To most people choosing to live in a
tiny house might sound like choosing a life full of compromise.
But in today's video, you're going to meet one couple who
found a way to fit every luxury that they enjoyed in their 5,000 square foot, former home into a high
end tiny house on wheels. Are you guys ready? Because I guarantee
you this tour is going to blow you away. Hi, I'm Julia and I'm Robert
and we are tiny living, living large. Watching on one of the channels,
the tiny homes. And we were like, we looked at each other and
we said, we can do this. Yeah, we certainly can do this. We thought, what if we built our own
tiny home and we would be able to stay in one
place for a month and get a sense of the community. And
so that's how the idea started. We took a tiny home building class
that sort of also validated that there was nothing there
that we couldn't do. But we also learned some
of the fundamentals, the
fact that, you know, Hey, you're building a house, that's going to
go down the road. What does that mean? The previous home that we lived
in was over 5,000 square feet. We enjoyed it thoroughly. I mean, people would say
you went from 5,000 to 300. Maybe that doesn't even make
sense, but again has not been, it's not been difficult at all There definitely were people
that were questioning the motives of why would you do this? And it
almost to them was a downgrade. Why do you have to do that? And
they couldn't see the benefit of it. They only saw the negatives of going
from large to small it's just because we want to go tiny because we want to
live more of that sort of lifestyle and being on the road and so forth.
Why would we have to compromise it? And I think that was one of the key
reasons we chose to do a tiny house versus maybe some of the alternatives. Yes.
This tiny home is on the upper end, but there's absolutely,
there's no compromise. Makes a difference from a
sustainability perspective. There isn't the waste
that we have found in our larger home with this smaller
space makes us feel better that our footprint isn't
so huge and extravagant. The question we often get is
what's the cost of this tiny home, because we have so much in it. It's also hard to compare because
we didn't have it built for us. We built it ourselves. You know, you can't count the labor and the
sweat and equity. If you will, that we put in and you
know, a material cost, we are probably somewhere
just North of $125,000 from a tiny home. It's a lot, there's This is a high end, tiny house people that perhaps
we sort of associate with, which are sort of the
empty nesters, if you will. And on the road that have now worked
and so forth, that want to move in. This is quite affordable. Welcome to the interior of our tiny home. When we started thinking
about the design of this home, we wanted a lot of space to entertain. My favorite part is the kitchen. One of the features I love in
this kitchen is my baking station. I have a tiny mixer. And so this comes very handy when
I am doing my gluten free bagels, my gluten free cakes. Love it. Another feature that I absolutely
love is my coffee station. We have an expresso machine
the glasses here, the cups, and then I also have my toaster. Another feature is the
refrigerator, plenty of space, more space than actually we need, but always good to have another feature
that we didn't want to give up on the dishwasher. Lots of
room in the dishwasher. It's a full size one
because we wanted to host. We wanted to make sure that all
of our appliances were full size. So the refrigerator is full-size. The dishwasher is full size. Our stove is also
full-sized four burners. But since I love to host, I felt that there was a lot
that I can do with four burners, the pot filler, I consider it a necessity. So we did put a pot filler in here. The steam oven is also a great feature. We bake breads in there and
it's artisan breads comes out. Absolutely perfect. The
timing for dinners is great. Since I love to cook, I
had to the spice rack, a sliding spice rack. Another feature that we
designed primarily for myself is this sliding ladder.
It's nice and slim. And I just take it out
and use it to reach the pantry. So our fan is actually quite
powerful just because we didn't want the smells of cooking to
be absorbed by the interior, the tiled back splash. We get a lot of questions with regards
to that because we're mobile and we didn't want the grout to crack. So we took a lot of care into researching. It's a flexible grout that when
we're moving, it doesn't crack. So our tiny stove, you notice
it right when you walk in, it has a oven. I do a lot of pizzas and breads in here. It keeps this tiny house,
very warm, very cozy, works great. We love it. And thinking about a
fan for the tiny house, we knew that we wanted
the air to circulate. I just didn't want a very loud fan. We purchased this fan is actually
very quiet, does a great job. And it looks good. I'm especially proud of this
shower because I built it myself. I knew that we wanted to
go with a tile of sorts. However, the typical tile weighs a lot and the mother of Pearl is very, very light. So one of the features in the
tiny home that was a must for me, was a toilet room. And it works wonderfully
because it has its own separate space has doors that close for discreteness. And it is a nature's head. We've been using it for about
a month now, no issues at all. It's been working very, very well.
We have storage in the ceiling, which is more storage than we ever
need, but it's always nice to have in terms of the washer and dryer, it is a Mila very energy
efficient let's head up onto the bedroom. I thought at first that it
would feel claustrophobic here, but actually it doesn't.
There's plenty of space. It's a queen size bed. We have lots of storage for clothes. We have storage on the floor and then we also wanted
windows on both sides so that there's air ventilation
very important to get a very well rested sleep. One of the things that was key in our
design was to have office space for us to both be working this year is my
working space at a standard stand up a working space.I just pull
this out of the base if you will. I have my mouse, I have my keyboard below. And then I used a screen
for my daily work. This is also then use for
a TV in the lounge area so we can move it to the side. It
will go up and it'll spin around. And then we will have the ability to
watch movies or other things upstairs as well. Below here, we have the drawers for the wine. And then on the other side, similarly, we have the drawers for the glasses. I will take this table.
I will pull it out. I will spin it around and
then I will lift it up and I can secure it. And then we have the table leg that I can put underneath. And now I have a bar top. So
now we can sit, stand around, talking with people who are cooking
in the kitchen. And it's just, it's actually quite
comfortable. One of the, probably most distinctive features
of our home and one of the key design features was to be able to be
sustainable and using solar energy. But where do we put, where
do we put all that stuff? Uh, the batteries and so forth. That's always a challenge we knew
underneath the stairs might be an option. And we talked about how do we flip up
the stairs to do that? And then, uh, I think Julia came up with
this brilliant thought that, that we could slide it around. So this is actually a kind
of a neat design where we can slide the stairs away
to really the guts of the system. So here you see
the Tesla batteries. We have the equivalent
of two Tesla power walls, actually four Tesla model S modules. They came out of a, a donor car. If you want to call it that these
are 48 volt battery systems. We have it running to
a Magnum inverter and then a midnight solar converter system. And we have 1800 Watts of
solar on the, on the roof. All of the lights in this
house are led, of course. And they're also all drawn
down to the central hub, which is using a home
assistant. Okay, Google turn on, all lights, tying into the automation was a great
thing because I can be anywhere in the world at my tiny is on the internet. One of the things that is nice with
systems is that you can really create an interface. So this is just a regular iPad
and they have a utility where you can build a quite customized,
uh, if you need it to, or, or follow their templates. So I have the ability to control all
of my lights in groups or individually. I have shades in here for, for the house and I can
actually see my battery voltage, probably I would say around noontime, this thing was at a hundred percent
that I have all my temperatures, my floor heating, cause I have the
radiant floor. Heatings my overall, uh, AC system. We have our
weather station on top. So we can look at when do we can
look at inside, outside temperatures, and then you can start using
automations to do tasks. Here, I'm sitting in the lounge. Uh, actually this lounge was originally
designed to be our bedroom. We realized in wintertime, where
are we going to sit? You know, we can't sit outside and where
are we going to sit in the, and where are we going to have
friends over and so forth? So we, we sort of pivoted a little bit and, uh, instead of having sort of a guest
bedroom up, uh, on the loft, we made this a lounge area
where we can actually sit up to eight people around this table and, and we can have it in a
cocktail configuration,
which is sort of the low, uh, as you can see a little folded up table. And then when we bring it up
and fold it out and we put our Leafs in it, it becomes
a dining room table. But then the nice thing is
that if we do have guests, we can then take that table, lower it down to the level of
where the seats are and put the cushions from the
back down in the metal. And we have a full queen
size bed here as well. Yeah, here we are outside. We had
to design it with travel in mind, meaning structurally rigid,
but also lightweight. We chose a gooseneck, the
reason for that, but again, we're going to be on the road a lot and
goose snacks are significantly easier to handle and drive that it's a lot more
stable. They're easy to maneuver. Once we get in, we have a triple axle,
the structure of this tiny house, we built it with steel
framing, lightweight, cheating, saved about 3000 pounds of weight. We've got triple pane windows.
It's absolutely no heat loss. And it also has a sound
barrier if you will back. So we don't hear anything from the
outside. Once we close those doors, did the sign on the house, as you can
see, really accommodates two sets of, of solar panels and sort of the angle
in that center portion will act as a deck for us, probably one of the most distinctive
features of the tiny house. And that's the window
wall door combination, tiny homes are small. It's very easy to feel that you're cramped
bringing the outside in was kind of our, one of our key objectives. Having
the ability to completely open up. It's really a 16 by 16 foot kitchen. The decking is about seven by 13 feet. We actually store it underneath
the trailer in sections. So we have brackets that we had the
trailer manufacturer put on when we ordered it. So we put the sections in over here and
then we have stoppers on each side to secure them. This is our tow vehicle, which
is a converted semi-truck, it's a Volvo 780. This
one has the single axle. Most of the converted semis
that are towing RVs are usually single axle cause
it'll be easier to deal with. And what people do is they really
go through a conversion process. They buy a used semi-truck and
then they have it professionally done. And there are a few of these
suppliers around the country, and then they build the bed,
which you see on the back, which really provides
all the extra storage. We have a drum box on the back as
well, that houses all our skis, our sporting equipment, some
extra tools and so forth. And you also see we have our car there. So we have a smart car and electric smart
car that once we get to a destination, we lower it down with the ramps
and we can then drive it around and select it. So it's,
it's very, eco-friendly. These things are used to pulling
80,000 pounds and with our tiny weighing about, 22,000 pounds, that is not an issue it's really
comfortable. This whole section, basically up to the back
here is on air suspension. So was an air cab. The
seats are air cushioned. My mileage on this is about
between seven and eight and a half, which I think is actually
quite respectable. It's been overall. A very positive response. It makes us feel good because we
hope that this inspires others to do the same. There is so much possibility
and it's just bringing awareness to people that they can do this. Should they choose people get
inspired just by the tiny house, down the road. The more people see it, that it is a possibility
acceptance becomes the norm. And there's so many wonderful
benefits that come from this. Thanks for watching this week's video. Make sure to like share and
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