Woman Gains Extra Freedom After Downsizing to a Legal Tiny House in the City + FULL TOUR

[Music] why is the question that i get probably the most is why would you go tiny why would you sell your townhouse and get rid of probably 90 percent of the things that you owned and build a tiny house on wheels i wanted freedom i wanted the ability to move my house it also came down to being more intentional with how i live my life so i wanted to simplify i wanted to get rid of the things that were sort of weighing me down literally and you know figuratively and going tiny allowed me to to do that only have the things that i love or that are really useful to spend more time having experiences and being with the people that i cared about um and it also lowered my expenses so when you don't need to support a bigger lifestyle then you have more flexibility and you have more options and at this point in my life i just wanted that i wanted freedom i wanted options and i raised my kids and they're doing just fine and now it's mama's turn to have some adventures and this was my adventure i have been living in serendipity for two years i've had two winters and survived and just love it serendipity is 37 feet long from the gooseneck to the back of the house and nine and a half feet wide and i am on a gooseneck trailer so that means that i can have the bedroom on the gooseneck and i can stand in the bedroom without the loft it's just over 300 square feet and just under 400 square feet with the loft and for me that's plenty of room i had my house professionally built by teacup tiny homes and working with a professional builder really helped develop the design i knew exactly what i wanted i wanted a big kitchen because i love to cook a permanent office space and i wanted a bedroom that i could stand up in and everything else i made negotiable but those three things i had to have and i got exactly what i wanted so i'm very happy with that so when you come into the tiny house one of the things that i love about this space is the fact that the ceiling is vaulted and it goes up i think it's 11 feet and it feels so open here i have a nice little living room here there's it's not huge but there's plenty of room to have friends over lots of big windows two of which open so you get a nice cross breeze here's something that you don't see in a lot of tiny houses unless they're in cold climates but when you live in canada and you need space for your toots and your mitts and your coats and your boots having a front entry closet is just so nice and one of the things i like about this space is that i can hang my long dresses on this side and it gives me a place for everything that i need that i can tuck away and when you live in a tiny house you really want a space for everything so that you can keep it fairly tidy i have a loft above the kitchen and the ladder is stored right here there's a little cleat here that holds it tight and whenever i want to get up into the loft i just pick it up and i hang it over here you just hook the ladder up here and then you can climb up into the loft it's really easy i do have a big tv and i just added a little electric fireplace for some ambiance and extra heat on cold days my happy place in my tiny house is my kitchen it's huge it's actually has more counter space than my kitchen in my townhouse did and it stores everything so well i didn't want uppers because i wanted it to feel nice and open so everything is stored in below even my pots and pans the stove in here is an apartment size stove and it is a gas range and oven and i bake bread in it and everything and it's the perfect size for here i really quite like it and i like the fact that there's a hood fan it's really nice to have that so you don't have the smells inside the house and then my fridge is narrower than a standard size but it's quite it's taller so it actually fits a lot and one of the things i love about the freezer is that it's got drawers in there so i can fit a lot of food in there there's always that wasted space on this side and so what i asked the builder to do is put in a little secret door here let's guess it's not that secret you don't need it very often but boy when you want to get something back there it's nice not having to crawl into the whole cupboard i wanted to do a few things in the tiny house myself and so one of the things i did do was put in this little eating bar it has a little brackets underneath that are really easy to take down sorry if that's loud when i'm not using it i mostly just leave it up and i sit here and have my coffee in the morning or lunch snacks things like that i have a pantry here that is seven inches deep and holds a ton of food in fact i have more than just this one pantry i also have this pantry here and this pantry here and you would think for one person that's an awful lot of food but again i like to cook i like to bake i like to send food home with my kids my home office was a priority as i've said before and this space is just so functional when i'm working i set up my monitor here i have my laptop set up and i can extend this when i extend this then i have room for files and everything when i'm working as well and when i'm working i get to look out the window and see the birds at the bird feeder i do have the cat litter box underneath the desk that wasn't where i had originally intended on having it but it's worked out just fine my builder made sure to build in a space big enough for a printer a full-size printer because i am a 100 a remote worker so i have space for my printer my files it just makes the space so functional it makes working from home really efficient i have a small bathroom but i don't mind because again it wasn't a priority for me i did want a tub i have an rv size tub which my friends make fun of me for but i fit and i just wanted a place to have a bath on a cold day or maybe wash a dog down the road my washer dryer combo unit works really well it does wash a load that's bigger than it dries but i hang a lot of my clothes up to dry anyways so it's perfect for me i do have a 60 gallon hot water tank under here there's a little door that opens and that was where the cat litter box was going to go originally but then i had to put in a water tank i have a bathroom fan which i think is really important one of the worst your worst enemies in a tiny house is moisture and so you need a plan for taking care of that so you need a bathroom fan and you need i have a lunos air exchange system they're on opposite ends of the house and it's either pulling in air or pushing out air and it takes care of the moisture level in the air i have a forced air furnace an rv sized forced air furnace in a tiny house i wanted to be sure to have good heating because i live in a cold climate we have very long winters and the last thing you want is your feet freezing because you are in a trailer now the floor is spray foam insulated as well and the house is skirted in which really does help to keep it warmer the furnace is actually under here this opens up for storage when the furnace is under there there's events in every room it keeps things nice and toasty one of the things that i did notice is that when you have your furnace in a tiny house it's never that far away from your bedroom so in the winter when it kicks in you do hear it more than you probably would in a foundation build house where your furnace is in the basement but you get used to it i know i say this a lot but one of my favorite things in the tiny house are these storage steps each one of these has storage but the beginning the gooseneck the part that comes up onto the gooseneck starts right here so this storage step goes all the way to the back each one of these goes all the way to the back so you have a ton of storage in here so this is my big tiny house cat her name is sophie and she loves the tiny house she particularly likes the loft because she gets to be up on her perch and look down at everybody so this is my bedroom and again one of the priorities i had was a bedroom that i could stand up in and walk around i'm 5'4 so there's a little bit of a the ceiling is a little bit lower here but it's easy to make my bed and this room is so functional i have two huge windows both which open so i get a really nice cross breeze on hot days and the bed actually lifts up so i have a ton of storage under here as well and i find this room is plenty big enough for me i mean what more do you need the floor of my closet is the ceiling of the bathroom so from here all the way to the end of the bathroom is my closet space and and then there's an opening on the end into the loft space my electrical panel is in there i made sure to put a plug-in in there so i have my dyson vacuum mounted in there and that's where it charges one of the benefits of having a gooseneck trailer is that you have that space under the gooseneck and i had always planned on making that a shed and i store my lawnmower and bike and things like that in there when i had it built i made sure that it was disassembled and even the flooring it's got a subfloor in it so that it really can be taken apart and taken with me it's also open to underneath the rest of the house so it allows some air circulation underneath the house and i made sure to put vents in the skirting around the house as well to make sure there was air circulation under there so there just wasn't a bunch of humidity building up under there [Music] where i am now i'm in a mobile home park and the fact that i used a builder that was csa certified and the fact that the trailer is registered as a park model allowed them to accept me here if one of those things hadn't been in place they would not have been able to accept me here so i was able to find a legal parking spot i don't have to worry about somebody knocking on the door and saying hey you can't be here getting a notice that i have to vacate and that was really important to me i wanted to give myself the most options to find a legal parking spot here right now where i am because i am in a big city i pay rent to be in this spot so there is that expense and i have um a small loan but that's it right i have utilities that that are solo in fact the biggest part of both my electrical and gas is delivery charges that you can't get rid of so financially it really does make sense it gave me so much more breathing room i actually work in finance being a remote worker was really important to me so i made sure that i had the setup to do that properly i have a secure workspace i have a good internet connection i have the ability to do my job no matter where i am i started my youtube channel called my big tiny house life it was a way for me to document my journey to answer the questions i kept getting asked and i found that i really enjoyed it i love sharing this lifestyle i love being able to help people on their journeys the i guess the biggest challenge that i've had is people's perception of what i'm doing that somehow it's a lesser than because it's not a foundation built house and you no longer own property but for me that's a plus so uh no i i can't think of any negatives i think it's all been positive for me so far i do think that one of the reasons that it's worked out so well for me is because i did so much planning ahead of time i'm a planner by profession and by nature and so um i kind of obsessed about tiny houses for a couple of years before i decided to actually do it and then i did a lot of research i took that tiny house workshop with kenton's urban so by the time i actually came to build my house i was very clear about what i wanted and what i needed there's comfort in knowing that she's mine that i can afford it that i can take her wherever i want and everything that i own comes with it's just the kind of lifestyle that really makes sense for me at this stage in my life [Music] subscribe to exploring alternatives and check out our playlists for more stories like this you can also follow adelina on youtube at mybigtinyhouselife thanks for watching

Channel: Exploring Alternatives

Views: 1,488,502

Keywords: tiny, house, home, tiny house, interior, tour, design, wheels, minimalist, minimalism, downsizing, simple, living, lifestyle, exploring, alternatives, thow, tiny house on wheels, Canada, modern, bedroom, loft, ladder, staircase, bathroom, toilet, shower, bath, tub, space, room, kitchen, space saving, furniture, storage, DIY, Adelina, My Big Tiny House Life, Teacup Tiny Homes, single, solo, woman, female, park, model, trailer, legal, parking, legally, CSA, gooseneck, goose, neck, reduced, expenses, budget, spend, less, documentary, story

Id: Oc0ZoCHQKLg

Length: 13min 32sec (812 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 29 2021