This is our personal story on how we went tiny and all of the homes we built.
In the Spring of 2015, David asked me what I thought about living in a tiny house. At that time we were living in an one bedroom apartment that was about 990 square feet and I thought he was crazy. But, before too long I began to change my mind. I saw how passionate he was about this and I knew he really wanted a home. Thinking about it more, I knew we were moving to Utah in several months and probably another couple states after that. Renting seemed like a waste and buying a house was not a good option. Eventually I was convinced.
The next week he bought a trailer. He started drawing plans and we talked about ideas. We were unsure if his sister was going to live with us so we decided on a two bedroom house. He created one of the best designs that was ever built. Later we found out that another tiny house company loved it so much, they had one built from our pictures online and used it as their demo model.
At the time David was building our new house I had moved to Salt Lake City, UT for my new promotion. Only being a 5 and a half hour drive to Vegas, I was able to visit a few times as the house was built. I thought I was crazy. When I saw the space laid out for the bathroom, I didn’t even think I could turn around in it! But, we continued to build.
Eventually the time came that we needed to move into our house, even though it was not completely finished. The first step was to pull the house 400 miles! We had bought a diesel truck that was capable of pulling something so heavy. This was a 35 foot tiny house made almost entirely our of wood, weighing in at 16,750 lbs. We successfully pulled the house in 7 hours, besides having issues with our truck overheating (we found out later that it had a blown head gasket and that sucker still pulled it all the way).
We, unfortunately, did not have quite enough time to finish the house. David, at this point, was not sure how to hook up the solar and we did not have our wood stove yet. So our only source of power was a small generator. We had a bed and boxes full of our stuff. Power was a little difficult. We could not run the generator constantly or we would run out of gas every day. We only turned it on when we needed it.
The biggest problem was heat. I was living in our house in Utah and David was traveling back and forth between Utah and Vegas, where he was working temporarily. I was using a small propane heater at night, it kept me warm enough. But Utah gets very cold in November. One night it froze everything under the house, being on wheels makes it harder to keep the house warm. Our thankless water heater froze and we had to buy a new one. The next day, David drove back to install a wood stove for me and only stayed that night before going back to Vegas.
Moving into our tiny house was not without it’s issues, but it also gave us a new look on life. It would have been much smoother if we had been able to get advise or if the house was finished. But we worked through it. And we had a home. David started working for another tiny house company and became good friends with a guy who helped us set up our solar. Of course, we still did not have anyone to ask advise from because almost no one who builds tiny homes actually lives in them.
We loved our home. We moved it around a few times until we found a more permanent place. We continued to work on it until it was mostly done. I began to embrace the tiny house life and I never felt like it was small, even the bathroom was plenty big enough!
After living in Utah for a year we decided to move again. We ended up moving back to Virginia, where we originally lived. We took our house with us and lived in it there for another few months, before we sold it so we could build another. Which led to another dilemma, where to live in the meantime!
To be continued in Part 2.