Mortgage Broker Quits Job & Builds Tiny Home to Fulfill Her Dreams

this is gumbo this is my little tiny chihuahua and i rescued him from the orange county shelter last thanksgiving down by my mom's house in southern california and he's a little love bug he's great he has eyebrows [Laughter] he doesn't know it though [Music] i'm kathy freiberg and i live in my tiny house in an area called tumelo right outside of bend oregon and i'm on a 10 acre organic farm which is beautiful i have a view of the mountains and it's just really nice and i retired from my career in 2014 i was a mortgage broker for 38 years and decided that when i got divorced i was going to build a tiny house and retire and start doing horse massages and then i work part-time at a title company in town so i get to take off and go backpacking and go skiing and all the things i like to do outdoors and i love my tiny house for one of the main reasons is being outdoors i love outdoors and i don't want to have stuff and have to worry about maintaining and having a mortgage payment and all that this is my tiny house um it's based on the morrison's plan and it's 24 feet long by eight and a half feet wide and at the tallest point is 13 and a half feet tall and it's got the shed style roof which i really like because of all the light that comes in through the windows so i have 15 windows i have cedar siding on the outside and a little portable deck that can be pulled off when i move it and it's on a triple axel trailer that i had uh custom built in portland by iron eagle trailers they're pretty popular for tiny house trailers so this is one cool thing i really like a lot i had my builder do a french door with the mahogany finish on the outside and i wanted the glass so i could see outside from inside and looking for you know anyway i could have more sunshine and light in in the house i had him do it open opening to the outside so i had more floor room floor space so that's a cool thing and in the summertime i just leave it open i have two lofts this loft is my son's loft this is the smaller one and it has a ladder that comes out he can climb up to get to it and then over on the other side the other end is my loft which has a staircase my son richard lives with me um part-time and lives with his dad part-time and he's 15 he's in ninth grade at summit high and he's a football player he's been playing tackle football for about seven years it's interesting because he's six feet tall and he weighs 155 pounds and he sleeps in that loft at the smaller loft upstairs so fits perfect he loves it and i have skylights above above both lofts that open and i could get egress there for fire escape if i needed it the kitchen is underneath my loft and the bathroom is underneath my son's loft right here is my utility cabinet where my batteries are for my solar system and then right here is a 40 gallon water tank underneath this seat so i can hook up to a water source and fill it refill it or just have the hose coming directly into the house and then these are all cabinets for clothing and pantry things over on that side oh yeah my bathroom this my bathroom i love the toilet is the best thing ever worth every penny so i have a composting toilet i have no black water and that toilet is made by separate and it is a urine diverter style so it doesn't make any smell there's no nothing to add into it no no stirring or whatever they do the cranking thing when you sit on the toilet seat a gasket actually opens that covers the solids and and then that closes again and there's a little fan inside that dehydrates the solids so it's really cool and then i have a small this is the one thing from ikea that i love that you see in some tiny houses this little sink it fits in really nice and then i have a 32 by 32 shower stall and then i have storage uh over here for towels and you know all the stuff that you would have in cabinets in a standard sized bathroom but it's perfect for me and my son this is my little dining room table and it has a it folds down which i've never actually folded it down i haven't needed to do that and i have fold up chairs that i can take in or out and i can bring chairs in if i have company and in the kitchen i have a two burner propane stove top and above that i have a microwave oven that's also a convection oven and a toaster oven so i can do convection i can do microwave i can do browning broiling i don't cook a whole lot but the two burners are awesome i use the microwave maybe once every other day and then i have lots of storage for all my dishes and stuff and then i have a this uh sink i love it's the two equal size and i like that it's a drop in it's flat so there's no edges to have to you know worry about cleaning around and this is my itty bitty refrigerator this is a apartment size and it has a little freezer and it's perfectly adequate for me and then i might have the lg combo washer dryer which i love it doesn't do it doesn't vent so it's a it's a does a wash and spin dry and so when it's done the dry the clothes are pretty much dry they're slightly slightly damp so i just hang them up on the hooks or the cabinet knobs in the house to finish drying them and in the warm weather they dry within a few minutes so one thing about tiny house living you have to stay on top of decluttering your clothes so if i bring new stuff in i have to get rid of old stuff and now there's some stuff in there that i need to get rid of so yeah i envisioned that i was going to do drawers in here at one time and i had the builder leave it like that for now for you know at the time you built it thinking i'll figure that out and so far i haven't done anything with it other than put a little rod in here to hang stuff up that you know i don't want to fold so but eventually i'd like to have that just covered just to not be looking at it but it's kind of exploding right now and i have a staircase which is great because the older i get you know i'm very active but that's one of the considerations i think for a lot of people is going up and down a ladder so um this works out very nicely for me so i don't have to do the ladder in the middle of the night if i have to get up come on let's go up come on puppy gumbo come on gumbo oh not gonna do it oh i didn't make the bed so yeah my my loft is up there and i have the windows the two the window at the foot of the bed and the window at the side of the bed open and then the skylight open so i get a lot of fresh air in there which i love the ceiling is bamboo flooring and it's actually by accident fossilized bamboo which was a little bit of a mistake so when my contractor ordered the bamboo flooring he got a product called fossilized bamboo flooring so it's this stuff is like super heavy one box weighed like 80 pounds and it took him forever to install it because it's so hard he had to drill holes and then put the finish nails in it but i love it when it's it's just got this nice natural warm honey color and then i had pergo xp flooring put in because of having the two big dogs and then my little dog not so much but the two big dogs that scratch up the hardwood floors this is um uh supposed to be the high end pergo it doesn't scratch and so i had him do that on the floor and i had him do it on the treads of the staircase and then i had him do the risers in the bamboo and then all the cabinets are alderwood so he trimmed it out in the older wood so it kind of ties it all together so you see the light and the dark color pulling together so i when i was first researching tiny houses i was looking at all the different plans and for a while i was really stuck on the tumbleweed and they were so cute they look like i live lived in a big house in a craftsman style neighborhood so i was looking at those styles and then i started thinking wait a minute the lights and things about you know the space and that and then the very first one that i absolutely fell in love with was the soul house by vina in ojai and i just absolutely loved the light of it i loved the french doors and then i saw the morrisons the home and that was even better because it has more space the so the sole house is really small um i think it's more for summer living like having the doors open and i it's i think it's 16 16 or 20 feet so the morrison's was 28 feet it has the shed style roof so i've got 15 windows in here which lets in a lot of light so it appears so much bigger when you come inside that's the first comment that people always make is that oh it seems so big inside and so having all that light is a big deal to me so i bought their plan i took four feet off there's this 28 minus 24 and i shrunk the kitchen so they have a full kitchen and i took the four feet off mostly here and they had a full oven stovetop thing and a full refrigerator and i didn't need that so so and i have plenty of storage and countertops as it is so i hired a stick-built contractor who had no experience building tiny houses and the cool thing about where he was building it was he lives in the pine on five acres so he actually built it at his house so he could come out in the morning pick up where he left off he didn't have to drive with all his tools and all his machinery to a site and he just built it by himself and he did everything custom yeah everything all the cabinets the stairwell the door the windows the skylights are all all custom made and he built it to residential stick built cold which requires r21 insulation so it stays really toasty warm in the winter time and in the summer it stays cool by just keeping the windows shut and the doors shut during the daytime and i just open the windows at nighttime and get the nice we live in the high desert so we get nice cool nights even if it's 100 degrees it'll cool down quite a bit so sometimes it's down blanket time so this is my little fireplace it is propane powered and it has little gas logs in there and embers and it has a remote control switch thing that i can take up to bed with me and i can set a temperature and i can say if i want to go on at 63 or 64 i like to sleep cold so i don't have to come up and down the stairs i didn't want to do a wood burning so because i didn't want to mess with the mess of it now and also having to stoke it especially when we have cold really cold winter time so this has been the bomb that in the toilet are the best things ever love them and that runs off propane my stove top is propane and my washer dryer is electric my microwave is electric and my hair dryer is electric everything else is led and so i have solar panels on the roof and batteries in my utility cabinet there and then i'm also rv compliant so i can hook up to an rv uh park if i wanted to have go somewhere i don't drive around my tiny house very much but if i did i started following tiny houses in 2013 and i can't remember how i exactly got started but somehow i got exposed to and i thought oh wow that's such a cool idea because i've always lived in a relatively big house with a lot of furnishings and a lot of clothes and a lot of shoes and the older i got the more stuff i retained and it was like i can't throw that away because it's i've had it for 10 years and it's beautiful i haven't worn it in 10 years and so i'd had storage you know i had lots of storage and so i started realizing that half my house was unused there was a spare bedroom and we only had visitors maybe once a year and then all this furniture and all the cleaning and dusting and the mortgage payment and everything that goes along with it and so i started fantasizing about the small house idea the tiny house and my husband at the time wasn't really on the same page as me but i thought oh somewhere down the road when richard is out of school and you know we're on our own that would be a perfect switch and so we talked about you know rvs in a condo that sort of setup and then so when i realized i was getting a divorce in 2014 i thought i'm going to do the tiny house because i don't want to have anything to do with the big house anymore and so i started doing my research and i had enough money in cash and paid for in cash and i've been living in it for two years and i absolutely adore it i wouldn't go back to a big house ever ever again so it's not about money it's like i have jobs that i chose that are different than my career was and they give me joy to be part of a team but i can also go home and not take my work home with me like i did when i was a mortgage broker and it gives me the freedom to travel and do the things i want to do outdoors and not have to worry about money so i can take last month that last year i took a month off with no pay and went backpacking and it was okay it's all right i didn't need the money a lot of things change and as i get older i want to do all of those outdoor things and stay healthy i don't want to turn into a puddle and a recliner i started looking for property after i started building my house and not really knowing so much about the potential difficulties and just thinking oh just go park it out on a farm and i live in an area where there's lots of farms and ranches how i started looking for property as a horse massage therapist i belong to a facebook page dedicated to horses and horse lovers and they're mostly teenage girls that go to horse shows and then the women that buy those horses for the teenage girls so i put an ad or a posting on there saying i have a tiny house i'm off grid i have no black water looking for farmer ranch to park my house on and i can pay rent or do work on horses or or do gardening or whatever and within an hour i had 41 responses this was two years ago and then the next day i had i whittled that down to five appointments to go view property so i went out looked at those properties and then the gal that i ended up hooking up with lori um she reached out to me a couple days later she didn't respond initially but then she reached out to me and um we started talking and she was like the perfect fit so i went and looked at her property and it was gorgeous and i lived there for a year and a half and all was great he lived with horses and a view and a pond and it was just amazing and then two farms down this man that lived there complained to the county without even coming over to talk to laurie or myself about what his issues were and the county came out and told her that she i couldn't stay there that it was a 30-day max because i was on wheels and she already had another little cabin on the property besides her house so um i had to move so when i the day i had to move i walked down i found out who he was i went down to his house and you know knocked on his gate and came out and talked to me and i asked him what was you know i told him who i was and i said and he says well which neighbor are you i said i'm your neighbor and shook his hand and he says i said i'm the one in the tiny house and he was like oh and i said yeah i wish you would have come over because i don't understand what your issue was and he um i said am i on your view and he said no i'm not in your view he said i just don't like tiny houses and they said why you can come look at mine it's beautiful and and he lives in a dilapidated crappy house with a single wide mobile home that's falling apart in the front of his property and a boarded up barn and i'm like are you kidding me and so he declined to come look he goes no i know all about them it's going to turn into trailer park and so there's this conception that it's going to be a bunch of people with crappy mobile homes or something and clearly he could see my house and it's not a mobile home it's not crappy it's beautiful and i think he just you know was afraid that there was going to be an overrun of people on this five acre parcel so that's been my my learning experience and so for over the winter i stayed at an rv park that took long-term rvs during the winter months which turned out to be a godsend because we had so much snow and plowing and that would have been hard on a farm and how much snow we had so here i am at this new farm and having the same issues so no somebody has complained to the county and i don't know exactly why but uh now i have to i'm in search of a new property so but i still i won't go back i love it i will not go back to living in a regular house this has been an amazing experience for me when people ask me i still say i would i would still pursue it because things are changing we're starting to see movement and and certainly other communities in other states have already done it where they've built tiny house communities and they're happening so i think it's just a matter of time before that happens here in our communities in oregon but i would say definitely if you're faint of heart you want to do your research and make sure you have a solid plan i i kind of live with the kind of attitude that things are going to work out and they always have i'm 61 i haven't had i haven't had anything happen in my life where i'm like oh my god i'm doomed and you know it's just doesn't happen so um but i know people think differently so um you know if they're worried about having a solid place get that secured first for sure in the two years i've lived in it i've never felt so much freedom to be able to do the things i want not to have the relationship with money that i used to have where i thought i had to make a bunch of money so i could buy a house buy a boat buy another house buy you know all those things you know i decluttered my life i decluttered my stuff got rid of the husband and uh yeah i'm in a great place and this is i feel like this is the thing you know that that made it happen for me [Music] do thank you for watching our video and for stopping by tiny house expedition i'm alexis and i'm christian don't forget to like comment and subscribe and for more tiny home tours and stories click the videos below and join us on patreon for bonus content including face-to-face conversations with us we hope to see you there all right thanks guys have a good one

Channel: Tiny House Expedition

Views: 203,385

Keywords: tiny house, tiny house tour, tiny home, tiny house on wheels, tiny home tour, solo woman tiny house, divorced woman tiny house, tiny house living, tiny house parking, tiny house evictions, 24' tiny house on wheels, tiny house plans, custom tiny house, living big in a tiny house, tiny house on a farm, hOMe tiny house, home tiny house andrew morrison, woman's dream tiny house, single woman tiny house, tiny house lifestyle, simple living, shed roof tiny house, downsizing

Id: CeRt8dbBaG8

Length: 21min 12sec (1272 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021