Woman Builds Tiny Home as Sustainable Affordable City Living

[Music] my name is sam gambling i grew up and currently live in north vancouver bc and this is my tiny house i recently graduated from ubc and i wanted i want to do good work in the city so working for non-profit is not super lucrative i cannot afford rent in vancouver so i saw a tiny house as a way for me to live in the community where i work do the work that fulfills me and is good for the community and also it aligns with my values of ecological sustainability and community building i guess the most noticeable thing from the exterior is the siding it's cedar siding that has been recycled from other houses that were being demolished in north band so i got a group of friends together and we found a house because all of the houses in north bend that are going to be demolished are listed on the website went there before they tore it down took off the cedar siding and salvaged it flipped it over and that's what this is so i've just been staining that today it has some like unique tiny home bits and pieces to it so like the front door opens out instead of in which is a space saver and then it's also smaller than a regular front door um most of the windows and doors are salvaged off craigslist or out of demo sites um let's go inside so um so this is my home it is as i mentioned it's 10 feet across so you can feel it's quite wide the flooring is cork flooring that was all recycled as well and my friend and i spent like a good four hours scrubbing it with wd-40 because there's these little i don't know if you can see anyways there was some stuff stuck to it but then we polyurethaned it and it looks really beautiful now so um so that's the floor i've got two storage benches here they both have the wheel wells underneath them but they also hold quite a lot this one actually also turns into a spare bed so you can see there's a hinge here and i'm not going to do it now but i can my wonderful wonderful friend cole made this for me he basically made three legs that you can plop in there and then you can fold it out and it becomes like another queen size bed so it's pretty awesome it's all still very much a work in progress which i say in every tour but essentially i'd love to get some shelves up on the wall here and this area is i'm hoping eventually it's going to become more like a bar where i can sit and do my work here so that i can keep the the doors kind of free of stuff on that side because right now my desk is just in front of the doors there um yeah my closet is on the side here and again i'm gonna get a little like dresser for underneath and something kind of that wraps around the sides for more storage really love the windows that was one of my big you know needs in a house is light natural light so again all of these windows are recycled and i kind of did the design around the windows and doors yeah the skylight i really lucked out on as well but the only thing is it's not an egress so i don't have besides you know i have my second exit right there but in terms of fire i know a lot of them the municipalities won't allow for like a sleeping loft unless you have an exit up there so um anyways that's something just to consider for future builds the latter i can't say a whole lot about it's actually not my ladder i'm just borrowing it from a friend from ben who did build this ladder though for his tiny house so i think it was just a regular like i don't know what that's called i'm gonna call it an a-frame ladder and he cut off one of the legs and so it fits perfectly in a loft but ideally again the idea was to have a ladder actually here that i could then like put up into the ceiling so it wasn't around all the time but i actually don't mind it looks kind of cool the countertops are one of my favorite parts of my house firstly they're very smooth to the touch so everyone comes over and they're like oh that's nice it's a recycled maple slab from west coast woods labs it works perfectly the sink is one of my only new purchases it's from ikea it's really big and i love it mini fridge off of craigslist again and then i got this stove the suburban three burner propane stove um from as a sponsorship from an rv store and then the hood fan is from b-line appliances and it's all just the basics like my my hot water tank is under the sink here and um i don't really have any other kind of gizmos and gadgets all the lights are led so they're like really low energy which is nice and oh one thing i did want to show you is if you look up the chandelier yeah the chandelier is or the pendant i should say is an arbutus branch from my friend's cidery on pender island so each you know every little thing has a story in here which i really love also because i can look at something and it brings me right back and this brings me right back to this time last year on tender and then these if you notice like the the cedar siding that was actually supposed to originally be my whole interior wall was going to be this this cedar fence board didn't have quite enough for it but it makes a nice kind of accent feature so the little knobs are from that's just like a little feature that my dad sent me because he was doing a renovation and had these little turtle knobs and he had exactly seven turtle knobs actually six turtle knobs and one frob frog knob frog and uh i had exactly seven cupboards and it worked perfectly although this one oh this one is really stuck yep um this one i put on the wrong side so this is my toe knob now until i can fix it so this is my office space for now um does the trick and my pantry slash storage space until i get some more shelves and yeah i mean i actually don't have a whole lot like i'm thinking about what else i want to put up here and like it'd be nice to have extra cups or something but like all of my cutlery and stuff just so happens to fit in here and i don't know it does fine maybe once i start living in it i'll be like okay i need another spoon but for now it does the trick and this is my wine storage let me just show you actually this is very important it fits perfectly wine slash beer the problem with that though is i had a bottle of wine up there when i was moving it from south surrey to north surrey and i opened my house and there was just like wine everywhere and i just totally forgot that that so it's a sneaky wine storage yeah uh so this is my bathroom um it's not done yet so this is yeah very much a work in progress i need a door for one thing uh and i'm thinking of doing a door that kind of opens like that because i was to do a sliding door but it didn't fit quite right with the toilet and so yeah it's quite basic i have a full shower in here which i'll let you come see in a second and i'm going to do tiling around the shower just to make sure the drywall doesn't get all gummy um and then all craigslist finds except for my toilet which is like it's like the highlight of my house um it is a very expensive fancy toilet from france it's a urine diverting compost toilet basically you go and then you use the foot pedal and it's like an escalator no it's like a it's a conveyor belt and it it sends the solids through the wall and out into the bin um and then the there's a very small crack so it gets all of the liquids and that goes into a separate little funnel yeah it's cool right so this is my poop box uh basically my toilet is a urine diver diverting toilet and so the urine comes out the bottom into a separate pipe and then the solids go up an escalator a poop escalator as my builders so lovingly dubbed it and into what is or what will be a little tub with red regular worms so it'll start the vermiculture process but this in itself was really tricky to make my mom's partner made this and i think it was more work than he was expecting because it needs to be completely sealed it has to be vented and then at the front it has a fly trap because flies never inevitably will get in there and so it has like this little window that you can look through which is also very weird yeah you just open it up and there can be or there will be a tub in there the vermiculture process breaks it down so much that you only really have to empty it like once a year maybe once every eight months and then you just add it to a hot compost pile or not ideal but you could put it in the landfill if you have nowhere else to put it but it essentially breaks it down into some usable soil there's nothing in there yet but this is the fly trap and they get caught in here and it's totally insulated so in the winter it's fine and it's sealed and i also because this will interfere it's so long that it'll interfere with um like the turning radius of a truck so i have it's also removable and i have like a little mini box that i can attach that just protects the poop skeleton when i'm moving it yeah um yeah this is just your regular propane hookup uh i've got two propane tanks that i could connect to uh and then you just like switch which tank you want to go to um this is my uh outflow pipe from i believe from the bathroom and then this one is from the kitchen so ideally once i finally find a place where i can park it for more than a few months i would dig a shallow trench underground and do like a grey water filtration um either using like the aqua to use uh gray water treatment system or just like if i can if i can find the right place to have some sort of like basin with biochar or with other mulch or like wetlands that can naturally filter it this is something that i should probably warn everybody against do not use wood filler because you don't need it and it does this when you're staining it this is all sustainable wood filler and it just didn't work so live and learn live and learn i've got regular gutters on the house and this is the rainwater barrel that works yeah i use that to water my garden poor little guy i transplanted him yesterday and i haven't watered him there you go a little squashy squash away and then i have a regular um like 240 250 volt it says 240 volt uh and i've got an adapter right now that goes from um the 240 to the 110 and then i just using an extension cord at the moment because that's all i need to power my lights and my mini fridge and i'm not using my heaters at the moment so i don't need that um but again ideally you would have like an rv plug or a dryer plug that you could plug into yeah and this is not best practice don't leave that hanging so i'm co-founder of the bc tiny house collective along with anastasia cotellanos and together we founded the tiny house collective in july of 2016. so the bc tiny house collective is just a group it's a community organization i think there's probably a hundred people that we work with on a regular basis or communicate with um and then there's thousands of members on on our social media and on our newsletters and things like that and the collective is yeah this community organization that's advocating for the legalization and legitimate legitimization of tiny houses as a viable and sustainable and affordable housing stock across bc all of canada is in a housing crisis right now i mean the number of people living on the streets of vancouver is unprecedented there are people who have you know a full-time job and an average salary and can't afford to live here people who i've talked with who like email me regularly to say when are tiny houses going to be legalized because i'm getting kicked out and there's like a 0.01 vacancy rate it's absurd so we i guess see tiny houses as not the solution obviously it's not going to solve the housing crisis in vancouver um it's such a systemic issue and involves so many factors but um we see tiny houses as one opportunity to increase the diversity of housing options for people in the city and as a a means of affordable home ownership which is just unrealistic now what often comes up is the environmental sustainability feature of tiny homes which i really love and it's very obvious that you can make these ecologically sustainable homes but tiny homes could be a way to like slow down a little bit and not have to work the monday to friday nine to five in order to survive um have some time for reflection and live a little bit more simply and within our means and ultimately improve mental health in a way that we really need improved mental health so [Music] 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: 259,533

Rating: 4.906817 out of 5

Keywords: solo woman tiny house, single woman tiny house, tiny house, tiny house tour, tiny home, tiny home tour, vancouver tiny house, tiny house in vancouver bc, exploring alternatives, living big in a tiny house, tiny house build, sustainable living, laneway house vancouver, sustainable tiny house, reclaimed material tiny house, tiny house salvaged materials, tiny homes in vancouver bc, tiny house on wheels, extra wide tiny house, BC Tiny House Collective, 10 ft wide tiny house

Id: 77kqnZv5F3Y

Length: 15min 57sec (957 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020