Woman's Spectacular Tiny House in The Wilderness

there are just so many reasons why people are choosing tiny house living and one of them is a desire to reconnect with our environment to get out into incredible places like this and reconnect with nature and that is exactly what's happened with this next beautiful tiny home parked up here in the British Columbian wilderness [Music] hi Jess how's it going thanks how are you good thank you lovely to meet you this here is such a beautiful tiny home so what was it that actually inspired you to go tiny so I had been raised on a hobby farm my parents have always raised their own food and animals the living a sustainable life was really important to me and then I just kind of kept being in places in my life but didn't make sense for me to like own my own home or anything like that so then when the tiny home movement started coming through it just really aligned and clicked for me that that was what I needed to do so what attracted me to tiny house living I think was really around the self sustainability piece and as I've always kind of been more of a transient person being able to pick up and go where I needed to be it was really important to me but also just having a smaller footprint and just I really think it comes down to essentially living in nature and I feel so close to nature when I'm living in a tiny home and I think slow living is just the way forward for myself and for the perspective that I hold on the world and being able to just be more sustainable well the aesthetic of this home really is quite extraordinary it's a little bit unusual as well can you talk to me about where the inspiration for the design came from yeah so I really wanted to emphasize on raw elements natural building structures and I know this is definitely wooden but I've spent quite a bit of time in Mexico so I kind of wanted to like recreate this like desert II feel in Canada so pulling elements from both areas it was really important to me so I kind of like had this vision of this like if you were to rock up to like a dusty mezcal bar in the middle of nowhere and it was just no ASIS this would be what you would see I think we are probably as far away right now as you can get from a dusty mezcal bah I mean I love the look and for a second let's just talk about this parking spot because this is probably one of the most idyllic locations to paka tiny house that I've ever seen yeah I feel so fortunate to be and being on this Creek is just so beautiful I don't have water right now so I'm pumping water from the creek and it's absolutely beautiful delicious water yeah so it's really allowed me to do exactly what I wanted to do and living closer to nature and of course living in a tiny house one of the things that I think we're really encouraged to do in tiny homes is to actually step outside into nature so it's lovely to have all this right on your doorstep it's so magical I feel so grateful there's just morning's I mean I have to get up and start my generator so that I always gets me out of the house but there's many mornings that I'm just happy to kind of go and sit by the creek and just enjoy so you're operating on a generator here you're not utilizing solar or anything right now so that's the plan it wasn't my plan in the immediate it was kind of like a three-year plan for me to move towards solar I kind of blew my budget yeah I was supposed to be set up with power for the first while and then work towards that but power isn't here I've been running a generator and I've actually quite successfully tested several different generators so I feel like I'm kind of confident about generator knowledge now got that dialed in and how does it actually work out for you just running off a generator does that mean that sort of you'll run it for a period of time and is that charging batteries or are you having to run the generator almost always to keep the house powered yeah i io need just run it for a little bit just enough to keep my fridge going really and what size is this tiny home it's just 20 feet just 20 feet that's really interesting because I think the way that they would and the middle clattering is sort of breaking up the design of the house and the different pitch in the roofline I would have guessed that this is actually larger than 20 feet yeah and they did this cool thing where they bumped out the back so a lot of my utilities and services are kind of in that little bump out so you don't lose any extra space which we know is so important at the tiny house well I definitely love what you've done on the exterior of the home and I am very curious to see inside can we check it out absolutely thank you this is beautiful yeah thank you I can see immediately you've got a lot of storage in here oh it's funny it's really true what they say about build a shelf and you'll find something to put on it so I've really tried hard to not put things on every shelf and there's just so much storage in here honestly I don't know what to do with all of it were you a minimalist to begin with or is this something that you've really had to work on you know I've actually moved around a lot in my life so I've always been kind of transient and so being able to pick things up and leave when I change jobs or whatever was important to me and so I think that minimalistic lifestyle kind of like fell in with being able to be free to move when you need to yeah and you still actually have to travel quite a lot with your work don't you I'm a social worker and so I do travel Social Work where I'm flying four times a month I work one week on one week off which has been really beautiful to allow me to finish my master's in counseling so moving forward I'm really looking forward to doing more like ecopsychology type work with people and really recreating the importance of how important sustainable living is so talk to me about the design of the house what were the things in here that we're really important for you to have mm-hmm I think the big thing for me was around aesthetics to start but then in terms of like actual logistics that was really important was kitchen kitchen is huge for me I cook a lot of my own food and so being able to have like a really nice kitchen and space for prep and all that kind of thing was super important I also knew that it wasn't realistic for me to have a second bed or a second loft in here so the way the couch is built it's deep enough that once you take off all my pillow is a single bed there so that was really my two big things and then of course going back to aesthetics that was kind of my big thought with living more sustainably is that you can actually do it quite beautifully it doesn't have to be like some cabin in the woods very true it definitely has a wonderful and homey feel in here and let's talk first of all about this part of the house very comfortable looking couch and it looks like you've got a lot of storage in there too so there's the two drawers that pull out and then also this other piece here flips up and then there's another piece on the side over there that also flips up so it's again I'm not gonna say it's more storage than I need cuz I'm grateful to have it but there's a lot of storage in here you've got the storage shelf up here as well and I see that it's not really being used for storage it's totally just decorative up there yeah it's taken quite a lot to pair things down but it just energetically it feels way better to not have clutter everywhere and then moving on from the lounge here we've got your stairwell again lots of storage built in some books you've even got a washer/dryer built in there yeah I do I have not used it yet but it is here problems with having to hold water from the river right yeah exactly now looking at this kitchen I can absolutely say that this is a design of somebody that loves to cook you've prioritized a lot of space and this relatively small home to the kitchen haven't you yeah and it doubles as a workspace as well so this is where my master's degree happened pretty much but yeah it's huge for a tiny home and I'm so grateful for it because it does really allow me to eat quite well before I moved into a tiny home I was living in a motor home for a year and talked about and in efficiently designed layout for sure so eating healthy was not easy like you can try and force yourself to eat healthy but prepping in a space that's super small is not realistic and the design looks quite functional as well because you've sort of gone for this galley style where you've got the sink on one side and then your oven on the other yeah so there is also more like prep space over here or more it's kind of turned into my like pantry space but I also have this amazing pantry here that slides out which is just more storage mostly vitamins right now apparently so yeah I just I can't say enough about this kitchen design being the fact that I want it and this window opens up fully and so the plan is is to actually put a bar outside that'll pop up so that people can sit there and you can just use it as a pass-through great idea yeah and then right out the kitchen window you just have this incredibly idyllic view of the river that is really quite something huh yeah I feel so fortunate this little chunk line wasn't actually available when I first came in view at the property and then my complete luck her chance I should say I ended up with it and it's just been super dreamy to have it for sure and then I'm guessing through there we've got your bathroom yeah so the shower for me I really wanted to recreate this kind of outdoor shower look that you see in a lot of really beautiful tropical places so having that kind of like woodgrain tile and of course plants in the shower was a nice element that I wanted to see happen in my home absolutely and with the placement of that window there it must really be like showering outside totally yeah having that window open definitely makes I feel like you're right there great and then composting toilet as well yep and I absolutely love it it's amazing in terms of composting toilets like super low maintenance and it pretty much does everything before you know it fantastic and then upstairs we've got the sleeping loft yeah after you this is a very cozy loft space yeah yeah I mean the king-size bed is a bit ridiculous but it was something that I had when I had in my bigger home and so I was like adamant that once you sleep in a king-sized bed it's really hard to go down in size but now that I have it up here I'm like okay it's a little bit excessive but nice that you knew what was important to you and managed to find a way to fit it in yeah absolutely it is literally just a bedroom up here there's room for my closet which is good but it's definitely yeah it's mostly bad that loft it's quite nice how you have built-in the hanging clothes storage up here as well yeah I like having that open look for it and originally we were kind of putting something there but I wanted it to be open to downstairs as well and so I'm grateful that there is space for a closet here and having it there actually works quite perfectly so how long have you been living in the tiny house now I moved in in the middle of February so I guess six months now and how are you finding yourself adjusting to tiny house life I love it oh yeah I'm so happy I look around it especially like when you build something that comes from your heart with the design then it just feels so cool to be in something that you had in your head in the middle of a sudden it's actually your living environment and having lived in the house already now for six months if you were to redesign anything or changing the elements in the home what would it be I really think I wish I had gone an extra two feet just to allow for a wood stove to have an alternative source of heat but other than that I don't know if I actually needed a washer and dryer but other than that I can't really yeah I can't think of anything that I would really really change so not utilizing the washer and dryer what are your alternatives I mean it's funny I actually have a fire pit out there with a pot of water on it and I've been washing my clothes like that probably old school really old school doing my dishes out there yeah I'm like fully immersed in the off-grid life right now so living tiny has taught me that I'm really able to do anything that I am actually self sustainable we talked about being self sustainable but actually being out here in the middle of winter and minus-20 I was like okay I'm doing this and I gotta get up and run the generator and I gotta make sure things don't freeze and it just made me feel like a bit of a bad ass to be honest and of course it really reminded me about what's important and it's just been this really beautiful experience because I do essentially feel like I'm outdoors I guess you would consider it kind of like glamping or so they say but you have all the features of a home so you're able to really just be immersed in your environment and I just can't speak highly enough about experience here and of course it's exactly my personal taste and style so there's that piece too when you wake up in the morning it's like this is my home that I made and I was able to afford to do that and now can we talk about budget what was the cost of building this home yeah so I think my budget when I started was around like $60,000 and then it definitely went up with some really important things that I don't regret installing like the in-floor heat and my fridge those kinds of things but it ended up being around $80,000 Jess this is such a beautiful home that you've created for yourself I love the style and I love how much of yourself you've actually built into the space so thank you so much for sharing it with me thank you so much for coming this really is just such a beautiful home you can really see that for Jess all of her hard work in the design process has really paid off and she now has a home that really meets her needs what's even cooler though is that in many ways it's pushed her outside of her comfort zone it's allowed her to connect with nature and learn so much more about what she is capable of as a human being and there is nothing more in life that we can ask for than that [Music] you

Channel: Living Big In A Tiny House

Views: 2,508,177

Rating: 4.8687983 out of 5

Keywords: living big in a tiny house, tiny house, tiny home, tiny house on wheels, wilderness home, off the grid, off grid living, tiny house living, tiny house life, small house, small house design, small spaces, small space design, small space living, alternative living, tiny house canada, tiny house tour, tiny house 2019, the tiny cabana, tiny house bc, okanagan tiny house, living big, tiny house wilderness, tiny house in the forest, simple living, minimalism

Id: uCJDbM8utVc

Length: 15min 11sec (911 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 28 2019