In this week's video, we're going to visit one of the largest
and best tiny house communities that I've ever seen. The owner is going to take us on a tour
of the community and explain why he focused on creating shared spaces. Finally, we're going to step inside one of the
beautiful renovated vintage trailers that they have onsite for nightly
rentals. So let's take a tour. I am Josh. I'm the owner
of tiny tranquility. We're a tiny home community
on the Oregon coast. We've got 43 sites, 35 of which I think are occupied
currently by tiny homes. Mostly people living here in the park. We do have a handful of folks who are
essentially using their tiny home as a beach house. And we also have 10 nightly rentals
and then sprinkled in between the tiny homes. We've got several
vintage trailers as well. I decided on the park
here in Walport Oregon, which is on the central Oregon
coast. It wasn't an accident. I had been coming down to this stretch
of the coast for a number of years with my family, and just really have always
been in love with the natural beauty of, of this stretch of the coast property where the park is located now was the
site of a nursery a large commercial and retail nursery that was
in business for decades. And unfortunately went out of
business during the last downturn. So in 2012 and really just
started falling apart for the next four years or so until I bought
it from the bank in 2016, when I bought the property, I honestly didn't know what
I was going to do with it. I just thought that it would
be a great site for something. And I kicked around a
bunch of other crazy ideas, maybe even crazier than
the tiny home park idea. Before I decided that this is
really what I wanted to do, that I wanted to create a community here to create the tiny home park. It was
almost like a complete redo. I mean, I did repurpose a couple of the
buildings, but in terms of the site, none of the infrastructure was usable.
So we had to completely scrape you know, in some cases, two,
three feet off of the site, um, to, to create the park, put
in all the infrastructure,
the power of the water, uh, the septic system, I've got a fairly massive septic
system with an acre of drainfield. But even before the development period, there was about a year of the planning
phase where I had to go through a very lengthy process with the
planning department in
Lincoln County to get them to approve the park. I would never say that was an easy
process because as I'm sure a lot of tiny home folks have experienced the local
planners really don't know what to do with tiny homes. Don't know what to make
of them. You know, are they RVs? Are they homes did the
building codes apply? And so there was plenty of occasions
along this journey where I didn't think it was going to happen. Cause there was a bunch of
derailers along the way. And we had to navigate
our way through those. Basically this is approved by
the County and is an RV park. So all the tiny homes here have to be
on wheels and they've got to be built in conformance with nationally
recognized RV standards In sort of traditional RV parks. I mean,
and of course there's a whole spectrum. There's some real nice ones and
there's some ones that aren't so nice, but in a lot of them, the RVs
are very close to each other. And so when we conceptualize
the park and design the park, instead of sort of packing them in, we wanted to give each site more
space than you might find in sort of a traditional RV park. The whole idea. When the park was conceptualized, was
that if you're going to be in a tiny home, it'd be really nice to
have some other spaces, some other areas within the park
where you could stretch your legs, get together with people and really just
have some shared space that was much bigger than the space you
might have in your tiny home. This is our greenhouse whole bunch
of different stuff going on in here. Cause it is a 12,000 square foot space.
Actually, when we got in the park, this was about a 40,000 square foot
greenhouse. Cause again, it was a, it was a nursery in its prior life. So we contracted it down to
about 12,000 square feet. So you can see we've got a mail slot and
this is where their packaged deliveries come. You've also got a little giveaway
table that just sort of started up organically. So people, people, uh, the stuff which is they're downsizing
and wanting to get rid of stuff, it goes to the giveaway table first
over here, we've got our community bikes, just this past spring. We put in some fitness equipment
for use both by the residents, the folks who were living here, as well as our nightly guess we're renting
this space out to a glassblower. Um, so, uh, he's just putting
a shop together and uh, hopefully within the next month or two
he'll actually start blowing glass and we you know, we've talked about him displaying
his work throughout the park as well. I'm hoping that he maybe has classes
and stuff like that for people in the community. And, um, you
know, I think we've been, I've been kind of selective
about who's gonna come in here. It's gotta be something that
really fits with the community, some formal storage for the
folks who are living here. So if they've downsized
for a much bigger space, but still need a spot to store some stuff, either in the short term or long term,
then we've got that available for them. This is our community garden
and where Helen Denton, who really has done everything in here,
I wish I could take credit for, for it, but I can't. She's really made
this a, this garden space, a really awesome space for our,
our nightly guests and, and, and the folks living here, Helen has her micro greens business. You can see some of the trays over
there called little Swiss farms. She's been here since we
first opened in July of 2018. And basically, you know, people want to come here and grab some
collard greens or some or whatever. Um, we do, um, ask that they contribute
or volunteer in the garden or, um, or make a voluntary donation,
which we then put back into the garden. So this is our Doug for lodge. This was
a, a storage building for the nursery. When we took over the property, the
roof had collapsed in really, uh, we had to completely revamp the building.
So we did a bunch of structural work. We put in three new trusses.
Again, this is another, I call it the shared living
room. You can see here, we've got a wood burning stove
with a nice seating area, People living here, and actually the nightly guests
have access to free laundry in here. You got a TV room in here. Um, again, some people don't have a
TV within their tiny home, so we wanted to give them the opportunity.
If they have a, a game or a show, they have to, they feel
they have to watch them. They do have an opportunity to do that
within, within a shared common space, ping pong, pool table, again,
available to everybody, a lot of games. And then we've got a little
library area over here. So we've got folks who live here,
contributing their own books to that. Uh, I got a bunch of boxes out of my
own attic. Um, and again, just a, a space where people can, can grab a
book, take it for a couple of weeks, bring it back, contribute their own books. So then this is our outdoor
space. During the summer, we typically have some
more seating out here. This is where we get together
for community-wide potlucks. We have two grills that everybody can
use a lot of nice big trees and just a nice space to come out when the, when the
weather's nice and just relax and eat, get together with friends and family So this is our Redwood commons. I wanted to have a building
that had some ocean views. Some people in their tiny homes
don't have an oven as an example, to be able to cook a Turkey or
something like that on Thanksgiving. And so we have a fully stocked kitchen
up there that anybody in the community or nightly rendered guests. This is the area in tiny tranquility, where we have most of our nightly rentals
we've we wanted to congregate them together and put them close to
some of our common facilities. So they're right next
to our Redwood commons, about a five minute walk
to the beach, you know, we're up to about 35 tiny homes here,
and there's a few that are the same, but by and large, they're all different.
And I think you'll see that within our, within our nightly rentals as well.
This one here we call the driftwood. The shingles on that tiny home
came off an old Masonic lodge, and then we have some newer, tiny
homes as well. Just a good, I think, a good representation of what you
might see within the tiny home realm, if you will. So we've got a combination of tiny
homes and then three vintage trailers. It's sort of a weird combination that
you probably don't see very often, but, uh, that was really just on me. I
really like old vintage trailers. I think aesthetically they're much more
beautiful than, than the newer ones, no criticism of the newer ones,
but I just liked the old ones. My name is Katie Wiley and I am
one of the owners of stagecoach. And we are in the dunes, which is a 1975 Airstream located
right here at tiny tranquility park. It is available for
nightly rental and Airbnb. So we started renovating trailers
many, many years ago, just for fun. But we had done enough that we actually
decided that maybe we should do this for a living. So we got our dealers license to
buy and sell vintage trailers. The owner of tiny tranquility
actually called us. And he said, I'm developing a park. Could
you do my trailers for the park? We couldn't believe it. It was just
days in from starting our business. And the rest is history. Here
we are now. So altogether, there are four stagecoach trailers here. We saw someone putting a for sale
sign on this beautiful Airstream, right across the street from our house.
And it said $1,000, we thought, no way, that's not right, but I made my
husband turn around and sure enough, they were duct taping aside to the
exterior of this beautiful trailer. And it said a thousand dollars. So we swooped in and
grabbed it that very moment. And here it is at tiny tranquility, it was really important that we had a
face that anyone could fill it home in to make breakfast, lunch dinner. So we
have a three burner stove, a sink, large enough to do
dishes for pots and pans, plenty of storage space. We also transformed this area in to a twin bed. It's a custom mattress, but we wanted to create a space
that could double as a sofa area. So you could put the pillows
back here, have a seat, watch TV. If you are a family staying in here, there's an extra bed
for a guest or children, as well as the main bed upfront on this side of the 1975 Airstream. We have a large bar top that
can double as a workspace, whether you're here for vacation or
for work, there's plenty of room. And we also have a Sandy colored laminate
flooring that we wanted to put in here to mimic the Sandy
tones of the Oregon coast. We have really fun maps
here of our town of Waldport that have been burned to
look like old treasure maps, just some fun coastal touches throughout. Let me show you the bathroom
here in the back back here, we have a full tile shower
with beautiful hexagon tiles. We have a flushing toilet and
a beautiful tiny pedestal sink upfront here. We have the bedroom area and one
of the only original features of this vintage trailer, because
it was in such poor condition. When we bought it is this
beautiful clock area, which is iconic to all Airstreams. You know, initially we had people and still have
people coming here from all over the country. Many of whom had never lived
in a tiny home before. And so I think, you know, it's evolved quite
a bit in terms of the, uh, just the community coming together. I'd say that's not something that I'd
necessarily put a lot of thought into when I was planning the park. I was so
focused on getting the park done. I didn't necessarily think about, okay, what's the playbook for trying to make
this a living, breathing community. I just sort of assumed and hoped
that it would happen organically. And I think initially it, that sort
of happened in fits and starts. But now I really feel as
though it's coming together, like the community that I
had envisioned it would, You know, I've also thought
about doing a second park. I don't have any particular
plans at this point, but I have looked at a few properties.
It seems as though there's, there's really quite a demand
for parks of this type. I think if they're done right, I mean, there's plenty of people who want to be
by themselves in their own tiny home, but there's also, I think a lot of people who
like the safety and comfort
of having some neighbors and enjoying that community peace as well. Tune in next week as we come back to
tiny tranquility to take a tour of one residence, unique, tiny home, also make sure to like share and
subscribe and I'll see you guys next week.
