Our Own Tiny House Revisited - And Some Very Exciting News!

unfortunately here in new zealand we have found ourselves back in lockdown which means we can't travel and film right now but we thought this would be a fantastic opportunity to give you an updated tour of our very own tiny house on wheels [Music] so welcome back to our own tiny house one of the really unexpected benefits of the whole covert situation and us not being able to travel outside of new zealand is that russia and i have got to spend more time at home we've got to spend more time enjoying our very own tiny house i've really been enjoying getting stuck into some garden projects i've built a few really beautiful ponds around the place this one here is a little zen pond that i built right next to our tiny house and i've also established a really cool wildlife pond which i'm using to try and encourage frogs and other natural wildlife back into this very urban section so i've really been enjoying doing projects like that but more than anything it's just been nice to feel a little bit more grounded normally in our lives we spend all of our time traveling it's unusual when we're on the road to spend longer than three days in any one place so for us actually getting to spend so much more quality time at home now has been really valuable shortly we'll go inside the home but before we do i'll give you a quick rundown of the exterior just for those of you who haven't seen our original tour of the tiny house so this home is roughly 6 meters or 20 feet by 2 and a half meters or eight feet in length making it roughly 15 square meters or 160 square feet in size within this home is absolutely everything that we need including the ability to generate our own power and collect our own water we've got the outdoor shower on this house which i do really like and it will be very useful in the future although right now it does not get a lot of use because where our house is parked at the moment it is facing the street so that would just be a little bit inappropriate to find out more about the construction of the home and the materials that we've used you can always check out our original tour of this house but for now let's get inside so i can show you the house welcome back to our tiny home this house is very simple and yet within these walls we have absolutely everything that we need both rasa and i have taken so much pleasure in making this space our own and decorating it with things that we love and treasure all throughout this home we have little trinkets that we've collected from our travels we have beautiful pieces of artwork that have been created by our friends and for us it's just such a place to treasure and really be ourselves and express ourselves which i think is very special both rasa and i are huge fans of scandinavian design and i think that really comes through in this house where we've used a lot of clean lines a lot of balanced symmetry we've used a lot of brightness which is offset and warmed up by elements like the timber like the woolen throws and pillows and it really creates this beautiful neutral base to work with in the home that neutral base is very much offset by seasonal color which is brought into the house through our plants and through flowers and things like that so we've got this lovely neutral base layer to work with which is welcoming and cozy and then we can make that explode with little bits of vibrant color that comes from all these things that we just love to have around us beyond the beauty of our home it's also a very functional place which takes care of all of our needs this here is our kitchen which is where we do the majority of our cooking and our meal prep although living in community with my family we do also do a lot of communal cooking together which i really enjoy the construction of this kitchen is very simple we do have a lot of storage space for our food although we have a relatively small fridge which means that we do have to cycle our food quite frequently one of the other unusual things about this home as well is that because of living off the grid i chose not to install a permanent gas cooker because i was hoping to use induction power for most of our cooking however in this current location that hasn't panned out so we are still just using a portable gas stove for our cooking right now which isn't ideal but that is something that i'll be changing up in the future we have a lot of prep area i really like the way that we have our chopping boards which were cut out of the original bench top and fit snugly above our two large sinks having a big sink in a tiny house really makes all of the difference it makes doing washing up just so much more pleasurable and because i am quite tall i'm around six foot four and so it was really important to me to raise the height of the bench in this tiny house and you have no idea what a difference that makes for me if i'm doing dishes at a regular height bench and sink really quickly i can actually notice a little bit of back pain whereas actually just doing things higher up at my level makes life so much easier so i'm very very thankful for that and it really again just goes to show when you're considerate of little things like that and design the house really for your specifications it does make life a lot easier and it's a good height for rasa too so we're both very happy with that she thinks that she's taller than she is but she is pretty tall she's not really she just thinks she's tall she does them on tiptoes i don't know anyway i have quite a knife collection in the tiny house when it comes to cooking for me my knives are really important i am quite obsessive with keeping them really sharp and really functional there is nothing that kills the cooking experience faster than picking up a blunt knife in your kitchen so having really quality kitchen knives is something that has always been very important to me and i'm very grateful that i can have a good collection of them here in this house when it comes to cooking beyond the gas cooker we don't really have a lot of appliances we do have our blender here on the bench top but to be perfectly honest unless i'm making berry ice cream it really doesn't get a lot of use at all with me i love cooking outside i really enjoy using my barbecue and so that's pretty much where i do most of the cooking and there is a great amount of prep space here as well so when russ is making her salads or other suitable rabbit foods she has lots of space to do that the cabinetry in this home was built by our good friends jake and casey from variant spaces who have done such a wonderful and loving job with crafting our cabinetry including pieces like this here this was originally designed as a bench seat for the desk however it really didn't work out there it's a beautiful and functional piece of furniture but it is not comfortable so if we were working at the computer for an extended period of time it really wasn't a good solution for us so we've moved it over here where it has given us a lot of extra storage for food the top of the storage box does also lift up so it can become a little bit of extra prep space or a surface to put things on when you're working in the kitchen too which is really nice also being located here it gives us very easy access to our storage loft which right now is really only home to our bean bag seats which we bring down when we have guests or if we're just looking for something that's a little bit more comfortable than our couch which i'll talk about soon over here we have our wood stove and this is one of my absolute favorite parts of the home there is nothing cozier than coming home to a lovely fire and this really does become the heart of the home in the winter it is a 10 kilowatt wood stove which does mean that it is overkill for the size of this house if we light that fire it really quickly cooks us out of the home because of that quite frequently i'll just light the fire in the evening maybe use it to cook maybe boil some water then just let it go out and because it has heat bricks in there it's got good thermal mass and it just gently radiates heat throughout the home for the evening so that is such a lovely feature in the tiny house and definitely not something that i would want to be without in our stairwell we have a good amount of storage this is used for our hanging clothes storage as well as shoes towels some linen and just basic things like that really really handy to have the extra storage in the stairs and this is also the hub of where all of our off-the-grid electronics are so we have our solar charger our inverter and all of our fuses and that sort of thing in this cupboard here in our bench seat over here we have lots more storage this is pretty much like our wardrobe so rasa has half and i have half and this is where we keep the bulk of our clothes i know it doesn't look like a lot of storage but in reality because rasa and i are both so very used to living out of suitcases this is more than enough for all of our things as much as i like our built-in couch it is probably the one thing that i would change about this house when i was designing it it was very much focused around aesthetic and i wanted to create something that would sort of match what was happening over the other side and not encroach in the space too much and we'd move the door into the center of the house which limited our space so there is a bit of a sacrifice of comfort really i should have made this a lot bigger i should have made it deeper and that would have really helped to improve the comfort level of that couch but as it is it serves a purpose and it is okay and if we really want to lie back and relax we can always use our bean bags which are super comfortable one addition to this house which i love is our coffee table to me this is just such a wonderful addition to the home it creates this wonderful visual centerpiece and it's also really functional you can put your feet up on it when you're watching television and obviously it's a place to rest food and drinks and that sort of thing but that really has been a lovely addition to the home then over here we have the office and the office is a much more established site now we've added a desktop computer which is really useful i have put in a proper chair there now because sitting on that box seat was just uncomfortable for a long period of time and this area has been turned into such a lovely place just to sit and get some work done as you can see here i am a little bit crystal and book obsessed i have this saying that uh i can still be a minimalist because books and crystals don't count fortunately both rasa and i share uh taste and design aesthetic we both love all of the crystals in the house we both love looking at beautiful books so this office space has actually turned into one of my very favorite parts of the tiny house you'll probably notice that we have also added blinds since our last tour this was something which was really important i really like to be able to have full blackout blinds so we have those in all of the windows except for in the bathroom where we have the obscure privacy glass and then in both of the triangular windows in the apex of the gable we've also added really lovely cedar shutters that just add this lovely sort of warm timber aesthetic to both of the lofts which i really like moving into the bathroom here not a lot has really changed in this room except for the addition of our composting toilet we have here the bamboo composting toilet which is a very very simple bucket system toilet when we do site the house in a more permanent place in the future we do intend to replace this with a fan vented underfloor model toilet but that is something that we'll talk about in the future everything in this bathroom is working out so well i love this shower we get really good water pressure i love the combination of having both the handset shower as well as the waterfall shower in there and all throughout this home we have used water saving devices so this shower head here only uses about three liters of water a minute which is incredibly efficient obviously when you're in an off the grid home that's important for two reasons firstly it reduces the amount of water that you're consuming in the house which means your water supply lasts longer it also means that you have less grey water to deal with as well so that is a really good thing to think about when you are choosing a shower so last we have probably my absolute favorite part of the home which is our sleeping loft upstairs let's go check that out and here we are in the sleeping loft this is such a lovely welcoming and cozy space even being a bigger guy climbing into bed at night here is just such a treat there's something about a sleeping loft where you really do just feel so cozy so safe and secure and snug and i really enjoy being in here we've added the skylight so both rasa and i have our own skylights to look out of and that is again such a treat on a beautiful sunny day there's just nothing like being able to look outside your window and really get this sort of immersive view of the sky one of the other real benefits of having the skylights there is they give us phenomenal cross ventilation especially in the winter when the fire is going or in the summer just on a normal summer's day the sleeping loft can get really hot so having both of those windows there gives us a strong cross ventilation to help cool down the loft we also have installed blackout blinds on both of the skylights and then we've also got our shutters on the triangular window there that means that i can block out all the light because i do like to sleep in absolute darkness so really really nice having that and climbing into this space at night is just the most delicious cozy thing and waking up here in the morning it's pretty hard to get out of bed to be honest i really hope that you've enjoyed this visit to our home for rasa and i this place is so special to us we called this house the seat of life and that very much is true to what this house represents to us this is a place where we get to be ourselves where we get to create we get to make music we get to enjoy being together we get to sit and relax and watch movies and just have a place of solace in the world at the moment in the world we're going through such a crazy time there's so much insecurity out there there's so much economic instability and having this home for us is also a real safety net we built this tiny house with a budget of around a hundred thousand dollars and that was paid off over the years as we constructed the home which meant that we own this space debt-free and if nothing else whatever happens and we don't have money coming in at least we know that we have a roof over our head which to me just means the world for now we're parked up on family land which is really nice it's a great situation for us we've been able to be so close to our family during all of these lockdowns and the instability of the last two years which has been a real gift but one bit of very exciting news is that rasa and i have purchased our own piece of land it is a gorgeous bush block a regenerating bush block it has beautiful old growth trees it has gorgeous fresh spring water on the property we have waterfalls there are even crystals in the river this is literally my dream property and a place that we get to take over guardianship of so we'll be sharing more about that with you all soon so once again thank you so much for joining us thank you so much for the support of our channel when we last toured our tiny house i think we had just reached 2 million subscribers we have over 4 million of you in our family now which is such a treasure and we just have so much love and appreciation for all of you for following our journey and being a part of our story so i really hope that you enjoyed this updated tour of our home and we cannot wait to share more with you in the future [Music] you

Channel: Living Big In A Tiny House

Views: 481,181

Rating: 4.9743867 out of 5

Keywords: living big in a tiny house, tiny house, tiny home, tiny house tour, off the grid, architecture, home design, living big

Id: Ts4PML3oCpg

Length: 16min 10sec (970 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021