Couple's 20ft Tiny House has LOADS of Clever Features & Epic Home Office Set-up

[Music] a big factor of us deciding to go tiny is just financial we felt like we were renting and our money is just kind of paying someone else's debts but we didn't have the savings or really what felt like the means to get into the actual real estate market so we thought well for roughly the same amount as a down payment for a real house we could just actually own outright a tiny house and whether that's a stepping stone to something else or you know if we stay in it permanently or whatever at least we're going somewhere that is meaningful to us our budget initially we thought we could build the house for twenty thousand dollars and the house ended up costing us about thirty six thousand canadian dollars like that includes every paintbrush every piece of lumber every screw we tracked everything uh it also includes some larger items so about 16 grand over budget but and some mistakes as well yes exactly yeah we designed it from scratch built it ourselves and i think we had some family and friends help us raise the walls and like bringing in the uh the countertop but other than that it's 100 built by us we started building in 2014 and we were sort of researching and planning before that and so i learned a 3d modeling software called sketchup the layout came together pretty quickly based on a few inspirations and then i moved on to actually designing the framing and figuring out every single piece of material that would be required to actually assemble the structure and that was super helpful because without any real building experience other than me being electrician the 3d modeling really helped like walk through like a virtual build so when we raised the walls and it actually came together squarely we were like oh wow that actually actually worked so this is the entrance to our tiny house you walk in and on the left we have a storage closet where we keep our shoes and coats and hang my purse and we also have kind of an upper level for jake and he has a handle here that he can just step up on and access his stuff and on the right hand side we have a storage shelf where we keep a little bin for recycling our dogs food and water dishes and these are dog towels that we use to wipe his paws when he comes in for being outside and then tucked behind the fridge we have our kitty cat stairs which are a way for the cat to go up into the loft without us having to keep on deploying the ladder for her to go up and down on top of each stair we have a little bit of bath mat that we cut up so that as she goes up the stairs it cleans off her paws and then on the side of the fridge we have some storage for things that we're grabbing on our way out the door i love my kitchen it's bigger than any apartment kitchen that i've ever had we really wanted to have lots of counter space and a large sink so that's kind of what we based our kitchen on this countertop we made ourselves it's plywood and then on top of it is tongue and groove fur that we stained and put polyurethane on and under here are the shelves that we just have for food storage and pots and pans we have a toaster oven that we use as well as one induction cooktop so far it's been enough i usually have like something on there and then i have like a rice cooker that i plug in but yeah i honestly it's been working really well we also built this custom hood fan to go over top of the cooktop and also serve as a shelf for the toaster oven this is a rv propane furnace we decided to put our sink in the corner just so that we were making the most use of the space it also gives us lots of space underneath the sink where we have kind of our own central vac system so we have a vacuum under there as well as a large dog food bag and our compost it's just like a um a shop vac with like a long thing and this can reach up to like the very back of the loft and all the way to the back of the living room jake wired in a switch right here so i can just easily turn it on one of my favorite features of our kitchen is the mexican tile that we put in it was actually one of the first things that i bought for the house and then we just have some sort of open storage shelves where we keep our plates and bowls and mugs and glasses and for our fridge and freezer we just got two bar size fridge and stack them on top of each other so we have the fridge on top and the freezer on the bottom before we started actually building our kitchen we first did a bit of a prototype where we just laid some plywood down and had like a laundry sink hooked up to the water so that we could see what it was like to wash dishes and prepare food in here and that helped us with the final layout another thing that we thought of when we were designing the kitchen is that when you're at the sink doing dishes you have a nice view so we have the two windows by the sink we essentially split up the kitchen from the living room by putting the bathroom in between uh which is split into a shower and a toilet room and it creates a bit of a hall that once you pass through it opens up into the living room and the shower it was quite a project to to achieve it's the very last thing that we finished because it was a weird shape we had to sort of build this plywood structure and then we ended up using vinyl decking as the waterproof material because it could just mold to whatever shape we needed and we were lucky enough to find an rv shower pan that that fit perfectly into the space so another issue with having left this to the end is that we built everything else and figured everything else out but don't have anywhere to hang the towels so i used the 3d modeling software to see if i could make a contraption that would be able to clear the opening in such a way that when the curtain is closed it's all outside and protected from the splashing of the shower head so the whole procedure would be that you first grab the bath mat and throw it down and then you swing the arm out and then you can go in and take your shower and then when you get out you're standing on your bathmat dry off put the towel back and then swing it back in put away the bath mat the controls for the shower are on the ceiling uh as well as an exhaust fan i ended up having to 3d print um a solution to extend the valves down to the the ceiling height and that worked out really well and also we're really happy with the rain style shower head with the plumbing being up top we needed something to come straight down so everything came together in the end but it was quite a process to figure all this out opposite the shower we have the other sort of bathroom half it's just got the composting toilet enclosure which is built from scratch so we have a bucket and some cover material and there's also like a urine diverting funnel thing naturally we were worried that there might be an issue with smell but the way we've dealt with it is to have an exhaust fan that's drilled through the floor that's inside the toilet box and that's picking up any smell or moisture and then is exhausting it outside and opposite the toilet box there's a small sink that's a nice sort of tight profile to fit into the space there's a bit of storage in the cabinet below one advantage of having the the two sort of bathroom facilities separated is that obviously they can be in use at the same time and like i mentioned the way that these two units sort of separate the kitchen from the living room is something we're really happy with back when we were designing the house the sizes of tiny homes was a lot smaller in general a 20 foot we considered to be actually kind of big on the bigger side of things looking back at it now something that we may have decided to do differently is get a little bit longer and put the bathroom as a full unit on one end of of the house which is a much more common kind of layout the living room serves several purposes obviously there's the nice lounge area where we made this corner couch that's extra deep just lots of room to sort of sprawl out on which is super important and then there's sort of an entertainment center where there's the the tv but also has like a workstation style setup where i can do work uh and also play games on it and we've got the dog bed in the corner that ended up fitting perfectly in there we've got this sort of full height storage area so really maximizing that corner for storage the last bit of storage in here is these cubbies that we made by just adding a bit of a bottom to where the underside of the the loft joists are one little detail that we added in during construction was to wire up plugs in there so just sort of electronics storage there with the power to to charge them and then on the other side the same type of storage it is wired for surround sound so there's four speakers up in the corners and there's one center one on the the desk this whole setup we've affectionately named the nerd station it's a sit stand desk in addition to the whole entertainment nature of it i can just sit at it like it's a normal desk but it can also switch to a standing configuration the little carpet here is covering a anti-fatigue mat and then the tv and the desk can both raise up to a standing height i thought it might be a good idea to put some handles that i can grab and i can do things like hang and sort of stretch out the back and also do some exercises like do some pull-ups kiva actually bought me a fingerboard as a gift so now i can do sort of climbing exercises as well this um hopefully looks kind of like a piece of art uh but it's actually our table it serves two purposes one is as a dining table it also is sized perfectly to fit to the left of the main desk to act as a second desk the table's great how it can pull in nice and close we made sure to space the legs such that they would miss the supports for the couch so it straddles around there it also doesn't interfere with the storage containers we have and then because we made it you know intentionally with a sort of c shape as for the legs it can tuck in quite far if i want to pull out like the main workstation seating it doesn't interfere this is all built entirely from scratch and i did 3d modeling of it to help figure out all these dimensions and everything and it really came together to be able to perform all the tasks that we needed it to this giant panel houses first and foremost the actual electrical panel for the whole house there's a lot of other contraption here that's a bit of an ongoing project of mine i'm both an electrician and a computer nerd so this is kind of the fusion of those uh two things all the lights in the house are 12 volt led strips that can be any uh color and any brightness and that's all controlled by an arduino computer that i've programmed from scratch these wires connect to the push buttons in the house so basically i can read any button press from anywhere in the house and then write code in the program to have that button press perform any action which could be turning on the furnace or changing any of the lighting not even necessarily in the room you're in but anywhere in the house we have our ladder tucked away beside the fridge and it's on two rails it's attached to the top rail and it slides along the bottom rail when the ladder is deployed it's at a bit more of an angle so it's more similar to stairs and we also don't have to pick up and wrangle a totally loose ladder it will always be attached to the loft and the width of it is so that it can perfectly fit beside the fridge without sticking into the hallway and also that when it's deployed you can walk from the living room into the kitchen without hitting your head on the ladder in the loft we have the cat house which is where the cat stairs lead up to and we also keep her food and for the cat we don't have a litter box because she's an outdoor cat so on this side we have these baskets that we keep our clothes in we have one shelf for clothes that are sort of half clean and half dirty like jeans and hoodies that you can wear once and wear again and then on this side we have hanging clothes storage we also put this mat down here so that when you're crawling from the ladder to the bed it's soft on your knees we designed the loft to be quite large because it was important for us to have a king size bed we have two windows one of them is an egress window and we designed it so that we would be able to sit up in bed without hitting our heads on the ceiling both windows can open they have screens on them so you get like a really good airflow through the loft another awesome feature of our loft is we have different lighting settings so this is full on there's also a p mode setting which just turns on red lights from the loft all the way down to the washroom so if you need to use a bathroom in the night you don't have to turn on the bright lights we put in some shelving on either side of the bed with power so we can charge our cell phones overnight and we have some storage at the bottom of the bed where we keep [Music] laundry so it took us six years to build our tiny house from start to completion and there was a few reasons why it took us so long as we filmed every step of our build and made youtube videos about it but also we moved in before it was totally done and then once we were moved in we got kind of complacent we moved in about two years in in a way it was a huge mistake to move in but because we were sort of day to day in here we got a better idea of the flow and so we were able to kind of design storage and certain elements around things that we otherwise wouldn't have foreseen our cost of living is much lower we used to live in the city in an apartment it's had a pretty big impact on our life where we both quit our full-time jobs and we started our own business surrounding tiny homes and then both of us sort of work like odd or seasonal jobs on top of that i have picked up a little bit of electrician work here and there as needed and i also do horse care and i work at stables in the neighborhood but we also get a lot of our income from online now through youtube and on the website we sell a video tutorial on how to use sketchup and specifically kind of targeting how to design a tiny house so we're parked a renting space on my parents acreage and that allows us to be close to my parents and also having the rent going into family land the house is 20 feet long and it's built on a 20-foot trailer which is an iron eagle trailer specifically designed as a tiny house foundation so that was something that we knew that we wanted was to not mess around with repurposing some other trailer that we weren't sure about the weight rating or anything like that it's eight and a half feet wide and it's 13 feet tall so it's road legal we decided to start with we would be entirely on grid so we have a 40 amp 240 volt supply and the major electrical load in the house is the cooking so to split up that energy demand we put space heat in the form of a propane furnace and the water heater is also propane the property has a well so we're just connected to that essentially we wanted to have a super solid internet connection so we actually have a buried cable all the way from the main house so that we have hardwired internet [Music] some downsides to living in a tiny house are even though it takes a very small amount of time to clean it i have to clean more frequently and also just space you almost have to learn how to like move in the house with someone else do a little dance to get around in the hallway especially it's a positive thing because it makes you not buy things too much but it's also difficult too when you do need something and you're like well where am i gonna put it there's a bunch of stuff like all my tools my electrician tools and then we have some seasonal stuff and a bunch of things that are in the main house's garage so we're sort of renting garage space we'd like to feel like we're taking care of all that either we're gonna have to build another shed or something or have another external space what i love about living here in this tiny house is the ability to have animals it allows me to live in the country and have my own space i just love having a space that's so finely tuned to exactly what i like to do so getting the most out of my sort of computer gaming station and then the lounge area is just like so cozy [Music] please share this video if you liked it also be sure to subscribe to exploring alternatives and check out our playlists for more stories like this thanks for watching

Channel: Exploring Alternatives

Views: 653,428

Keywords: tiny, house, home, tiny house, interior, tour, design, wheels, minimalist, minimalism, downsizing, simple, living, budget, lifestyle, exploring, alternatives, thow, tiny house on wheels, Canada, modern, reclaimed, loft, ladder, bathroom, toilet, shower, space, room, kitchen, space saving, furniture, storage, DIY, self, built, build, nest, pet, dog, cat, stairs, ramp, tech, futuristic, custom, electric, propane, heat, lights, gaming, work, from, office, standing, desk, station, Jake, Kiva, small, micro, cabin, multi, functional, cheap, affordable, BC, full

Id: sAkXgFSEVB0

Length: 19min 14sec (1154 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 07 2021