Author: Cassandra Hui

Living in and building off-grid tiny homes

Where Do You Put All Your Stuff in a Tiny Home?

This article has been reviewed in accordance with our editorial policy.

As a tiny houser, I get this question a lot. One of the main reasons people can’t understand our lifestyle is because they have too many things to be able to move into a smaller area. I am constantly answering the question of where I put my stuff. When we first started tiny we moved into a 35 foot trailer, about 280 square feet, with two very large lofts. Then we down sized to a 40 foot container, with 5 foot of that turned into a covered porch and no lofts. We are currently living in a 14 by 8 foot cargo trailer, 112 square feet. All while having five amazing dogs. Going tiny doesn’t mean you don’t get the opportunity to own nice things, in fact it’s the opposite.

I tend to answer this question with “What stuff?” To be fair my husband or I have never been “stuff” people. We don’t tend to hold onto things we don’t use. My husband and I first met in Virginia, later we decided to move to Nevada. We fit everything we owned in the back of our Subaru Outback, besides his motorcycle which he drove there first. We have never really had a lot of things, so going tiny was not a huge mindset shift for us. But I want to explain to everyone all of the benefits of having less “stuff”.

I do not have a lot of things, but I have everything I need. For instance, I do not have a lot of clothes. It will surprise people when I tell them I have four short sleeved shirts, three long, three tank tops, one pair of shorts, two pairs of jeans, four dresses, and some work clothes. But in reality this is more than enough. When you work five days a week and are only off two, not to mention doing laundry once a week, there are more than enough outfits for every season. I don’t need anymore, and honestly I don’t want any more. Every day I get to wear my favorite shirt, my favorite coat, my favorite pair of shoes. What could be better than that? I don’t own a lot of things, so when I buy something I make sure it’s something I love. Quality over quantity.

There have been many studies on the psychology of choices. I find it interesting that people assume the more choices they have the happier they will be, however that is not the case. There have been some very interesting examples of the stress of choices. When people are faced with two different clothing stores, one has black and white shirts and the other has thirty different types of shirts, almost all choose the store with more options. Say you walk into this store, now you must choose between red, blue, navy, green, patterned… and so on. In the end you are just as happy with whatever shirt you choose, however psychologists have shown that people faced with an abundance of choices stress over picking the right one. They are so concern about picking the right shirt so that they don’t regret their decision and want a different one later. However, in the end it doesn’t matter. Opening a closet overfilled with cloths you barely wear is only causing undo mental stress on yourself. By eliminating choices you eliminate some of your daily stress.

This post is not intended to tell everyone to throw everything away. I am only trying to help other understand that living tiny and having less things is not a bad thing. In the end you build your tiny house to fit your lifestyle. If you want extra room for storage, than build it. Don’t think you have to get rid of everything. I want to challenge you though to think about the things you own, that you don’t use. Remember at some point that was money. Only keeping the things you actually need will lower your overall stress, make your house easier to maintain, and everyday you get to use only your favorites.

Every six months to a year my husband and I go through our whole house and throw away the things we do not use anymore. As we change, our stuff does too. Over the years we have downsized and I cannot remember a single thing I used to have that I wish I still had.

Tiny Home Blog: 4 Years Living Tiny

This article has been reviewed in accordance with our editorial policy.

Have you ever wondered what the daily life of living tiny is actually like? When my husband and I tell people we live in a tiny home they always ask us what it’s like. It’s difficult to simplify your life to a few sentences, so I decided to start a blog to give others a window into the tiny lifestyle.

My husband and I have been living in a tiny house, off-grid and traveling, for almost 4 years now. We have had lots a great experiences and difficulties, but overall we have so many memories. I want to tell other more about what it’s like to live tiny.

 

The Tiny House Decision 

Several years ago my husband became intrigued by tiny homes. Having moved a lot as a child, owning a home was very important to him, although for most young couples it is difficult and costly. We had an additional battle to owning a home. We wanted to move a lot, starting our relationship in Virginia and then moving to Nevada, we knew we were going to continue to explore America before we landed on a permanent location. 

As he continued to research the practicality of a tiny home he became more fascinated by the idea. I remember first hearing about it and thinking he was crazy. We were currently living in an 800 sq ft apartment and I was thinking there was barely enough room as it was. In reality, there was plenty of room, it just wasn’t set up as well as a tiny home would be. I didn’t use all of the drawers or cupboards in the kitchen and there was plenty of open space. However, I still thought that downsizing was always negative. Why would someone want to have a smaller place?

As time went on, David showed me the benefits of living in a tiny house. To be honest, I really didn’t get it until we started actually living in one. A tiny home would be more than a project to us. It was a home that was affordable and relocatable. Being able to own a home for one third the price of average homes, was very appealing, but we also knew we wanted to travel around, and be able to live in different states, and this gave us the opportunity to do that without throwing so much money away on rent or constantly having to pack everything up.

Since David was so excited about it and I knew that he could build the house himself, I caved. 

 

Building Our First Tiny Home 

David had been a commercial roofer, framer, and dabbled in many other areas involved in building homes, when we decided to build our new tiny house. This meant that, thankfully, we only needed a little help. We bought a trailer and he went to work. 

Well actually we ordered a trailer that took three weeks for them to custom build, and when we got there we realized that they had very similar trailers that were ready for sale. But after all his research, my husband knew that the trailer was key, and needed to be strong enough to hold the entire home. So we wanted to be sure that we got the right one, and at the time did not know we could just go pick one up. 

 When we first decided to go tiny we were living in Las Vegas, NV. At the point of the buying our trailer I had received a great job opportunity with my work that required a move to Salt Lake City, UT. We decided that I would move to Utah in June and at the end of the Summer, when David had finished the house, he would then move up there with me. 

Still maintaining a full time job, he could only work on our home in the evenings and weekends. He had a couple friends help out here and there, but overall he worked almost non-stop to build us a home. There were a couple 3 day weekends I had that I went down to Vegas to visit him. And the progress was amazing, but I was still concerned it would be too small. However, I figured that even if we didn’t like it we could sell it and get our money back. 

My biggest shock was the bathroom. Even though it was the size of a regular small apartment bathroom, when you are only seeing a framed wall it looks so tiny! But I didn’t give up hope because my husband was so proud of the home and so excited. 

After a couple of months of non-stop labor, we had a home. Well, most of a home. It was not completely finished there were many more things we would have to learn along the way, but it was our home. I showed up to move the house back to Utah with David. 

 

The First Move

We ended up running into a rushed time frame with leases ending and we were just tired of being apart. So the house was not completely finished when we decided to move it. A few days before the move David did not feel confident enough to hook up our first solar set up. So we contacted a solar company and told them about our situation. They said they could send someone out to hook it up for us. 

However, when the technician got there he said that he was only giving us a quote and they couldn’t do any work for another couple weeks, even though we had explained over the phone that we were moving in two days. To be honest, sometimes people would just show up to look at our tiny house, even if they knew they couldn’t actual help. At times it has been difficult when people just assume they can take up your time to check out your home. But it has been part of the journey. So we decided to move without having the solar hooked up and some other finishes. 

We spent a lot of time making sure our truck was prepared to pull such a heavy item. We upgraded the hitch and bought a heavy duty ball and receiver. And we got all the fluids changed and checked. We had bought this truck, a F-350, specifically for towing our home.

The move was not easy. Our house was 35 feet (10.7 m) long, by 8′ 6″ (2.6 m) wide and weighed 21,700 lbs (9843 kg)! The house was heavy not easy to pull, even for an experienced driver like my husband. Going down hill there were times when the house swayed so much we were concerned about losing control. Later on we bough sway control bars, these helped a ton! But also the truck was overheating, we found out later that it had a blown head gasket. 

Through it all, we finally made it to our new location, Utah. 

The First Months of Living Tiny

When we first got to Utah we decided to stay on BLM land until we could figure out a good location or buy land. The first place we moved to was open and used for camping and dirt bike riding. If you want to know the struggles we went through to figure how to get an address, check out my post here. 

So we had moved without having our solar hooked up. We could still run off of a generator, but we could not leave it on constantly because it would run out of fuel and just cost way to much. This also meant that we couldn’t use a fridge, because everything would go bad overnight, when the power was off. But I don’t think we had even bought a fridge at this point.

I remember we had all of our stuff piled up in the living room and we sitting on lawn chairs in the kitchen saying at least it was ours. We still had a lot to finish. The walls weren’t completely done, the floors weren’t finished, and we didn’t have a fridge or an oven. We were just using a propane camping cook top, which ended up lasting us a year. But it was ours. 

Over the next couple of months we finished up most of the house so it was livable. David made friends with an electrician who also did solar and he taught David how to hook up our solar. It is funny to think back to those times, as now my husband has installed at least a hundred solar systems and has even built his own battery bank, but everyone starts somewhere. 

Finding a Location for Our Tiny House

There, in Utah, David started sub contracting for one of the largest tiny house companies in America. This is when he knew that building tiny homes was his passion. He learned many tricks for solar, mechanical, electrical, and several other areas of building tiny homes. I was working as a director of administration right outside of Salt Lake City. 

When we first moved to Utah we found some BLM land to park on. But you can only stay on BLM land for a couple of weeks. So we found a couple of other BLM spots to go to as well. At one point we parked on some land and then there was a huge snow storm, there was a foot and a half of snow everywhere and it was an uphill climb to get out of that spot. 

A ranger came and told us we had been there too long and needed to leave, we explained that we couldn’t due to the snow. She was somewhat rude and flat out mean when she came back to tell us to leave again. And then she got her truck stuck in the snow. We didn’t hear from her again but we moved soon after anywhere, the snow had cleared up enough. 

After that we went to an overnight parking lot for campers at a sporting goods store. We spoke to the general manager and were told that the store didn’t care how long we stayed there, but technically someone else could still complain about us. There were a few other trailers there as well. Several had taken their tires off and were propped up on blocks, this way they couldn’t be towed even if someone did want to complain.

Living tiny we have come to learn that it doesn’t matter what people are doing around you, in a tiny house you stand out and will always get called out. This place was in a city and very public. There were a few people who stopped by to look at our tiny house. David made a few friends and we found a place we could stay in exchange for keeping people from trespassing on the property. 

This location was an hour drive from work for both of us and there was no cell phone service. It was very relaxing. It was actually quite a bit of work to keep people off of the land as they were used to going there and destroying the property that the owner kept there, even with all of the no trespassing signs. But it was a great location for us at the time. 

After that we found another location closer to our work we could live and moved the house there. Within the first 6 months of living tiny we became pros at moving a large tiny house. Our home was 35 feet long! We then decided to take advantage of our mobile home and moved to Virginia. 

Our Second Tiny Home

We stayed in Virginia for almost 2 years. This was were we grew up and had met each other. So it was nice to get to spend some time around family and old friends. Plus there we had a great place to live, on a good friend’s property. 

We decided to sell our first tiny house so we could make a small profit and also build another house. It was bitter sweet to sell our tiny house, but we knew that better things were coming. We were able to sell the house for just over what we had put into it only in cost of materials. And then we started building our next tiny house, a container home.

Now we needed to sell the first house in order to get the money to start on the second house. We thought about the best way to go about switching homes, also having 5 dogs to consider. Deciding that trying to rent an apartment for two months and handle pet deposits wasn’t worth it. We bought a tent and camped out for a couple months. 

This probably sounds more dramatic than it was. Our tent was mostly just a place to keep our stuff and sleep at night. We still had our cook top and a cooler for some food. But we bought a lot of food or ate at family’s homes. We still had a gym with a shower and a relatively normal life, although it did snow our first night in the tent. 

Needless to say we were very passionate about our dream of building tiny homes. We got the container as soon as we could and got to work. David was again still working a full time job to help support us as he built our second home. We weekends and evenings was when the house got built.

Our container home was smaller than our first one, and obviously not as mobile since it was not on a trailer. But it was perfect for us. We didn’t need any more space and it had aspects that we had wanted to change in the last home. The rustic metal exterior and modern simple interior were a perfect compliment. And again this home was solar. 

But as the our tiny home story goes, we decided to move again. 

Our Third Tiny Home

I had gotten a great job offer to move to the Pacific North West, of course the other side of the country, and we knew that there would be lots of tiny home opportunities out there as well. Already getting antsy staying in the same place for too long, we couldn’t turn down the offer. Next was deciding what to live in to move there.

At first we considered selling our container home. But then we thought that it may be better to keep and move it out west when we found a more permanent spot and bought land. So what would we live in until then?

It seemed like the best idea was to buy a cargo trailer and renovate it along the way to be a conversion. It couldn’t be any worse than living in a tent. So we bought a trailer and a heater, took some of our solar with us, and moved to the other side of America. We were able to store all of our stuff, not like that’s very much, and my car in the trailer while we moved. 

When we got to Vancouver, Washington we only had a mattress, cook top, a toilet and solar. But soon we had bought some other things, like a mini fridge, and built in a bed. At first we were trying to find somewhere to park for free, as there were lots of trailers parked everywhere on the streets. Alas we were not so lucky. Thinking that we would blend in more, now that it was a trailer and not a tiny house hooked to our truck. But we did not, we had a nice trailer with solar panels on the sides. 

We found a place to rent for a couple months, but David started working for another large tiny house company who had room for us to stay. In return we would watch over their shop in the evenings and weekends, since they had had some problems with theft. This was convenient as David didn’t have a commute to work and had access to the right tools. 

We was able to quickly build out our trailer into a beautiful home since it was so small. And being that at this point he had already worked on hundreds of tiny homes. Even though it is much smaller than our first tiny home, this one is my favorite. It has been so easy to move and travel in and it is simple but has everything we need.

 

What’s Next for Our Tiny Home Business

We built a passion for tiny living several years ago and since then we have learned and lived it everyday. David has built tiny homes for lots of large tiny house companies and we have seen the process and business for years now. We have loved our journey and we want others to have the option of an affordable tiny home as well. As far as I know, we are the only tiny house company who’s owners actually live tiny. We have been through the journey and have built our own homes with mistakes as well. We know the best way to set up a tiny house now and we have lived it. 

Right now, I am going back to school, pursuing my Ph.D. in Neuroscience as well as helping with our business and David is working with solar and building tiny homes. We are also working on building a house on a foundation, which will be around 650 sq ft, due to the county’s restrictions. 

 

We are currently living in 112 sq ft with our five dogs. We have lived off-grid in a tiny house for almost four years now! We know the benefits and the struggles. We know how to build a tiny home for practical long-term living. We know what it takes to live off-grid. Now we want others to be able to have the same. David has had years of experience specialized in building tiny homes and we have had years of experience in living in one as well. Check out our company, Specialized Tinys, LLC and contact us with any questions! 

–David and Cassandra