Couple Develops Raw Land for Tiny House - stunning 10' wide tiny home!

and that's why you never shake hands the princess oh hey didn't see you there my name's nathan this is heather and this is our tiny home bertha we're in florescent colorado welcome [Music] i work for colorado state university we actually met in oakland and moved out to the colorado area about eight years ago i work for a school district in windsor colorado with the transportation department work with the school buses yeah we met we moved back to colorado and decided we wanted to get a piece of property we're standing on our property here in florida colorado and it's two acres about a year ago nathan and i said we really wanted to find a piece of property nestled in the trees that you could smell the pine that was within like three hours of our home which is our other home is in fort collins colorado so we took a big drive one day and came down to this area uh and just toured around i think we saw like 14 or 15 pieces of property is what we were looking at so when we saw this property we were super excited because it already had some things done on it so it had this already graded a little electric drops and the electric was dropped which was too like that was a huge part of like our consideration um and then it had this uh our cistern which is a water tank it holds about 1800 gallons and it will provide the water for the tiny home because there isn't sewer out here or city water so this is truly developing property from the ground up we like we said we have two acres that goes down um this like little ravine area and what really sold me is if we go around uh later you'll see that we have these big giant rocks and they're just amazing sitting on the property in wales yeah so we really were super excited when we found this and at that time we had no thought that we were even going to get a tiny home [Laughter] we got bertha here 10 feet wide 32 feet long and 13 and a half feet tall and had to get an oversized load sign and permit to get it from fort collins to here when we saw it we fell in love with her because it's the kind of funky front that it has with the corrugated metal and the green siding and the i assume cedar and then the maroon or red windows around it we saw it at a tiny home festival and we're smitten kittens the minute we saw it well one thing i want to point out before we get all the way around is that it does have rvi certification which we learned was really important to us because that's one measure of making sure that your builder is building to a specific spec and quality and quality and so that was really important to us to know that we were getting something that was built to some type of standard that was out there so that was a huge bonus when we started learning about it um and our builder is indigo river tiny homes who are pretty like peter and christine are phenomenal people so um but if we come around here we can go the front and that's where we have storage area i'll let nathan do it because i mean i can reach it but it's definitely tall so one of the things that you're always looking for is storage and especially stuff for just those random things and so we love this because we can put so much of like our outdoor stuff in here so we got a big outdoor tent and some chairs i think at some point we might put shelves in and so forth but i just hop up on the front of the trailer and jump on in and there's lights too which makes it really nice and then if we go around the back we can point out our other little outdoor seating area this is where we spend most of our time when it's nice enough out have a couple adirondack chairs i believe is what they're called table we found yeah on the side of the road and we sanded it down and refinished it we have a very nice kitchen inside but why use a kitchen when you can grill it's way cleaner to cook out here and bring it inside than it is to cook in there and then clean up afterwards so the really nice part is that you have the main door on the front but then you had this slider door and so that we knew exactly how we wanted to park this so that we could look out over the property and really just like kind of just stare at like the pine trees and just relax and you can't beat a giant window in a tiny home so we don't have our septic system built yet we're in the process of it so we just have to have our little uh when we call it the puma call it mobile we bring it here use it and then load it back up and dump it in fort collins when we bring it there's a place by our house we can dump it for a reasonable price at some point we'll not have to bring it and it's going to be an amazing time in my life thanks to our sponsor bright sellers i love to whine i mean i love wine but as a novice when i go pick out a bottle i mostly depend on cool artwork and sometimes a fun name but i want to learn about all those juicy wine details and that's where bright sellers comes in through a short fun quiz they get to know you and curate personalized 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in that corner because of the cistern it pumps from there into the tiny home you have to have a pressure tank so this also holds the water that comes and pressurizes the water that's going to come into the tiny home they put in a water purifier so that's super nice because we'll be able to purify the water that's coming out of the cistern we'll get this filled by a truck that comes up here and divide from divide that will fill it and that's really common up in this area is to have your water put into a tank and then we have a heater back here because we need to keep this warm we have a temperature gauge back here so nathan can monitor it on an app and so we know that everything in this area that needs to stay warm because it's where our water is and obviously gets really cold up here in colorado we know if there's any issues so that's been a really good kind of peace of mind not being here to ensure that we don't have pipes freezing and so forth so um and then this is kind of cool so just to tell you we are at 8 354 feet here in um fluorescent so we're pretty high up so yeah it does get cold and uh we've got the plywood here we had the cistern and we had to dig a trench from the cistern to the house to be able to hook it up and get the water running and we were really excited we were going to get water and then we found out that where the septic system is going to have to go there's about 100 feet that you have to have between cistern and the septic system and we're at 92 feet it doesn't matter that it's 30 feet down it matters that it's 100 feet straight line the company that's going to put the septic in is going to move it back you know the eight feet that we have to do and then we won't have to walk on plywood anymore and we are in the process of installing the septic so we have our deposit down but with the supply chain the way it is these days it's going to take us a little while to get the tanks before the septic can get inside his optimistic side is i think six months is what he's hoping so we also just love the back of the tiny home too because it has just quirkiness and so forth with the metal accents again to where that garage and mechanical room is and then this is where our breaker box is and so the breaker box is totally like any other house right and what was great is we could tie our cistern into that and then on top of it we have these heavy duty stabilizers which are super important because bertha weighs about twenty thousand pounds so she's a big girl well we'd love to invite you into birth end so you can get a little glimpse of our tiny home [Music] and this is bertha our tiny home welcome um one thing that we really liked when we uh toured bertha at the tiny house festival was that you walk in and there's a an entrance you don't walk in and it's immediately into a room the kitchen or or the the living room like some of them do because they're just so small or not properly designed this one you walk in there's a room to the left and then there's a kitchen to the right which is heather's favorite room but before that we have our mini split it's fantastic one unit covers the entire tiny home we've only got it set to like 65 or 70 and it is definitely toasty in here and so we uh need to take our jackets off real quick part and then heather will be able to show you the kitchen when we first came and saw bertha like i was super ecstatic about this kitchen because i didn't really think that a tiny home kitchen could be like so inviting and so big and just have a lot of space um what's great is nathan can be in here i can be in here and the two 70-pound dogs can be in here and we don't feel cramped at all it was really important for us to have a kitchen that kind of felt like home because we do mostly we don't really eat out and we do a ton of cooking and so we wanted to be able to have that luxury in our tiny home living the really great part is that we have it's kind of like a smaller but an electric um stove with oven and so this oven fits even a standard side sheet pan and we have found that the electric works really great we got some pans for it and it also cleans up super nice and it also when it's not on gives you some extra counter space as well one of the great things too is that we just have so much storage these corner cabinets like nothing's wasted and so it's that whole area and then if you open it up each of these corner cabinets including this one has those like lazy susan so you can just flip it around and get like maximum usage of all this space and it holds some really heavy stuff too this is like our dutch oven what i thought was really beautiful is these cherry countertops they clean up really well and i think just with all the wood features we love the warmness it brings there's great big cabinets and so these drawers specifically pull out and they're just so deep and we could put like just baskets we found at target in here to just organize it they're just wide and have a ton of space if we come over here we have an apartment sized fridge which just keeps everything super cold and has plenty of space uh we don't have any issue with like having space for all of our various things um and i'm always i was a little worried about like will the freezer keep things frozen but it totally does and then again the other thing we like to just remember is like always having like every space is used so then we have more storage down here as well this space was kind of empty when we first got the tiny home and actually it worked out perfect because we could slide our garbage can in there so that's our garbage it's kind of fun because it's motion sensor so it just opens up and then it automatically closes the not fun part is that cleo has learned how to open it up so she comes on over puts her little nose right there and opens it right up so sometimes we'll find it open the upper storage is also really spacious and again it's corner cabinets so you get all the all the use and of every little space i just love the fixtures i fell in love with everything so like we said before we didn't actually get to pick everything out but like i think if we did have to pick it out this would be exactly what i would want anyway um it has a huge sink uh that was a huge perk too so they had this table in here and this table can actually seat six and so if you want you can pull it out and put up the other end and then you can seat six in here right now we just have the two chairs but we discovered the other day we got this poof and we sat it on the end and we're like oh that's perfect we can have another chair there so we'll get another one of those but then it's dual purpose because you want to think about like it's tiny so you need to use things in a variety of ways ways so we're going to take that poof and put it in the living room and then you can put your feet up so it's a perfect piece that is getting used in multiple ways to just make the tiny living even easier so why did we choose a tiny house i think it was a big just perfect storm of circumstances when we bought the property i think our initial thought was to put a house on it but with the pandemic and just construction prices and all of that we don't have the money to put a house on it right now or the time we started looking at tiny houses and watching all the the various tiny home shows and instagram pages and uh at a tiny house uh festival in brighton colorado it's the first time we've actually been in a tiny home and realized that like it's plenty of space like we can we can live in a place this size even with our dogs and cat and all of that yeah i think i think that's what really like opened our eyes is that at that festival you can go tour a ton of different tiny homes and you can really see like the differences in craftsmanship the other thing that we noticed is we don't need the square footage that we originally thought we needed so when we were looking at building a cabin and what that would be we were looking at like definitely under a thousand and you know probably a little more than 500 but we realized in this 360 square feet like it had everything we needed and it felt like a home and so that really just changed our perspective on the fact that we could have this and then probably build like a big deck to go with it so we could have that indoor outdoor feel and so when we walked through this particular home um like we just fell in love with all the features that we saw and so forth and yeah it really felt like while we didn't design it that somehow they knew exactly what we wanted and they did design it for us yeah it was strangely easy major commitment to make yes like we went from not buying a tiny home to buying a tiny home like over the weekend kind of almost like how we bought the property this is our living room what caught our eye immediately when we uh toured the house first was the reclaimed wood design that uh is the bedroom wall living in colorado we immediately thought that it was a perfect like reclaimed wood mountainscape that would be great for a a cabin and in the woods the way everything's designed it's just everything has an eye towards multiple purposes starting with just our couch and we have our couch which is how it is 95 of the time and so what we'll do is you can also expand it out to a bed in addition to that there's also storage underneath where we keep blankets and pillows that we might need and so it's just a nice way to spend an evening after we've gone hiking or or whatever else we might do up here then behind the couch is another little spot for storage so both of these open up and there's just all the way down to the ground of storage we typically don't put a lot in here yet right now it's just when we put things to charge like our vacuum or something like that we'll put it in here in addition to those storage the stairs have storage i know it's not a unique feature for tiny homes but i absolutely adore it i have a habit of leaving my keys wallet sunglasses trash from my pockets in various places so i have a drawer here that i put my phone my wallet and everything other than that we've got our hiking trails maps we have four or five of them in this one and then various things flashlights you never know out here when the lights power might go out we have our sliding glass doors which is fantastic it's fancier window than i've ever had you can just slide them uh open and closed and this one will move the the blinds themselves i've never had anything like that and i'm just amazed by it every time i play with it and then also the giant picture window between that window and these windows here we've seen big bucks a fox and then a lot of squirrels and birds and a handful of dogs every one of them drives clia insane and she howls like a mad woman so that's pretty much it for the the living room the next spot would be into the bathroom which is another fantastic area that is way bigger than i think a tiny home has any reason to have for a bathroom you come in we got our little pocket door again economy of space it takes up hardly any to slide in come in eventually we'll have one of the washer dryer combos that fits right here i know they're not the greatest in the world but it'll be nice to do laundry and then we have a full-size sink nice little uh faucet more drawers over here a full-size toilet this one has just a normal toilet and then the last feature that this has is it's got an actual bathtub in it and not just a shower i'm not a huge bathtub fan but i love having one in the house but then like the three different tile design which i think is just wild and fun and and it really shows their quirkiness as as builders and that's that's the bathroom i mean it's the bathroom it's a fantastic bathroom but it's it's the bathroom when we bought this particular property we bought undeveloped property so it was a piece of land that needed to be developed so we first went out and looked i mean we'd love to have certain perks and so forth on it like i really wanted some water and so forth nearby yeah we started out thinking like oh we want a river to go through the property and we want it to be affordable and yeah those go out the window pretty quick you have to become an adult about it right when you want to a river trees rocks all these things you kind of have to decide what is the priority and so the big thing about property development is it's a lot more complex than you might think and it's also a lot so slower process so we were super fortunate that we already had a power pole dropped and we already had a cistern on site not hooked up but we had the tank um and so you you basically need unless you're gonna live off grid which we opted not to and part of that decision not to live off grid is that we knew for us to have this particular piece of property that we would want to also rent it as well so there was some revenue coming in just to help pay for the home that we were to put on it in that process we realized even before you buy the property you have to do a soils test for future selling and so forth it's important that you understand if a person could build on it in the future so that's step one before you even buy the land as part of the negotiation process is going through that soils test once you do that and you get the land and everything's yours then you start the process of um realizing how much more yeah realizing all the stuff you have to do so like we dropped the power since we already had the power pole in but you still did have to drop a panel and hook up power which was pretty inexpensive that was the easiest thing we had it happened within a week i think and so that allowed us to then plug in something from there you also have to survey the land because if there's anything you're going to do on the property like we wanted to install septic then you have to actually know where like the land is at and where you could put the elevation yeah and i think the thing we've learned is it's just a really really slow process yeah and it takes a lot more time than you realize and i think probably because building is so i mean every there's a lot of building going on and a lot of people are doing development that you think you can get it done a lot quicker and it's like six weeks so we started we bought it in april of last year and at this point we had the power by may 1st yeah and then from there it's taken us all that time to now being january to actually get the cistern hooked up to get the septic design first because you have to have it engineered and then once that's done we could then have a septic person start the install process but in that process they have to do a perk test which are the big holes that are out on the back side of our property to make sure to let the engineer know what type of sept you can put in so there's just a lot of 15 steps it's insane and even like i thought a well would be easy enough to put in because i grew up in the south and you just throw well if you need to because there's water all there we talked to them in may june yeah and the earliest time to be able to get one is next march so they're a year out and even then they can't even guarantee if there's water the the wells might be 200 feet or 700 feet down or nothing um yeah everything's just takes time yeah everything six weeks out yeah so i think it's been i think eye opening i think we've surrounded us with people who are really willing to share and teach us how to do this because in essence we're our own contractor so we're finding the various people to help and so i think that's been super fortunate yeah we've been very lucky with the the contractors that we found that they've managed to they hold our hands through the whole process and they know that we're green and we don't know what we're doing and so they've been very kind to to take you know two ignorant people and walk us baby step through it so it's it's it's been a blessing and a curse welcome to our master bedroom it was really important to us that our master bedroom also felt really home like and that it didn't feel like we had to climb up into a loft or something like that so what's really cool about this master is that we have a ton of clearance so there's like it's six foot four nathan can stand in this part of the master and like totally stand up straight so that's pretty cool if i come over here i'm like five foot eight five foot nine and i can almost stand all the way up so i'm like just touching so that's the really um part that we really loved about this master it's a california king which is great for us because we have two 70 pound dogs and as much as we didn't want them on the bed because we were like great it's so high they're not going to get up here clea the spoiled one is definitely up here you'll see that it's actually built on this platform here and what's pretty cool about that is because it's on a platform that allows the bathroom to be underneath this bed so it just makes for great space utilization up here to allow us to be able to stand up here but then also have your bathroom be very spacious as well so i would call it like his and her closets and wardrobe so these open up and you have a ton of hanging space in here you can stash shoes under there and so forth and then the drawers are also really large and so you can put a ton in here as well and so each of these have the same amount of storage on each side so nathan's is over here and i'm here mine's way more convenient because i can stand we probably should have switched that if i really thought about it but anyway i'm spoiled so um one of the other cool things about up here is that we have our lights right above the bed and so we can turn those on over here or over there so at night it's really convenient for me to just shut off the lights or you can even switch off your individual and underneath here is a little usb plug so you can even plug your usb to charge your phone at night which makes that super convenient the other little bonus that's over here so we have this window here and this is a window seat and so what's great is you have a whole nother storage area in here we love having the windows one of the things about the loft is it stays really warm up here so if we keep it like 61 on the mini split or 65 we are super super warm throughout the night so we're never chilly um as we went the other kind of cool thing is so i sleep on that side and nathan sleeps on this side so i've learned to just climb up over there i use a little handrail i can put down a platform and so it's a little step and then you can just crawl right up on the bed which is super convenient um so it's you don't even have to work that hard to get up here and the little bonus we have over there is we have a fan that's built in so we can just turn it on and so if it gets a little warm up here it'll suck air from out into the main part of the house into this part so that's also a great little feature so i'm going to show you our other loft area which has this like phenomenal spiral staircase to get up there which to me is just like a piece of art in this particular living area the other really cool thing too is we have this little juliet balcony and so you can look out there's a huge window there and you can also look out over this living area now we're up here in our loft area and so part of our tiny home journey is that we really want to be out here on our property at least once per month we really thought it was important that we justify if we're going to have property we need to be able to use it but the other thing we really want to do is we really want other people to experience the whole tiny home living and be out in nature and the woods all at the same time so these two areas it's like the jack and jill and it has a nice cool little divider between so we really hope that families will come visit stay out here and the kids can pick whichever side they want so we have toys and so forth but there's two twin beds what's really cool is that there's big windows on each side so again they can see out everywhere that just makes it like this fun little place where you can as a kid run up here and get away from your parents and just have a like totally be on your own because your parents are on the totally other side of the tiny home i think advice for people who want to put like to develop land with a tiny home is be patient and and do your homework i think the other piece too is that um you definitely have to have cash like one of the things in order to do this process is like most of the people that you're paying as contractors you need the money yeah the septic is not going to take a credit card yeah you have to charge accordingly for it right you have to write a check for it so i think it's it's pretty cash intensive but you have to see it as an investment in your future and that the fact that you're making improvements to a piece of land only brings much more value so let's say 20 years down the road we could potentially be selling this land and that's the other part of it but i think it's definitely it's not inexpensive to kind of give some figures like to drop power is about 8 000. yeah we got lucky and the power was dropped so we only paid five or 600 for the right but the actual breakers but yeah it'd be eight grand right and then to put a septic in for a two-bedroom house and so if you think about that this can sleep six yeah you need to be able to think of it almost as a two-bedroom house that's like another almost um 25 to 30 000 so and probably the cistern was another five so when you really start to add it up it does take a lot of cash to be able to start to develop a property um but it's something that we dreamed and really thought that we could do and so in order for us to do it we like looked at equity in our other home but yeah i think the most complicated part is that you have to be able to you can't necessarily finance it you can finance things once you're all done but there's definitely a lot of upfront construction costs that are more than i think you'd have to get a parking so you have to get like a personal loan develop then get financed at a reasonable rate but yeah cash is cash is king i think our plans for the future is we're gonna finish developing the land itself we plan to come here as often as humanly possible but yeah so i and we just want to have a little bit of joy hanging out here and uh being in the pine trees [Music] 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

Channel: Tiny House Expedition

Views: 554,456

Keywords: tiny house, tiny home, tiny house tour, developing land for tiny house, tiny house with bathtub, tiny house on land, homestead, finding land for a tiny house, developing raw land, vacant land for tiny house, finding land for tiny home, 32 ft tiny house, indigo river tiny homes, tiny house with standing loft, tiny house giant journey, tiny home tour, tiny home tours, tiny house big living, tiny house parking, small house design, 370 sqft house, 10 ft wide tiny home

Id: G4Z7pu9PoGo

Length: 31min 12sec (1872 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 25 2022