Family of 6 Living in a SHED Converted Into a Tiny Home & Homesteading

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Building and Living ''Different''..living Debt-Free..

In just two years, Kelly and Beau sold their house in the suburbs, bought 7 acres of raw land, started a permaculture homestead, and transformed a 16' x 48' shed into a beautiful and functional home where they live, work online, homeschool their kids, and run their growing homestead. Their goal is to be debt-free in their 30’s so they carefully spaced out each building project to avoid financing and stay out of debt.

In this video they’re going to give us a full tour of their shed to house project, including the spacious open-concept kitchen and living room, the kid's sleeping lofts, the single bathroom they have for all 6 humans in the house, and the outdoor laundry room, and they're also going to talk about the building process and why they chose to convert a shed into a house.

You can follow their adventure and see the whole shed to house project from the start here:

https://www.youtube.com/bettertogethe...

https://www.instagram.com/bettertoget...

And you can join their Shed to House group on Facebook here:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/86126...

Thanks for watching!

Mat & Danielle

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STAY IN TOUCH!

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Blog: www.exploringalternatives.ca

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/exploringalt...

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/exploringal...

LOVE LIFE LOUD AND CLEAR

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/allexcited69 📅︎︎ Jun 20 2020 🗫︎ replies

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hey everyone in this video we're meeting a family of six that's living in a shed in just two years Kelly and both sold their house in the suburbs but seven acres of raw land started a permaculture homestead and transformed a 16 by 48 foot shed into a beautiful functional home where they live work online homeschool their kids and run the farm their goal is to be debt-free in their 30s so they've spaced out each building project to avoid financing and stay out of debt in this video they're going to give us a full tour of their home talk about the building process and why they chose to convert a shed into a house so let's go meet up with them and find out more in the last two years we've sold our house in the Houston suburbs to move to Central Texas we took a shed and converted it into a home that we live in with our four children who are ages nine and under and the square footage was literally reduced by half so we went from 2,000 square feet to less than a thousand and we gained seven acres were really following some permaculture principles so that we can create everything from a food forest to raising our own animals our garden is now growing we'd like to be growing about 80% of our own food so those are our goals in the next few years to be debt-free in our 30s and be raising most of our food and our humans on the seven acres our shed the house adventure really started back whenever we first realized that our kids were so much happier outside and we just knew that we wanted to start this adventure of finding land and growing our own food and so we knew that we needed some kind of alternative different house to be able to live in I was just driving down the road and I saw this lot with these structures on there looked like these shed barns and then I went to go tour this lot and they actually finished them right and that allowed us to see the possibility that hey you can make us one of these structures amazing they bring the exterior of the house and drop it on your property so if you didn't have all the construction skills this gives you that jump start all right well show you our shed the house I think the kitchen is where most people spend a bulk of their time when they're at home so we designed this kind of around our family we went really easy route and just picked a floor plan out at IKEA that worked for us and in a small house with a big family I think the large appliances were really the way to go it saved us a lot of time and stress and we made it a 2 buck kitchen so like two people can stand in here and move either way even if the dishwasher is open project wise little pieces at a time have kept us on our goal to be debt-free in our 30s we didn't want to finance a whole house or even a whole kitchen so we put in the cabinet's first and then the countertops and finally this was like a life saver because once we had counters everything just piled up and open shelving was really cost-effective and really simple to install on our own it is a little bit dustier than normal but I figure if that's the worst thing that happens it's not so bad so we needed more storage and instead of just a kitchen table here with chairs we went ahead and made an island out of one cabinet from Home Depot it was so simple that it just made sense we could get it in quickly and then it would do the jobs that we needed it to do so this is a temporary top and then there'll be a leaf that comes up because right now we can fit for here when we flip up the leaf we'll be able to fit about four more people so everything from meals being prepared and just gathering around for a good conversation happens here or we turn that way everything from schooling to crafting to a lot of dance parties happen right here in this space I knew that we weren't going to want a TV but I knew that I wanted movies and so we came up with a plan to be able to have a projector and in the projector screen so this guy just pulls down it's super fun just to be able to all sit here we have four kids so six of us all fit in here and it's just a nice little cozy spot every week for movies one space we haven't designed yet is our office so this is a Secretary's desk it folds down it holds a lot of our school curriculum and then some little things that we use for our business and we just sit here and work kids go upstairs they play outside this is our mini office for now designing the space though we really took advantage of the height in the main area because it can feel very cramped when you have lofts so the lofts are on either side of the building and then wide open in the middle where our kitchen and living space is so we took shiplap to the ceiling and that way we could go through the trusses and still hit the peak of the ceiling and feel open and very airy if you have a boys loft and a girls love because yeah there's a whole lot of kids in here but the way we designed it was as simply as we could projecting how they would grow and what they'd be interested in so we built lofts with kind of like private space but no doors and they're kind of cool with that undecideds the girls loft and eventually this project will be complete there'll be a door on either side barn doors that slide and meet in the middle and they'll cover this whole opening space that way there's more privacy for the and it's a little bit quieter for us when they go to bed at night I've gotten a lot of flack for this bathroom and it's because it's so large it takes up a huge footprint in the house but it's our only bathroom for now we do have another one that's in the works right now this is our main bathroom for six humans I really feel like this is a good use of space we have a full-size tub the floor we tiled I did this all by myself according frankly I'll say it could have been worse sinks my favorite it's from Ikea and I love it because it's got these double faucets the cabinet is really wide also I wanted as many pocket doors as we could have in this house because they're great space savers and they make your house feel like there's more space than if you have something that's cutting off half of your walkway every time you try to open it not everybody gets a closet in a small home but we needed one because this is the only closet in the house for all of us so winter clothes go in here this was key to storage and keeping things out of the elements off the porches another thing that we learned moving into a small space was that storage was critical so yes we had the closet but we figured that bed frames were a huge waste of space once we found this bed frame that is designed to just hold your mattress and then huge space underneath for storage so it is a bed frame without a box-spring so yeah we have 17 inches here like you can fit a full-sized bin right here I I get really excited talking about this bed for and it's comfy like we never notice anything different and you can just get these things online it's they're not hard to find so a lot of people ask us how do we heat in cool our shed to house it is with four of these mr. cool units we also have spray foam insulation in here even with our big overhang front and back porches once you hit a hundred and one degrees in the summer it's gonna get hot a lot of people ask why aren't why do to have solar why are you not off-grid it's slightly different here in Texas it's so hot here and electricity is really really cheap at the moment it's not cost-efficient to have solar yet so we chose to put our laundry room on our back deck and this is it right here it's actually bigger than our laundry room was in suburbia building it on the back deck was the best choice because inside it's like precious square footage and it still works great like we just come out we do our laundry out kind of like if you had it in the garage here is our 5,000 gallons of rainwater catchment and these tanks are full we just now put these in in February of 2020 of this year and they're already full with the spring ring they're not piped into our house at the moment I think maybe someday we might think of doing that but right now we're using it for our garden and for our animals and it just feels good to have that much like emergency water if we ever needed it and we're going into our second summer and we know just how dry it gets this is like peace of mind feeling really prepared and grateful that we had this time to get that much water stored up we really did not have any troubles with building codes municipalities because we did the work before we bought the property I was on the phone with the county with the city everything and then for our County it doesn't have any building codes and a lot of people say how do you mind that County you're just gonna have to pick up the phone and start calling for the areas that you're looking for we did have to have a permit for our septic but that's very common our end goal was to live in a house that was comfortable and to be debt-free in our 30s so it made shed to house a really simple decision and yet there are a lot of things that are very costly in in building on raw land so this included our choice for septic our choice to be on grid with electric and co-op water our choice to have very large decks so yes all of these things do add up and they are costly however even after two years we're spending less living here in our converted shed than we were in the suburbs it's the finishing out that is going to separate whether someone thinks that it is expensive or cheaper you're gonna save money if you do it yourself we averaged out our cost to be able to have a cheaper house without a mortgage on this actual house by slowing down the project there are a few things that we would do differently if we had to do them again my number one would be have a better foundation for the house right now we're just some blocks and it's okay but it would have made me feel a little bit better if we had real Piron beams being web-based for our income makes a big difference in our life and our ability to live here without fear of how quickly do we produce things for sale and feeling overwhelmed because I would feel as a mom of four small kids overwhelmed really easily if we had moved to raw property like we did and from the ground up have to produce Market Garden right away the idea of making money off the property is certainly there it'll just be further down the line probably in the next five years we'll be creating some sort of income that profits I did want to be able to help people out so whenever we started the Facebook group shed to house we also started documenting everything on our YouTube channels you see everything of us getting rabbits of us you know trying to grow a garden of us having our fourth child building this shed like building everything it's nice to be able to have those videos to look back and like wow look how much we've accomplished if you could tick off every box the shed to house just made sense so it was the it was the decision that kind of shook us for a little while like are we really gonna live in a shed and then we took the leap and now it's one of the best decisions we've ever made [Music] you can follow Bo and Kelly on YouTube at better together life I'll link to it in the description below also be sure to subscribe to exploring alternatives and check out our playlists for more stories like this thanks for watching

Info

Channel: Exploring Alternatives

Views: 852,496

Rating: 4.919867 out of 5

Keywords: shed to house, shed, house, barn, living, lifestyle, family, homeschool, homestead, alternative, home, exploring, alternatives, better together life, converting, conversion, build, interior, design, tour, full, rainwater, collection, permaculture, living off the land, land, raw, Texas, micro, documentary, tiny, new, experience, start, finish, minimalist, minimalism, family of 6, kids, children, debt, free, debt free, downsizing, working, online, decks, loft, sleeping, story, mortgage, no mortgage, tiny home, tiny house, homesteading

Id: 362b4gPNbF0

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Length: 13min 52sec (832 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 20 2020