor Research tiny house which was Zach gin's tiny house so he used to travel cuz he was a professional skier and he would go travel in the house like so many other people once I learned about tiny houses I fell down a rabbit hole and was watching videos reading any articles I could find you know the the whole thing for the next several months and I just fell in love with them they really resonated with me because I was in a period of transition in my life like post divorce and i' just been feeling super overwhelmed and stressed out and the idea of simplifying just felt right and of course being a lover of small spaces I was like this could be a really cool way to start a new chapter and so ultimately I ended up pitching Christian I called him up I mean at this point we've only been dating for about a year and I was like okay I got this great idea I want to build a tiny house you want to build it I want to build a tiny house cuz I think this is a good fit for me but also I've learned about all these cool ways that tiny homes are being used around the country and I was just like there's so much story here so I've been working marketing and was eager to get back to film making and so anyway so I'm kind of an All or Nothing person iar I was like do you want to do this with me yeah and I thought about it and I was like yes if I can have air conditioning in the house and my own bed that was the two conditions I had and I got both like I can live with that yeah and behind our bathroom door is the other part of our pantry I love this because this is such a great small space solution this is a nonstructural wall so we were able to recess the these shelves inside of it without causing any problems so we made the shelves the perfect height for jars you know it's so nice to be able to just see what you have so if you can see back here there's two different colors of wood and these are actually the original colors that came from the panels that we pulled down from an old farmhouse so it's it's pretty neat to have that it gives a little pop of color and it was such a fun day that we spent with a group of people as part of Habitat for Humanity pulling down as much as we could from the house and habitat would take the things that they could resell but things like wood they can't resell so we were able to keep that for free so make friends with your local Habitat for Humanity so when it's time to move simply Slide the bathroom door over the pantry and there's a little latch over here boom and it keeps everything in place we've never had any jars break from any of our moves and back here is our bathroom our bathroom might be extra tiny but it's completely space maximized every inch pretty much has been used in here to add some kind of function and the best example of that is our over the toilet van uh that Christian dreamed up and a key feature is this fold down shelf over the potty the composting toilet here I can put my makeup and look at the mirror back here and get ready in the morning it's a real luxury and it's almost a full length mirror too which is quite an achievement in such an itty bitty space originally we had a self-built composting toilet but later on we upgraded to a Nature's head which was fantastic fantastic when we were traveling it's a great off-grid toilet solution however we got tired of emptying the canister for the urine and Christian ended up piping the urine out of the house so much easier you don't have to worry about overflowing which is not fun and on this side of the bathroom is our shower it's a 36x 36 shower which is pretty spacious for a tiny house particularly one of this size and it was 100% worth it the shower surround is made from uh galvanized metal scraps from the place where we got our metal roof so that was free it's a little dumpster dive across from the kitchen counters is our closet but most people don't realize it's here because it's built into the wall and with this uh wallpaper kind of just disappears so inside of here is a surprising amount of storage there are six crates um that Christian made now initially Christian envisioned that this would be a perfect size for a milk crate and he had collected some milk crates but the dimensions were just a little too tiny so he ended up having to make these and then he realized oh they're actually really heavy built out of plywood so he cut all these circles in them to loosen it up but each of us have three of these and it's insane the number of t-shirts and pants that you could fit in here Christian has 15 pairs of pants and he can fit 15 pairs of pants in one of these next to the shelving is hanging storage space it's only 6 in wide but you can fit quite a few nice shirts and dress or two in there which is great for when we got to be spiffy uh also other miscellaneous stuff like the telescoping ladder that we now use to access the storage Loft so across from our sofa is another seat right here this is usually where Alexa sits and she'll sit here with the table up and sit and work on our computer the cool thing is like everything else in the house it does other stuff inside here is a huge storage bin um that's absolutely massive and this whole thing moves so it slides back and forth so if Alexis was sitting there and needed a little bit more leg room she could pull it out we can even pull it out and put it on the uh porch if we wanted to when designing the steps to get up to our Loft I needed to make them as compact as possible so I Incorporated them into the closet and the way I did that was I created this hidden step right here which is super strong and it's a 1in piece of Oak it took me three different tries of building a set of stairs and tearing it down and building it again to finally come to this conclusion just because every time I'd build it it would go like partially into the window when we couldn't have our desk so after doing it so many times this is what I came up with these steps are 20 in apart so they're kind of stout you know they're not for everybody but you know we made it for us specifically so for us it's great and up in our Loft it is super simple because all we do up there is sleep so we have a queen bed we actually have five opening Windows up there and one of them is big enough as an egress window I might just might have to like try hard to squeeze my butt out of it and for fun I decided to try and make some light fixtures which are made out of black [Music] pipe so across from our sleeping loft is a storage Loft that used to store a little boy um just a random little boy when we started building the tiny house my son Garrett was just seven years old and now he's 17 and taller than me Garrett used to travel with us part time about every 3 months he would come out with us somewhere on the road and had a really great time we got to see my family spread out all over the country and because of us traveling so much Garrett has been to like seven different states and met tons of different people he is definitely a well-rounded kid because of that yeah he actually talks a lot about that now about how that kind of opened up his perspective and he really liked his Loft it was so cute he had input during the build yes he did yeah can there be like something for me to make them go down like to carry stuff down and oh like a pulley system yeah he wanted a table um so all he could do is Legos yes exactly so it it would fold down from the ceiling and he had a little bed and a toy basket on a pulley so it was great for a long time it worked but the kid wouldn't stop growing yeah so a few years back uh we knew that we needed to find something else another solution for us and luckily SARS aligned and we were saving money and we're able to buy this great little Homestead with a A-Frame cabin that is is a luxurious 800 ft mhm massive but he can have a room that his tall body can fit in so it's perfect absolutely perfect and as much as I love tiny houses cuz I I really do we're we're kind of obsessed as as you know if you watch our Channel y but aframe was my original childhood dream home so dreams do come true now we have like a million projects yeah U because when you're a nomadic tiny house dweller you don't have any landscape in there's very little house maintenance and now we have all of it but it's it feels it feels right right now and it's actually great to have a stationary home base and it's a place that we love in Central Oregon near a ski resort cuz we like to snowboard so it's kind of great and so we have a lot of plans and part of those plans include renting out our tiny house longterm to somebody who needs a great affordable yep place to [Music] live the cost of the tiny house was around $25,000 and that includes the value of a lot of things that we got for free you know maybe the value of the things we got for free I don't know might have been upwards of $8,000 yeah but we spent months sourcing materials before the build and and during the beginning of the build there must be almost an infinite amount of ways to take a small space and come up with different ways to use it also really cool to see how people make the space work for themselves right because there's always a personalized spin yeah which should always happen like Jay schaer says you know it's a portrait of the person that lives in it so and that's absolutely what our house [Music] is thank you for watching our video and for stopping by tiny house Expedition I'm Alexis and I'm Christian don't forget to like comment and subscribe and for more tiny home tours and stories click the videos below and join us on Instagram for bonus content including face to-face conversations with us we hope to see you there all right thanks guys have a good one download June's Journey for free by clicking the link in the description below

Channel: Tiny House Expedition

Views: 99,091

Keywords: tiny house, tiny house tour, tiny home, tiny house on wheels build, diy tiny house, $25k tiny house, tiny house build, tiny house recycled materials, tiny house design, multifunctional furniture diy, tiny house expedition, tiny house living, tiny house movement, tiny homestead, tiny home community, simple living, living big in a tiny house, tiny house giant journey, exploring alternatives, tiny homes, tiny house nation, tiny home tours, tiny house on land, tiny living

Id: u3cvIf0Twfg

Length: 29min 25sec (1765 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2024