Family Of 3 Lives Tiny To Spend More Time Together - Gorgeous Tiny Home Tour

[Music] I'm Trisha this is my husband Andy and our dog Bruce our daughter ila is two and a half she's taking a little nap and she'll join us a little later so this is our 28-foot true form tiny Kootenai this is the urban finish on this and after living in the city in Boston after the birth of our daughter we decided that we wanted to spend more time with her and less time working and so a big motivation for going tiny was sort of family time and we decided no better place than Northern California to be in a tiny space because of all this beautiful outdoor time even though it's pretty pretty overcast today so we ended up here in my mom's backyard the house that I grew up in and yeah we're excited to show you guys around today so walking in from the deck this is the main living space here we have couch that I think Andy will talk about a little bit more later and then this is a nook that's bumped off the end of the the actual tiny house we have some great book storage here in the window that we've kind of built in more books kid toys these drawers pull out and are huge we have all of our daughter's clothes in one of these drawers and then shoes down here and then another drawer over there that kind of hides away electronics that we don't use very often yeah so the Nook we use for so many different things obviously storage but um during the evenings we either I sit here our daughter sits here or Andy will sit here we definitely use it for reading books or watching TV and then we have lots of storage up on the top - for hats kid shoes that kind of thing this is great for just hanging up jackets we feel like you know walking into a tiny house you or walking into any house you just need somewhere to put your stuff and this is a really easy way for us to kind of keep our shoes and bags and jackets organized to the benefit of having the Nook is we don't just have one sitting space so we have our couch but we also have that so it just makes it easier to kind of play together as a family but also to have friends over there's just a lot more seating and a lot more area for people to relax and watch TV or read books or anything like that so so this is just a metal three-tier cart we have a bunch of our daughters kind of sweatshirts and things on the bottom we used to keep diapers there now it's kind of underwear and stuff like that for her and then lots of books on top and remote-control stuff that kind of thing yeah so that's just something that we kind of have moved around the space as we've needed it and that's where it ended up a nice little corner spot and then there's a letter in the back a telescoping ladder in the back that we used to get up to the storage loft up there which we'll show you a bit later alright so moving off of the nook here that Trisha talked about that's again 2 feet that's cantilevered off the back of the 28 foot house so we're 30 feet overall this is that livingroom area one of the things that we've always really liked is where that mid-century modern style furniture but it also works really well for tiny house living part of the reason for that is we have wheel wells so down in each side from about here to about six feet that way we have the wheel arches from the actual trailer and that can create a challenger to actually furnish in your house so one of the things that that we like is finding furniture that have these sort of spindly legs this is a West Elm Tillery couch these things come up on Craigslist all the time that's where we found this one this thing one of the things I've done here is added two by sixes underneath it screwed those into the frame and then that's allowed me to basically lift it by just under two inches you can also often on Etsy find longer legs that screw into that standard fitting so by doing that I've put three legs on here and then that back corner actually sits on the wheel well so we removed the leg off of this couch that's allowed us to sort of adapt it to that space but we also removed the legs completely off of the ottoman added some casters and some old belts and so we actually have a pull-out ottoman the kids love this Bruce gets to sit on there sometimes it's just added space we can see when we bring the TV down which I'll show you in a minute here we can actually see two or three people there two or three people here kids can sit down here and we actually have like a movie night things like that tucks away out of sight you could use that for more storage Trish I just showed you that we have some storage baskets down there you have a beautiful thing about this couch which makes it perfect for tiny house living is that you can rearrange everything so these cushions are weighted they come off you can take them off completely and now that's a twin size bed so if somebody is sleep sleeping over and you don't want to empty out the lofts you can always do it that way you can also put these back on like that and then seat a few more people this way by opening up the seating space so it's really flexible which is perfect for sort of any sort of family life as well as tiny space this guy we also removed the back legs off of we have our router as well as I sort of record collection here but we also use this for storing computers and sunglasses I store watches in their general junk drawer and then we'll have I'll show you this later but with play kitchen so this sort of one piece of furniture does it all for us from plants to hiding Eilis toys underneath you stashed up down here to the vacuum under there sort of a one-piece does it all but again took the back legs off that sits on the wheel wells on that side so the record player here we've had this for a while we've got a cool mix here of my dad's old records as well as more modern stuff we also have good stuff for the kiddo like Raffy some classics and that's something that we definitely want to bring into the tiny house so we just sort of made the space for it rather than having a big setup we use for this Bang & Olufsen bluetooth speaker that we actually have adapted to work for the record player as well so that's something where again this speaker can go with this when we travel it can ride in the old Land Rover which doesn't have any speakers but it can also play our records off of it here so that goes out on the deck stays in here goes for trips all of that so as a bit of a nerd I like a lot of the smart home tech that's coming out we've tried integrating some of that in to our home as well it just makes things sort of easier and more functional for us so we've got a few different things that we'll talk about this is a smart speaker with Alexa built in so that's great for playing music listening to news but we've also added some smart sockets so that through the wall fan we can now control that by voice rather than having to go up and plug it in or out so we can say Alexa turn on the fan and you'll hear that fan kick on up there so that's something that's good for just moving air around we also this is a CLO breeze this is something I highly recommend for controlling the mini split these mini splits tend to just use a remote control by setting this up you actually have a readout here of the temperature and humidity and you can control it from here but it also makes it possible to set up scheduling so if you're concerned about you know how much energy you're using which is great for on the grid or off the grid you can set up program so that at 6:00 in the morning it comes on you know and heats up the downstairs before you come downstairs and then it shuts off at 8:00 and then it switches to AC in the afternoon time when you know that you're getting heating so that's something I highly recommend and that company has been fantastic their support and everything if you have any issues has been has been really exceptional we also have a Roomba vacuum down here which in a small space that seems kind of crazy but between the amount of foot traffic that you get in a small space it's all concentrated with the big yard we bring a lot of dirt and things like that in with the dog with aiyla you know there's always outs and rice and dog hair on the floor so having the Roomba that comes out on its own and then you can also control that and stop her and send her home using Alexa that's been fantastic and then with traveling it's nice if my mom or someone else needs to get into the house we have the art August smart clock again we can control that from our phone there's a hub that lives down here with the Wi-Fi router so we can open the door remotely but we can also actually see if the doors been opened while we're gone or if we left it open and so that's something when your homes on wheels it's nice to be able to check in and make sure that you locked things up and we also have the keypad on the outside so we could send somebody a code to let them in that's great as we think about you know years down the road if we transition our home to a Airbnb or something like that or a guesthouse we actually have a way of letting people in remotely so that's something that we really enjoyed about the way that the house is set up right now so this is our cubic mini wood stove I talked about a little bit outside the AC mini split and we have heat from that we also have some electric heat in the bathroom we like our heating and cooling options we wanted this for ambience but obviously having a toddler not wanting to give up floor space we wanted to get creative cubic actually offers this wall-mounted heat shield vent as an option so we did that and said let's put it up above the couch that way even when she's standing up here she can't actually reach out there and touch it yet has a little storage drawer underneath this is the Grizzly which is the larger of the stove models large is all relative here as you can see about the biggest that it would take is one of these like six-inch logs this is some kiln dried stuff from Lowe's it's really great smells good lights up really easily one of those logs is enough to heat the house to about 80 degrees in here that'll burn through in like thirty minutes or so so we'll use it in wintertime but we always have to be ready to open doors and windows because it gets pretty hot in here alright so continuing on from the Kubik mini wood stove this is the interior unit for our HVAC the mini split and so that's a wall-mounted unit these things are amazing and bigger houses you often see them with different zones in the tiny house you really only need one so that things off most of the time we can control it from the remote or we've got it set up now to work up from our phones and that does D humidifying it does air conditioning and it does heating as well as a few other functions else around it as a fan so that really effectively cools the space down the one sort of challenge that we've had is we use our master loft both for us as well as for our two and a half year old and so we wanted to be able to fully enclose the loft to keep her safe but also to give us personal time when she's in bed at night or during nap time and so that does mean that the loft gets a little bit hot and stuffy so one of the things that we've done we'll show you this later is we've added a through the wall fan up into that space so that helps you either pool cool air in or we can flip it around or in the summertime and actually pump the hot air back out so the mini-split can deal with that that's a challenge we've sort of had to overcome but the priority has been safety in sort of private space which can be hard to find in a tiny house this is something when we were designed the tiny house we knew that we wanted a ceiling fan a lot of the the tiny house options that you typically see are the really funny small looking fan blades it makes sense for a small space but they also when you walk in can be wow that's a really weird looking fan it's so small so this is sort of an intermediate this is the hunter vault ceiling fan this is in the black-on-black setup they also have a really nice bronze cage that you can do we have a wall-mounted switch over here so we've added the light kit to it so that has a dimmable LED really efficient power use there it also has you know different fan speeds here we can switch this around for the wintertime to actually blow the warm air down which again just helps with the efficacy of hitting and cooling that you can see it doesn't overpower the space when we do have the loft up here to get to our storage space you still have plenty of clearance but also you have like the added benefit of feeling like you have this cage around it so you're not ever gonna get to be touched by the blades so it works really well in the space hunter has been great to deal with and it's just a beautiful fan I think that really works well and complements the other fixtures that we have in here so over here above like this sort of media console we have sort of our our junk shelf right so we hierarchies here while it's all that kind of stuff but we also use this as sort of like a media hub so there's a hole here that actually goes up to the TV and gives access down here for like blu-ray player and some some tech we could also have run a cable in if you're ever in like an RV park or something we have the jack outside there so you could run utilities in that way but we mounted our TV up here Trisha told me when we decide that we're going to go tiny that I could keep the big TV if I could figure out a way that it was not in plain sight all the time so we came up with this wall mount that's tied into a stud here but if you're down here in the kitchen doing dishes you can always swing that around that way but obviously when we're over here having family time it pivots this way and so from this way in a sitting in the Nook sitting on the couch you have a good angle there so it's really nice to have a you know 50-inch TV like this I can then get out of easily and sort of very lightly move out of the way so that's been fantastic we've only been in the one spot I think the thing that I would do is you can see there actually some hooks up there those are for securing the fan and so I'd probably do something similar to that had additional hooks were to just bring it down to take some weight off of it thoughts are pretty easy to pull down you can just take one pin out and pull it off the wall so moving over to the kitchen and we have a really great open space we have the whole back area here and then this l-shape and we use this mainly for eating but our daughter I'll also use it for painting just doing lots of playing up here so we have the two chairs here a booster seat now for our daughter in here and this pulls all the way out pulls out even further than that so we can eat here and then we also recently mounted this roll of paper so that we can pull that out and I'll I can color and draw in there super easy way to get her set up and be able to do whatever she wants there and then we also just added this leaf and we have a couple stools here so that we can all sit and eat together here and then also have a guest come and eat with us too and be able to sit down and all sit at the counter together so we love the setup of this kitchen we feel like I mean we have more space in this kitchen for you know prepping meals for eating together than we did in our apartment in Boston so that is a major plus and just the way that things are laid out in the kitchen is a lot more functional than in an apartment or at least our apartment so and then the storage we have a ton more storage in here than we did in our apartment so storage wise we have a big cabinet here that actually goes all the way through so we have you know just general kitchen linens here and then also our instant pot is stored down here which we actually use quite a bit and then the other side we have a bunch of art supplies for our daughter so this space is huge it stores a lot of stuff silverware and then a big cabinet underneath the sink here that has garbage recycling and then lots of cleaning supplies and we have locks on the inside of all of these so that our daughter doesn't get in them but then whenever we do move the tiny house they'll be secured that way and then we have a huge closet here we have a large closet bar in the back there so we have a lot of clothes hanging there and then jackets and then a ton of hooks here just for jackets that were currently using bags that we're using grocery bags that sort of thing so there's tons of stuff stored in there we also have a vacuum that's mounted in here that's charging in there and it's tucked away so if we can grab it whenever we need it so this is a Revati sink and it's huge we when we moved in our daughter was still a baby so we were still giving her seeing theft so we wanted something big for that and also just because it's nice to have a big sink to throw a bunch of dishes in and be able to you know wash them or leave them and not see them for a little while so yeah we love the sink there's sort of drain dish here we've just stuck our Boone thing in here for drying other kids stuff and then there's also a cutting board that goes on top here so this is really like a multifunctional sink and has worked really well for us the sink is amazing it you know comes out of here and can kind of go everywhere water wise you saw that a camco filter outside and then we also have an under sink filter water filter and so the the water water filter doesn't actually limit our on-demand water heater so it only is working when we're using cold water so it's been great because now we can you know have safe drinking water out of this faucet as well as it just being you know our go-to kitchen sink faucet so this is their fruit basket is from Amazon and everyone always comments on it because it just looks lovely and it holds so much and it's up and out of the way not taking up counter space so yeah we love that we compost in the kitchen we collect all of our scraps and then we have a large screen waste bin that gets collected yeah if we it's a great way of kind of reducing waste and that sort of thing the dishwasher is small but mighty it works really well for us as a family of three we can fit in a day maybe even two days worth of dishes so yeah it's really all we need it's efficient it works really well and the only downside is that large dinner plates don't fit in it so we wash those by hand but that's not an issue really it works great for us more storage we have all of these drawers down on the bottom that all pull out and just have so much space so down here we have all of the pots and pans that we need we really kind of edited down the pots and pans that we had when we moved in and kind of replace them more frequently because they get a lot more where but they work great for us Dickinson Mediterranean stove so it's made for boats I think it has three burners and this cutting board covers up the burners which is amazing so again multi-purpose space we use this cutting board all the time and we also use the burners all the time we just lift it up and move it over here so if we have a large burner and then two smaller ones we haven't actually fit three things on the on the stove at the same time but doing two is really all we've needed so it's worked great for us the oven is okay it's not the greatest oven I mean it'll cook things but it's not great for baking I've learned but I don't think the temperature is accurate and it's just uneven and it kind of burned things on the on the bottom before it's cooked through something we've talked about is adding a pizza stone or something to dissipate the heat a little more and just more evenly cook things this is another great built-in that trueform did for us which is lovely spice rack so these store all of our spices and they're tucked away and very neatly organized which I appreciate and then another end on the bottom for cooking oils and things like that yeah as far as the overall setup of the kitchen I feel like it flows really well there's plenty of workspace I can throw things right into the sink or the dishwasher when I'm prepping meals or cleaning up so yeah it just works really well for us we also have a coffee bar over here that Andy will talk a little bit more about because that is his favorite part of the house I think all right so one of the big deviations that we did from a typical Kootenai trueform design or layout is typically I think on their model the front door would be here so you would enter in and like the refrigerator would maybe be on this side with the pantry here we really wanted a coffee bar which is turned into like a beverage bar and so we did the French doors down there and then that gave us this extra counter space here which we really love you get a lot of light coming in through over the stairs we have our espresso machine here as well as like our chem X and our pour over stovetop espresso our arrow press we've got basically everything that you could need to make a good cup of coffee in here and then we also realized that we were consuming way too much sparkling water has a lot of people do and we felt bad about the the volume of cans and cardboard that we were going through so we actually added just a secondhand SodaStream here and we really love this thing and by getting like the nicer KitchenAid just housing it sort of blends in with the other things that we have and then obviously our blender as well the microwave we try not to use it too much with a kid that's sort of impossible so actually they're just stuck that down below we have this nice little Breville microwave and then we also have a lot of booze and other things storage down here so this is our coffee bar slash full bar so scotch wine all that good stuff down there and then again we've tried to prioritize low drawer spaces for our daughter so she has things down here that she can get to herself when she wants a cup or a bowl for snacks and then also of course her her fridge magnets and chopped the door over here hang out down here this is just like a pretty low cost energy star rated Magic Chef refrigerator this was one of the standard refrigerator options from trueform you can also do sort of like a propane or a dual powered if you're gonna be off-grid or traveling quite a bit for us being plugged in this works really well the thing that I love about it which I feel like more refrigerators should be in tiny houses having the freezer on the bottom so it's really nice working height to get into the refrigerator and I got your beer storage that kind of stuff so this works really well good size for a family of three living in a house like this and then the freezer space down below and then obviously again these big toe-kick storage underneath here which left a massive drawer and then you still have usable space up here so we have like our our waffle maker and our large Dutch oven as well as like big serving bowls and things like that so again just storage storage storage everywhere and then from here we we flow on into the bathroom which Tricia is going to talk about so this is the bathroom it's five feet we have a large shower on this side the shower itself is beautiful but we also wanted a tub for our daughter and so we actually just got a stock tank and have painted it a little bit with I think marine grade paint or something like that and it works great for us we have it sitting on some teak tiles so it's kind of lift it up a little bit and it then isn't ruining our nice tile underneath of there so you know at some point we'll kind of be done with the tub so we can take it out and just have our nice shower again we put in some towel racks up top here so that our towels are stored sort of out of the way but are obviously easy to grab when we're getting out of the shower we have the separate composting toilet it works fine for us it definitely is less smelly than we expected it to be I think urines been the grossest thing even though it does divert it into our gray water it's still because it's a plastic toilet we clean it all the time but it still just tends to smell sometimes which is kind of something that we have tried to been figure out figure out with supper rat they've made some suggestions as to kind of improve that and it wasn't until the last couple months that we really noticed it so something that we've added to just rinse urine down is we've repurposed our diaper sprayer here and this is something we used when we were at cloth diapering and it's just basically a little nozzle and just rinse the water down here and down so that definitely has helped prevent that buildup of of smell we take this solid waste out usually every week we is just something that we like to get out of the house and so that's what we do we also have our daughter's a little potty here which will live there for a bit longer the separate does come with a kid seat but we just haven't transitioned to that yet so she's still using her tiny potty so something that's great about how our builders trueform designed the bathroom is they actually added a water hookup even though we wanted a composting toilet so if down the road we do want a flushing toilet we can just add that right in and that's what we've added the the diaper sprayer into right now down below we have the water heater is down there and then there's a propane detector kind of right tucked behind the little potty chair we have a great storage cabinet here lots of cleaning supplies we also store some clothes under there the sink is not my favorite thing it's because it's so tall and I'm so short it's not not functional and then also for our daughter we have to pick her up to wash her hands a nice tool would just be in the way and she still wouldn't be able to reach the sink at this point so that's something that I would have changed about the bathroom I think we've talked about different ways of reconfiguring the bathroom but just haven't decided to actually do anything like that we have a washer/dryer combo LG and it's worked really well for us it takes a long time to wash and dry but it's been pretty great we tend to do a load of day and sometimes things stack up if we don't but it's really been pretty efficient during the summer we also will line dry things to kind of save some energy and it actually drives thing fat dries things faster line drying them on the back side of this door there's a full-length mirror and that's the only spot in the house where we were able to fit that so it's nice that that tucks away and then on the front side of the store we've added some chalkboard wallpaper so this is a space that our daughter can use to play but again just tucks away so that you know we don't have to look at it all the time and it's just really easy to to move in and out so her chalk is right here so she can just kind of come and do this whenever she wants and then she also has a bunch of magnets here so this is a nice little corner that she can use when she wants to but again we can just kind of tuck everything away and then it becomes our space again or everyone's space and then she also down here has a large drawer of toys that she has always been able to access but holds a lot lots of blocks and great toys and we kind of rotate things out it's a little bit messy right now but it's just so nice that she can get to the toys and then also is able to clean them up herself well something that we're working on but is tucked away so that they're just not sitting out so one of the things that Tricia has sort of pointed out with a few of these things in the kitchen area that sort of fits with our broader parenting philosophy that would be true even if we were in a larger house is giving our daughter Eilis spaces that are hers but also that don't take over the entire living space that's really important when you're in a tiny space where once the kid goes to sleep or if you're having people over you still want to look like your home as well are the high double spaces so like the high double chalkboard or having you know magnets that are hers that she can play on the fridge but then go away wouldn't want them to go away and same for the chalk we've done the same sort of thing with this space with her play kitchen and with these drawers so again she has you know this space in here high quality wood toys that if they are out we still like the way that they look and they're less likely to make noise which when you don't have a dedicated playroom it's nice not to have things that are beeping and making sounds constantly so that's something that we've tried to give her spaces but also maintain sort of ownership of the space with like our design elements and things like that and so we have a lot of storage here in the stairs including her space but also our own things so like from you know hidden baskets and things like that there's a ton of storage here as well as a closet that Tricia will cover and then we asked trueform to close this space in for us but we started a little bit of modifying ourselves to make it kid-friendly so we've added sort of these open spaces here these bars to let light and air move through but also make it so that she couldn't fall through onto the coffee bar and then up here we asked for a square loft because we're living in a place that doesn't have a lot of snowfall or anything like that we actually maximize head space so we have four foot of head space up here as opposed to the other loft which you'll see has this peaked roof which only gives you about two and a half foot of head space in the corners this is a king sized bed turned sideways we're both short so we can still all get in here but still have plenty of room we've got some large windows on the side and blackout blinds there as well as a smaller window at the head of the bed this has been an area that we've really adapted a lot even though we've always had aisle us since we've been in this house when we first moved in we had some built-in shelves over there and then sort of nook of this area and we just didn't like the way the baskets looked so we got rid of those shelves and we found this dresser on Craigslist and sort of modified that to fit our style and that actually fits perfectly in that space so we lived with it for a while like that which was super functional and at that point ila was still Co sleeping with us and then once we decided we wanted to give her her own space we actually turned it this way and used it as a room divider for a while and put this sweet little toddler bed into that space for her and then we decided was just a little bit easier to use if we put it this way so we've moved this around three or four different ways now and so it's nice that you can be in a tiny space and you still can adapt and move things around and sort of play you know Tetris with your furniture like you do in a regular house which some people like Trisha and I we do that all the time anyways so you still have that flexibility but this is our sort of like family bedroom we have her in her own little area but she's still a pretty clingy little baby so she likes to come over and get with us in our bed at like you know 4 or 5 a.m. or so and so she has her own space but it can do that one of the things that we're trying to sort of introduce to sort of push that time later and later is in here there's a little light that turns green when it's okay for her to come over to bed so it's read and make sound at night that's a hatch it's what it's called and so we can turn that on at nap time or a bedtime and it glows and makes lights for her but she knows that she stays in bed until that turns green so that's something that we've added over there she sort of has the best spot in the house with this big Velux skylight right overhead so we can open that up this is great in the summer time for dumping heat out he gets trapped up here so we can push it out that way and then one of the things that I hadn't really seen a lot but I found I think on ebay from Europe is Velux actually offers these insect screens so that's something I don't see frequently enough over here but we can have this open in the summertime without letting all the bugs in and then when this is closed and at that time you can also this is one of the Velux blackout shades here so we can shut that down for nap time and close this space off and then we also hung a pocket door track here and cut down a full-size door and so we have a sliding door here that you can't quite open and then this other door closes so we can fully enclose the loft this is great for nap time with the blackout shades over there to give her a dark cozy place to sleep but it also means that at bedtime we can put her down and the we can actually still have you know grown-up time downstairs watching TV cleaning up after food have friends over that kind of thing this through the wall fan I talked about earlier that actually helps to move air in and out because it is so closed off up here and then we've also added some hunter desk fans over there that by putting in these windows we can create a cross bruise and really helps cool this base down so with the king-size bed that was something we got rid of the mattress that we have in moving cross-country because there was no way of getting it up here so we ordered a new one on Amazon that had good ratings one of the intentional decisions we made was going for a four-inch memory foam mattress it's delivered vacuum-sealed let us get it up here before we cut the bag open just by going from a fork from a you know 6 to 8 inch mattress down to a 4-inch you're actually gaining headspace so if you're worried about being in a loft by going down to that four inch mattress I still found it really comfortable Trisha thought it was a little too firm so we've added a two inch mattress topper it's easy enough to add one of those toppers but that's a simple way of gaining yourself inches of head space if you're worried about a loft space is by minimizing the mattress and then working back up if you need additional softness so the second loft we use mostly for storage at this point and it is something that we could turn into a bedroom for our daughter down the road we had a really nice letter that trueform designed for us but we wanted to use this space differently this is where the ladder was just leaning against the wall so we've stored that elsewhere and gotten a telescoping ladder instead you saw Andy pull it out where it was tucked away there and it comes out really easily and it's not super heavy so because we're only accessing the loft you know maybe once a week something like that we have just been using that we're now up in the storage loft and it's 5 feet deep and 8 feet wide and as you can see the ceiling is peaked here so it does take away some of the head space but it's worked great for storage so far we've gotten a bunch of bins and the stores just closed we're not using lots of kids stuff towels that kind of thing and obviously lots of clothes we have a ton of winter gear from living in Boston and we go to Tahoe occasionally so we just store all that stuff up here I think having this extra loft has it's been useful but it also has allowed us to hold on to things that maybe we don't need to hold on to so it's kind of a mixed blessing having this storage loft I think in the future it'll be a challenge to kind of sort through what we have up here and get rid of more stuff and then also kind of fun to see what we do with it next so one of the things that we thought we would do when we got the tiny house was build a big deck right because it's amazing you can double your livable space by having some outdoor area you know eight feet deep and thirty feet long boom you've doubled that space because of the sort of shared space we have here with my mom's house we didn't go that route we kept our porch small and part of that's because we have so much amazing outdoor space here my mom's house so Isla and her cousins get to play outside all the time with this big play structure we have sort of the shared garden space here we've also added a veggie garden over here Iowa is telling you that she loves birdy are old vintage land rover there that's her favorite feature of the whole yard I think but we also have worked along with my mom over here to make the shared space more livable so we added the big stock tank kiddie pool here so come summertime instead of having the plastic kiddie pools we put a footer set of water in here and the kids have a very durable but nice-looking play space we have the big shared outdoor space with the fire pit here we also do a lot of like dining alfresco so we have the big table here with the umbrella that we can bring out we also power house coming in here coincided with a lot of home renovations that my mom did so we sort of have been mutually beneficial there our house is plugged into her house with the 50 amp power you see that she has the solar panels we all like sort of this dark gray color so our houses really complement one another and we have sort of this you know communal courtyard like space here and then a big part of community is also keeping the neighbors happy that's always sort of a tricky thing with tiny houses they're not always on a percent legal depending on where you are so one of the things that we did was work with some of the existing neighbors here to actually build new fences and higher fences so even though we have a standard height fence along the front we've gone with an 8-foot fence with the lattice in the back and that gives some more privacy for us but it also sort of protects the neighbors from us all part of just keeping the neighbors happy so we're gonna start off talking about the deck here with trueform and this sort of style model of home the deck here is I believe 5 feet by 8 feet and that actually folds up into the space you'll notice up here by the French doors that it's recessed about six inches from the state width of the house that means for a transport the house actually folds up and latches in place it has adjustable legs to set the height on it now we lived with it like this with just the deck space for the first year and a half that we were here and then we finally in the last couple of weeks decided like let's sort of make it look nicer and so we've built these areas here to sort of hide underneath but also to give us more practical space the original plan here was to build a big planter box once we got it erected we realized hey you know what that's more storage so we've added these big storage lockers here we have like some outdoor carpets that we can roll out when we have friends over for picnics or play space as well as some sports equipment we have a few more of these under the house for seasonal things like boots and and other things we just don't want in the house so when we have people ask us about what's your tips for adding storage to a tiny house one of the things that people don't always think about is using under the deck or under the house storage space those vacuum-sealed bags big waterproof containers are perfect for getting things that you don't need often out of the way we part of the plan for this was to use these concrete blocks that are usually used for making raised planter beds or Gardens the beautiful things about this is when we want to move the house these things can actually just lift off and unstack and that makes this whole setup portable what that folded up the house can then move right out you'll notice oh we went one higher here one of the things that were probably going to do in a future project is stack these up over here and we can actually continue that wood around here as a skirt that's something that a lot of times just don't have a sort of nice skirts that blend in to hide underneath and so these add sort of an easy way of adding that and give it a sort of finished look it also keeps balls and pets and kids from going under the house which is nice this is just spray painted roofing material so we'll probably do a hybrid of the wood and the roofing to hide off the tires alright so over here this is sort of the business end of the tiny house as I call it we have our 212 pound propane tanks here that's cooking gas for our Dickinson Mediterranean stove and oven as well as heated water for our precision temp on-demand water heater we also have a bad here that runs some LEDs as part of our solar ready set up so if we ever wanted to go fully solar we actually have LED lights in the second power system set up for that this is where our separate composting toilet initially vented out it's pretty common for a lot of different builders not just ours to have their composting toilet venting right here the problem with that is like we have these northerly winds that then as pushing smell around so for as effective as the toilet is at keeping smells to a minimal inside the house and sort of defeats the purpose of its venting here below your window or you know up to the skylight and around to the front door so this was like a really easy addition that we did and anyone else can do getting the conversion pipe and then three inch PVC to then just vent this separate around to the back of the house so now I need sort of smells from toilet come this way you're still minimizing the number of 90-degree angles and the distance which keeps up the cubic foot per minute the airflow so that's an easy thing that a lot of people can do you'll also see right down here that's our 50 amp power cord and running along with it there's an Ethernet cable rather than just relying on Wi-Fi we picked up 100 foot long Ethernet cable we ran it off to modem in the main house and so we have our own independent router and Wi-Fi setup inside the house all right so our fresh water actually comes in right here our water heater sits just inside here under the bathroom vanity so that's fresh water in we also just have a garden hose running this way our wastewater comes out here unlike some tiny houses or rvs we don't have any black water the urine is separated in the composting toilet and then that mixes with water from our dishwasher clothing laundry machine our kitchen bathroom sink and our shower and bath and all of that comes into this so it's a gray water setup there's no need to empty RV tanks or anything like that and so to handle that wastewater what we did here was set up what's called a French drain or a grey water drain and so this is about four feet deep four by four so we have a lot of cubic area here the bottom of that is layered with hardwood charcoal that's just sort of untreated and then we layered some untreated mulch on top of that and then pea gravel on top just to make it easier to access we have these two buckets that are stacked on top of each other there and then I just use a simple pool filter drain bucket like that so it's it's a pretty in elegant the very simple sort of foolproof system this gets all of our waste water back down into the groundwater which you can see these citrus are actually like thriving and loving on we try to be pretty good about soaps that we use and things like that and what goes down the drain but it's also pretty easy to maintain given the the filter basket here you just get sort of food waste and things like that all right so we have a Lennox mini split ductless AC and heat pump in our house this is a pretty big luxury to have but we absolutely love it this is one of the things adding this at the time of the build you'll save thousands over adding it later we don't get crazy hot summers here but when it's 95 out or if it's humid it's awesome we'll just turn that thing on and it really effectively and efficiently heats and cools the house we use it during the summer mostly for a/c but during the the winter time it's great to just set that on to like 75 when you come down the morning and quickly warm the house and then you turn the thing off it's pretty quiet with the stands that we have under the house it minimizes the trailer wobble or the shaking that you feel we don't actually sleep at this end of the house so the noises and ever an issue for us it does have a dedicated breaker here so it's easy to shut that down if you ever wanted to or if you're like going off grid and you really want to minimize power you can you can avoid using that but for us it hasn't been an issue issue thanks for watching the tour of our tiny house it's funny because when we put the house here our plan was that we would find land within six months or so but really the situation that we've had here being close to my mom and watching that relationship with her and my daughter has been amazing so we sort of stayed longer than we planned but that's sort of like part of tiny living is adjusting the plan and making it work you know as we look forward our future holds probably a more traditional house but we'd love to keep this space as a guest house or potentially as an air B&B yeah we feel like we've developed a sort of commune with family and it's it's a little bit hard to picture leaving and what that would look like but um we are excited about the the prospect of moving to our own piece of land and but keeping the tiny house and using it as space for family and friends to visit and or potentially an air B&B - yeah you know for us the process of starting our Instagram which is three tiny hams was all about being a resource for other families and people that were thinking about going tiny as we started that process a year and a half ago now what two years ago with the planning it was hard to connect with other families that were doing it and we found a lot of really helpful people on Instagram and so being a part of that community you know we just want to say reach out to us anytime whether you're thinking about using true form or a different company or just questions about yeah you know living with kids in a small space yeah there are ways to make it happen so and we're happy to answer any questions or be a resource in any way so definitely reach out to us on Instagram we also have a Facebook page but we tend to use Instagram more it's a another thing so a craft that we've all taken up recently has been making ceramics living in a tiny house we don't have space for all the things that we're making like these mugs here or planters like this so you can check out at our Etsy store tiny house ceramics on Etsy and and buy some things that don't fit in our house and help us out links will be down below check out our Etsy store and our Instagram hit us up on either of those and reach out yeah love to talk to you [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 1,584,383

Keywords: tiny home, tiny house, tiny home on wheels, van life, camper van, shipping container, design, tiny houses, tiny homes, tiny house tour, family travel, minimalism, family tiny home, family tiny house, road trip, family road trip, nice tiny house, nice tiny home

Id: AzcUwDtZzwQ

Length: 46min 33sec (2793 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 10 2019