Family’s Off Grid Tiny House in Charming Backyard Village

hey welcome to the community [Music] behind us is the tiny tack house and over on this side is our friend cat's house she's been here on the property with us for about a year we've had a couple tiny houses in and out of here our friend Sean Burke was working on his tiny house out of a shipping container and his life journey and work sent him away for a couple years so he ended up selling it so we've had a couple of tiny houses in and out this is our house we've tried to kind of pretty it up a little bit on the outside I had a little bit of bamboo to add some ambience around the windows we had built our house not knowing where we were gonna Park it and so we decided to add solar capability to it we went with a pretty beefy solar setup the unit we ended up deciding on can handle 3600 watts of solar panels so quite a bit more than we currently have we only have four panels which gives us just over a thousand watts but we wanted room to grow so just over next to it you'll notice there's a couple cables running out and these are our batteries they are very large and beefy they're all 12-volt sealed lead-acid batteries basically the equivalent of a large 48 volt battery 260 amp hour during the summer months can absolutely hold enough power for us to get all of our energy needs especially when the sun's coming out Washington State is not necessarily as rainy as everybody thinks but it definitely is a little bit cloudy in the winter months so we definitely need an assist for getting power besides the Sun during those months otherwise these batteries if they're treated really well and you don't discharge them too much they can last I've been told 10 to 20 years we ran off of solar from about April until October jost utilities for one year was about $300 so we use a lot of solar over on this side of the house we have decided on putting the solar panels over here it's on the south-facing side of the house it gets pretty good Sun throughout the day and for most of the year especially during the summer months but we do have some pretty tall trees up behind us that as we get into the fall and winter it's gonna be pretty much shaded most of our backyard is so won't be perfect but it should still collect a little bit of power and give us some solar we also have a couple hookups here we went with two different options we have the standard 20 amp hookup as well as we put in a 30 amp just because we didn't quite know where we were going to be and we wanted also to have the ability to use a little bit more power if necessary around the corner here we have our water and we just ended up purchasing an RV water inlet and installed that it runs we have two options right now it's hooked to city water through a hose and there's also a fill port inside here because we have a tank how many gallons is a tank hold it's like 38 or 40 gallons yeah so we had the tank custom made by a steel fabricator locally here and and one of the reasons why we decided that was because we didn't know where we were going to end up so we could have been parked on a field with absolutely no power no water no nothing so the idea of just being able to fill it when we did and we actually did that a lot in the winter time because we didn't want to deal with freezing hoses and stuff so we would fill the tank and that would last us about three to four days before we'd have to fill it up again also when we're running off the tank I think it encouraged us to be more mindful of our water consumption and take shorter showers make sure you aren't wasting water the only thing that we have that is propane based is our cooktop it's just a small two burner cooktop some of the larger items that we didn't have room to store inside our house include our bicycles we decided to build a little bit of a divider to visually separate the parking area where we generally park the cars from the view as well as a place to put our bikes so we're still trying to decide on our final covering before the winter comes but we're gonna have it covered so that we can keep the rain off our bikes and also just kind of gives them a good place out of the way where they're safely and securely stored so the dimensions of the house we built it on a 20-foot trailer and it's within the wheel wells itself so it's it's under 8 feet I think on the inside it's like just just over seven seven and then I had actually kept the dimensions a lot shorter than what is typically used because I was not a hundred percent sure how it was going to sit once everything is in it so it's about 13 feet tall as well we haven't actually had it weighed yet but my guess 8 8 5 here's the door that we had custom-made it's a little bit shorter than a standard door not quite as wide and the height we did that because our walls aren't tall enough to have it be any higher so when I'm standing in the doorframe it's actually a little bit on the short side you have to step your stepping up into the house so it's not such a big deal or you're stepping down into it but when I stand in the doorframe I actually hit my head so it always kind of freaks out the taller visitors but again we're stepping down friends I've never had any issues coming in and out of our house so that's been a win come on in so for the inside of our house we decided to put in pine tongue-and-groove siding and that's what you see here so these are 3/8 inch boards so they're pretty thin but we decided to seal them with tung tree oil - ung Tong tree and it kind of gave it this beautiful golden glow yeah I mean originally in my design it was white walls because I wanted white to make the room seem a little bit brighter but it was hilarious because when we went to go purchase the siding the gentleman that was helping us he asked what our project was and when we informed him what it was he's like don't you dare paint this wood and were like this is our project why can't we and he he enlightened us with the whole put it up see how you feel and if you feel like you want to what paint it white then paint it white but if you paint it white and you decide that's not what you want you can't undo that so we took that to heart and we just left it up and yeah it just created this really nice warm homey feel to the space so you'll notice behind us we have a storage bench and this was one of our two main storage areas for all of our belongings we kept some my camera gear in here we kept hiking camping stuff any of the little knickknacks that you kind of keep around that you don't need to access too often all kind of got to store it in there our initial plan was to make this a second bed we actually designed two widthwise so that we could have done piano hinges and done another flip open part and then we started asking ourselves well how often do we really have people staying with us and in this one is while we were in our apartment as well so we realized how many times people had actually come to visit us and it was very few and so or like all right let's just scratch it this is our house yeah so we did decide to make it long enough that it's it could hold the six-foot tall person comfortably we have had people sleep on it and it works out perfectly it's pretty wide once you pull off the back cushions this is our only skylight that we have in the house we definitely wanted to incorporate a skylight just because like going to visit D and then Brittany and realizing how much it brings so much light into the house it was kind of a must-have and we have five of these windows throughout the house they're double hung so we can open them either from the top or from the bottom which is really nice and then we have a bunch of smaller awning windows which is perfect when it's raining because then you know we don't have to close the windows we can still open them up and airflow is really important inside of a small space this used to be my desk my workspace where my computer was mounted and then I would sit here for like ten hours a day doing my 3d but it's also where we would eat our dinner and so we did a little flip out desk slash table for us to use and I wanted more of a cozy chair for working since I knew I was going to be sitting for a while we decided to get a folding chair and so this worked great which ultimately we ended up making him a desk over here because we had he had separate projects that he needed to work on and it was really difficult for us to both use the same computer at the same time it just didn't happen and so we built this side desk here for him to work on his projects and now it's just a really great space to hang out and read books because we didn't originally have the plan for both of us needing to work at the same time we just had an Ikea bookshelf that was on its side and so it gave us extra seating and gave us some book storage but ultimately yeah once we realized that we both needed computer work space we ended up getting another iMac that we had there in the corner and we just ended up building this custom or as the other desk was just the standard IKEA yeah sure does so this guy I'll just flip up and then we have these side knobs that will pop out and so we made it so that it would come out a little bit more so he has a little bit more working space but we didn't need that much depth for our bookcases necessarily so we brought those ones back a little bit and then we just made it hinge for him as well one of the things that was kind of a struggle we had never installed Windows before we watched a lot of videos and then we got the windows in and we forgot that traditionally you have some sort of trim around the windows and I don't know for some reason I have trouble visualizing things until I see it either in 3d which he was really good about designing things and showing me here's what I have in mind for some reason this I was just like struggling with mental even though it's the most simple thing and I came home or I came out to work on the tiny house one day after work and Melissa had several of these up and we just bought some pine lumber from Home Depot and we basically Melissa just did these little angle cuts and then kind of rounded off the corners and we ended up hanging our curtains just by putting another piece of one by two and sandwich Aang the curtain in there and it's just holding the it's just bamboo basically of a bamboo shade that I cut up and I bought a few rolls and cut up and it was plenty to fit all the windows cuz they're so small but yeah it worked out really well it seems like all the detail stuff like the house the structure of the house went up so fast like within a day I said I 1 or 2 days we got like the walls built yeah and it was already standing and then we put the siding on and it looked like a house right and then you get in here and you're like ok to do all the window trims was a day to do the floor was a day and it just like I had it added but of course having no experience the researching of it also took the time to it did yeah the sighting took a lot because we used wool insulation and so we would put a couple of boards up and then we would have to grab the wool and tuck it down in there and so it was a very timely process and we it's funny we did time-lapse videos of all those different days of the exterior and the interior and there are tons of awesome videos that you can check out on our website that show time-lapse progress and they say witch days they are of working and yeah it's kind of fun to see that progress happen over time one of the design things that we had done was a ladder instead of stairs and a lot of people asked me why I didn't do stairs and for my design it would have been kind of cut off one of my windows would have went into my workspace or my seating area which just didn't work for me so I got really comfortable with a ladder after climbing it so many times to build the house that I like let's just keep it as a ladder and so again one evening I just decided to build a ladder and there was yeah and we we heard horror stories from Dee Williams about how she had fallen she was carrying her dog up and she yeah she just had it slide out under her and so we decided to go with just a really simple solution was to put up a few hooks and then throw a piece of copper pipe up there so that we could have it hooked in there so that way we can still shuffle it over and I just put these hooks on yeah and and then still remain stable for us so it was never an issue so over here behind the ladder a couple interesting things we put in some storage and this was our main clothing storage we had our hanging clothes in here and we also originally had a different material the same we had but my cat liked to sneak in in between and started he just started destroying it because he wanted to sleep on our clothes and have a nice warm cozy spot to be so while we were living in the tiny house another thing that we had was obviously two cats and so we had cat litter and one of the common issues people have with cats as they get the litter everywhere and we didn't want it being tracked throughout the house so we ended up building a little hidden spot to store the cat litter and then there's a little doorway that goes through to the bathroom and the cats had to go through the bathroom to use the bathroom yeah we keep our dehumidifier down here during the winter months there can be humidity buildup we didn't put in any sort of active ventilation and so we decided that a dehumidifier was going to be our best option for keeping the humidity low and it worked really well we wouldn't have to run it more than an hour a day during the winter months and it was really when it was extremely cold outside if the temperatures would get below freezing showering cooking any time like that there that we knew there was gonna be moist ER and within 24 hours we filled up I think we put 50 pints yeah it was water and it was so much easier to heat after we had done that as well so so originally when we were designing the the loft space we knew we needed to make some alterations to what we had seen originally in the tiny houses before ours and that most of the tiny houses we saw all had a straight gable roof that spanned the entire length of the tiny and that works great when you have a single individual sleeping up in the space but being that there were two of us we decided to incorporate some dormers that gave us a little bit more wiggle room as well as the the placement of the side windows are a little bit further back so that way the area where our head goes still remains somewhat dark and originally in my design we had built side cabinets for our clothing but then decided that we didn't really need it let's check out the kitchen one thing to note is our frigerator people are almost asking us where we got our fridge and I don't think they actually make this model anymore the magic chef for there's an alternative one we knew we wanted to have like a separate freezer unit as well so we found this very cute very tiny but still worked out it we have pictures of how much food we actually could cram in this it's crazy I feel like the space in here is a lot more like how I say like it worked out a little bit better for storing our food in here and it didn't in a big house so now I just use it for my guests for for if they need anything in here but you can see where I put the Christopher's chair and this is another thing why we did not do a propane fridge because of venting and at one point we put the fridge a lot closer to the cabinet and then I realized if I pushed it over just lightly there was a perfect room for me to hide his chair behind most of being the genius that she is he's really good at coming up with places to store things and she took these baskets that we had and screwed them to the wall and it worked out really well we put in string just to keep things from falling out and also a little bit of space up here above where the wall sits and so we left that open we just decided well we could put little things up there I wanted to keep it open I wanted the flow to continue so it was moral it still felt like one space it wasn't like the living space and then the kid because originally I had actually designed it so it blocked off like this was a wall and we had extra stuff on here but then I'm realizing that I'm I'm designing for stuff as opposed to designing for what's going to work and what we actually had already and so this worked out perfectly as we move further in and we kind of kept the the l-shaped design it worked really well actually while we're we're cooking and doing stuff like we could both move back and forth between and then we when we're in the house we kind of use this as more of our pantry so when we're cooking it's awesome because it's just kind of like a grab-and-go kind of setup and we only have three cabinets total in here in this space we used for our plates and cups and bowls and then yeah and then we have a couple other little things that were in here we kept it again really simple I mean the the construction of our cabinets was how much extra would do we have that we can just throw together and it works it it definitely worked underneath here we actually have our water tank and so we made it so that we could pop the wall completely out to access it and one of the reasons for this was there's no indication on how full it is when you're filling it and so I use this as a visual because in the winter months it's a lot warmer in here and so we're putting cold water into the tank and so I can see the condensation essentially on the tank rising so when it got to a certain point I can tell Chris all right enough but it's also nice to be able to shift it and bring it out because I've taken taken it out of the house before just for cleaning purposes our two burner cooktop we actually purchased at a boat store it's just a little princess two burner cooktop but the same company princess makes a lot of different options they have little ovens they have three burner four burner units but yeah that was one thing that we quickly discovered was that boating stores are a really great place to find smaller appliances and kind of those weird specific items that are not always that easy to find because a lot of people do live in their boats mm-hmm and you'll notice these little caps that are on top of the knobs we did live with two cats and to prevent any issues with them turning the gas on those came in very handy so we kept our lighting really simple in 2011 though when we started building there weren't a lot of lighting options when it came to LEDs so these are the units that we ended up with we've got it's got three little LEDs here and five LEDs here and then we wired it into the switch we took the little DC to AC converter and put it up there just to tuck it out of the way and to give you an idea the LED lights that were available to us when we first started these are under cabinet lights they were the only LED lights on the market at that time yeah it was a challenge and they were very very expensive so we went with these two light bars and then the bathroom has a four light light bar we can talk about our kitchen sink and additional storage we just purchased the sink at IKEA the one thing that was kind of weird is the sink didn't come with a hole pre-drilled and we didn't feel comfortable drilling it ourselves we didn't have the right hole saw or bit to do so so we actually ended up paying more in the end I think than just buying a sink with a pre-cut hole would have been because we were like oh yeah this is only a $30 sink but then we ended up spending another $50 to have the hole drilled underneath the kitchen sink we have a little bit more storage as well as our hot water tank is in the corner we have a four gallon hot water tank and it is wired into a switch so that we can turn it on about twenty minutes before we're ready to shower and then turn it off when we don't need it to be using electricity and heating hot water and there is also a pump under there because again we have the water tank and we made sure we put a water outlet at the bottom we have a pump right above that and then there's a splitter so we can either have we can have it hooked up to the pump at the same time as the city water if we need to but we can also run off of just the pump and that's wired into a switch as well so we can turn it off when we don't need it so I want to point out a design flaw just because it's an important one so when we originally designed this cooks cook space we thought since we were going to have any vent fan of any kind we still needed to make sure moisture found its way out and so what we did was we put the window right next to the cooks aisle that was mistake because the complete opposite happened and the wind would actually blow in and the moisture would stay in the space but then there's also the potential of it blowing the flame out and so one thing I would note to others is to make sure that your window base is a lot higher than where your flame is gonna go because that was one thing we didn't realize until we used it the first time we have a pretty small bathroom and it's very simple also we decided since our kitchen sink is three feet away that we didn't want to put another sink in here so we have a very simple toilet it's a bucket with a urine diverter so separates the solids and the liquids we have a little container with some sawdust and coconut core that you just sprinkle on top of the solids after you go to the bathroom and that keeps the smell down we put in a small mirror that was able to be flipped out of the way and then a small shelf to store some towels and small earth items on up on top of the shelf we have a little air filter it just kind of helps circulate the air it keeps it fresh it kind of minimizes some of the dust you'd be surprised how much dust collects especially when you have cats and the space and cat fur so we find ourselves having to vacuum every day that was a very regular part of our daily routine was to sweep and vacuum the floor just to keep that kind of dust and cat fur out of everything we did decide to paint the walls of the bathroom white and part of that was because of the smaller size it just made it feel a little bit larger so this was our compromise with not painting the rest of the walls white we just decided to go with the bathroom one thing that our tiny house became really well known for was our shower and we originally had half of a wine barrel for our shower and it worked really well when we were living in the house full-time we were taking a shower everyday we are keeping the barrel wet because if you think about a wine barrel they're held together because the wood expands because it has liquid in it so as we transitioned out of the tiny house and not showering in it every day we noticed that the board would start to shrink there was a lot more maintenance involved for us we had to soak the tub really well every couple days just to make sure it didn't shrink too much and start to leak and then finally gosh it was earlier this year just a couple months ago so we're looking at about six years in to having the barrel it finally gave in and the bottom board ended up breaking because it held a little bit more moisture and started to rot as wood does over time and so we ended up having to replace our our well-known shower Basin with a horse watering trough we just bought this at a feed store and then we got some spray paint intended for metal and painted it and then we drilled a hole for the drain but we also didn't necessarily want to be showering and standing on cold metal doesn't sound very enjoyable when you wake up early in the morning so we ended up building a little platform out of wood to stand on and we needed a way to keep the water from sitting in there so we actually made the boards so that there moveable and then we can use a sponge to to get the water out of there so you can see our drain right in the middle and then use this custom cut all these boards by we I mean Melissa did we also wanted to keep our plumbing really simple so it's all in this corner of the house we have our water tank right behind there we've got some piping running to the hot water heater and then it comes into this wall and comes up and we just want with a really low-flow showerhead and basically it's like a little waterfall you stand under it turn the water on and get wet turn the water off then you can grab the soap clean off and then turn the water back on because with the 4 gallon hot water tank you only have about a 4 minute shower with a one gallon per minute flow showerhead [Music] we lived in the house for four years and it was an absolute amazing part of our life we learned and gained so much and we actually have developed a much stronger relationship because of it but now we're in a different stage in our life but the house will always be part of our journey and our lives who knows what time will bring us we may end up living in it again we may end up building another small structure to live in who knows and maybe we'll pass it down to our daughter as well hopefully if you want to find out more about us and our story feel free to head over to the tiny tack house calm [Music] hey guys Alexis and Christian here with tiny-house expedition don't forget to Like comment and subscribe and click left or right for more tiny house stories and tours [Music]

Channel: Tiny House Expedition

Views: 369,850

Keywords: tiny house, tiny home, tiny house tour, tiny house on wheels, off grid tiny house, tiny homes on wheels, DIY tiny house, tiny house family, tiny house build, simple living, tiny house nation, tiny house design, tiny house movement, tiny house community, tiny house living, tiny living, living big in a tiny house, alternative lifestyle, sustainable living, minimalism, tiny house village, backyard tiny house, off grid living, tiny house big living, airbnb tiny house

Id: PzVZAk9Ot4k

Length: 31min 35sec (1895 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2019