Update: The Teenager Who Built His Own Tiny House

[Music] hi i'm janie and i'm jesse and this is the tiny house that i started building as a teenager and i've been living here with jesse for the last five years this video is sponsored by ridge wallet to get 15 off your new ridge wallet click the link in the description and use code floor at checkout and remember to subscribe i grew up on the land next door and when i was a young teenager i was really wanting my own space i was like living in a tent outside because i wanted to just like be outside more and be in nature and when i was 17 i started building this with lots of recycled materials and things i scrounged up along the way you might have actually seen this space already in a past video on this channel and a lot has changed since then i moved in about five years ago since then i feel like we've gone through pretty much every corner of the house taken everything out and put it back in like reorganized like where all of our clothing goes and where all the stuff goes in the kitchen and like one of the major differences between us is our height you know jane has her own countertop that's her height now and there's all these sort of little nooks and crannies that we've rearranged and just ripped things out and put back together because we found that our needs have changed from what mine originally were in every tiny house you get to choose like how you prioritize the use of your space and we've really prioritized cooking so like pretty much three quarters of our house is like built around like food storage and cooking because that's really what we like to do and that's how we spend our time i feel like as much as the tiny house is our space the whole land is our space and one of the reasons that we've been so happy here is that we really use the outside as our house as well i really like that i like having to go outside when it's freezing cold and i think that sort of integration with nature is really special all right so this is our tiny house and as much as we live inside our house we also love to spend time outside so i'll show you this is our wood-fired oven here when i got here five years ago jesse had a small cobb oven which a couple years ago we knocked down and we built a brick oven so the inside is all brick and then the outside of the oven is concrete and perlite which is insulating so it insulates the heat when we have a fire there's heat then for like 24 hours afterwards so this roof is protecting the oven all right so we'll go down to the sauna here so this is a small garden with some perennial herbs and greens and flowers and then we grow a bunch of garlic we've got all sorts of firewood here we will go through about a quart of firewood in the house in the wintertime and then this is all pine down here which we use for campfires um and then this is our sauna we built this sauna starting a couple years ago and we wanted sort of a shower that we could use in the winter time i also really love saunas so we'll heat this up and use this for bathing in the winter time we haven't moved it that much because mostly we've enjoyed this location that it's in but the thought press is that we could move it if we ever wanted to move it to a different spot on the property and then if we ever wanted to tow it like to a friend that had a lake house we could bring it to the lake and jump in the lake so yeah just an option for moving it this stove right here is actually the stove that used to be in the cabin it's a lot better suited to the sauna because it heats up super fast you feed the stove from the outside and on the inside there's slats in the wood so any water we use can drain out the bottom and there's a little sheet of insulation that just blocks wind from coming in the bottom it's four by eight feet wide but because the walls go out you get a little bit more room the benches are all cedar and this is made of pine but everything that you touch is cedar smells really lovely pre-covered we once had about nine or ten people in here so we really squished it but mostly it's just been jesse and i using it all right so i'll take you up to our screen house here right this way this is our screen house that we built last summer and sort of the inspiration behind it was wanting like a permanent tent sort of guest house space that could be used in the warmer seasons and also for any time that we had friends over during bug season bug season in maine can be pretty gnarly so it's nice when it's hot out to have a bug free space and sort of a yoga studio of sorts for me as well we used to have a yurt on the property and for us because we weren't living in it it was hard to maintain in the winter time so we built this with the idea that we could use it in the summer and the roof would shed snow super easily it's screen on either side so screen here and then clear roofing on one side just to let a lot of light in and then the other side is screen as well so we get really good cross ventilation in here i love these small windows and i love that like sort of you get the whole view of the forest from the roots of the trees to the very top and you would think that maybe it would heat up a lot in here in the summertime but when the leaves are all on the trees like it's really really lovely and here it feels like you're sort of tucked in the forest the only purchased materials is this clear roofing because we specifically wanted that but otherwise this is reclaimed metal roofing and just wood that we had around or milled this is a little portable box for solar power that jesse built is actually wired to a small solar panel that's right on the other side of the wall there so now that we've seen the stuff outside let's take a peek inside so uh this is the mud room really handy in cold weather places to have like a unheated sort of airlock to come in and out of it's sort of our summer kitchen we have a little propane stove set up grain mill that i inherited from my folks we use to grind our corn for cornbread and grits and things like that and also flour for making bread you know it's big and heavy but it works really well and we love using it so that's about what's going on in here it's just full of gear things are a little bit different than they were last time you were seeing this mostly inspired by the things we've needed to change from living here together um we have tuned up the kitchen area i'm such a big fan of this foot pump we got it's a dual stage foot pump i first got like a cheap knock off one and it didn't work that well it broke i couldn't get replacement parts so we've got the real deal now it's made by whale it's an awesome product you can get parts to fix it it moves water really fast this is the whale gusher i think it's called i was walking around home depot looking for a faucet thinking about what i could use i found this stainless steel hot water heater pre-connect and decided that looked like a cool faucet so we made a faucet out of that and we've just got a water bucket that we refill for our clean water and a drain bucket that the sink goes into that we have to empty so it's a super simple system we also got a soda stream and like plumbed that into a tank under the sink so we have endless bubbly water which has been really fun done some upgrades on our solar system so we have four 170 amp power 12 volt sealed lead acid batteries which give us a little bit more juice in the winter time i also threw some additional vertical panels on the outside of the front of the house in the winter time we just leave them vertical so they get that low sun and they don't ever get covered by snow so we always have a little bit of power coming even even if we're not here to clean off the panels on the roof just this summer i added a bigger inverter to be able to run like a food processor a little air conditioner on those super hot days previously we've just had a really small little 300 watt sine wave inverter made by morningstar it's a fanless unit that's basically just like a big chunk of aluminum heatsink so it's super quiet and i think in a small space that's a really nice feature for an inverter to be able to have you know power for our computers and things where we're not hearing that fan and at home all the time over here there used to be just like a filing cabinet and some milk crates for storing random kitchen stuff and um now that jamie's here we discovered that the countertop that i had built was way too tall for her so we kind of came up with this scheme for a sort of custom height bread kneading countertop which has some built-in storage for things i think one of the things about building some more built-in little nooks and crannies for storing things has been the ability to have a little bit less visual chaos in here and that i know is something that is really important to jane and i also appreciate it's really nice to be able to sort of tuck things away and obviously there's still a lot of things out something that i really like about kitchens if you go to somebody's kitchen who has cabinets everywhere and you're like oh i want a glass of water and you're doing this trying to find a water glass that's not very convenient or welcoming in a home and i think that it's really nice to have the things that you use every day or that a guest might look for when they come to your house visible whether it's on shelves or in behind glass doors or something over here this is probably one of the biggest new things i talked about it in the last video i think it was sitting out under a tarp in the front yard and now it is here this is our tiny house mass heater that a friend of mine designed it's 900 pounds of thermal mass and it once it's warm it radiates heat for 12 to 18 hours it's really nice gentle heat we can cook on it in the winter and it's been a game changer for tiny house life here in maine because it's such a gentle heat coming out of it it allows us to not only put it closer to the wall but it allows us to actually function near it in the winter we can lean on it it won't burn us on the sides it doesn't get too hot except on the cooking surface so we've actually gained space in our house by putting a larger item in it for heat before the nook was here there's always that stuff that doesn't quite have a home and it was always just piled everywhere here and something that i really appreciate about this space is that you know we've we've taken up a considerable amount of our floor space putting this full-size furniture piece in here but it's actually created uh a home for a whole bunch of things like our daily you know backpacks and bins full of the little random things that we didn't have a home for a whole bunch of bulk food storage underneath so that's something that's been a big takeaway of how we can better utilize the space and take up maybe more room initially but then actually have a cleaner more functional space afterwards upstairs we have our bed loft it's just pretty much just a full-size bed we have little cubbies at the head and the foot of the bed for storing our clothes we've realized that we don't really need like a huge bedroom we just need a place to sleep and i think it hasn't changed a lot because it hasn't needed to change a lot we still have this catwalk here it is not often used it's not very practical i've learned it's not wide enough to be practical and at some point here we may make it wider or actually like loft in more of this space to make more useful room upstairs but in the meantime this is kind of proven to be one of those things that was an idea that now is a stuff collector [Music] having that sort of long-term perspective on being in a space i think has been really amazing and fun and an adventure every day there really isn't anything in here that we can't rearrange again um and i think that really goes for a lot of houses and hearing people talk about like getting a design dialed in right like i don't think you can do that the first time and that's totally fine and it's been good to learn that like firsthand like that is totally fine one challenge of coexisting in a small space i think is just how two different people live in their space sort of clashing and in our particular case i'm more comfortable with clutter and mess than jane is we have like occasional sort of moments where we sort of have to reconcile these differences in how we use our space and realize that like we have to deal with this and figure it out right now because there's not any space to put it aside for dealing with later and i think that's something i really appreciate about this lifestyle is that things can't really linger too long i feel like the challenges of living in a small space together are also like our growing opportunities all the different changes we've made are because we came up against some sort of challenge where we're like like this was working for you and now it's not working for us so like we need to uh like this is just showing us that we need to make a change here and i feel like that's been the challenges and growing pains have also been the reason that we love our space so much i'm definitely not always an eternal optimist but like i really like the fact that like all of these things that could be considered struggles very quickly turn into opportunities for making things better or for some kind of personal growth and i think just looking at it through that lens is how i want to be in the world in general it's exciting that way and and easier to like wake up every day and be excited about the next thing that we're doing instead of sort of getting dragged down into the weeds of what are we going to do next this is the ridge wallet and it is the wallet that i use on a daily basis i'm a big fan of the minimalist design and the quality construction this one is my old wallet that i used for years and you might note that the designs of the wallet in the ridge are similar but what my old wallet was lacking was rfid protection built into the wallet and in fact i kept an rfid blocking sleeve in that wall in hopes that it would do the job but the ridge wallet fixed that issue because it has rfid protection built into the wallet which in my eyes makes it as good of a design as i can think of and my daily carry the ridge wallet comes in over 30 different colors and styles including this gorgeous burnt titanium or my favorite the north shore it's such good quality that it comes with a lifetime warranty and the ridge wallet has a 45 day money back guarantee so you can try out the wallet and if you don't love it send it back and you'll get a full refund also you'll be supporting this channel by clicking the link in the description and using code floor to get 15 off your ridge wallet today it's a great wallet click the link now and have a great day

Channel: FLORB

Views: 174,243

Keywords: Tiny house, Tiny home, Teenager, Teen, Age, DIY, Off grid, Off the grid, Homestead, Homesteading, Garden, Sauna, Tiny dwelling, Affordable housing

Id: 3--9FOX2L1Q

Length: 15min 14sec (914 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 13 2022