WOMAN lives in a TINY HOUSE so She Can TRAVEL the World

Hi, I'm Jenna from tiny house, giant journey. So a little over four years ago, I was working at a job that I wasn't passionate about. I had gone to school for filmmaking and I was working at a movie studio in Hollywood, but I felt stuck as I think a lot of people feel stuck in a job after they've gone to college for and gone into a lot of debt. My partner and I, at the time, we decided to live a more minimalistic lifestyle, something that would free up our finances. And with the savings that we had, we decided to build a tiny house and spend one year traveling on the road doing a photo journalism and blogging. We were just in way over our heads and it took us a year. I was working on it mostly only on weekends for the first six months and then I quit my job and started helping him full time. So I traveled for one year with this tiny house and we went about 25,000 miles, which is huge in one year. We went all the way up to the Arctic circle in Alaska and all the way down to Florida Keys, the Key West. This is the hitch end of my tiny house. It's been raining here a lot in Oregon. You can see that my reclaimed siding, it's 75-year-old wood siding from an old barn in Wisconsin. It's looking really dark right now. It probably weighs twice as much as it normally does because it's just soaking up all that rain. This is where I keep my propane tanks, so I have two 15-pound propane tanks. In the winter, I like to use this heat blanket because it helps with efficiency. I also had trouble with, when I was staying in Colorado, not getting enough propane pressure to my water heater and it actually broke down. So this was a must. I've also put on a winter skirt this year, just learning from my time in Colorado. I'm in Oregon now, so it's not quite as cold. It definitely has made the floor a lot warmer in my tiny house. This is the coldest part of the tiny house, heat rises, and with all the wind and cold air coming underneath the tiny house, this has definitely made it so I don't always have to wear slippers. This is the front or the license plate end of the tiny house. We found this on the side of the road at the time. We just thought, wow, this looks really cool with the old reclaimed wood. So it's not structural. It's kind of a nice handrail, in a way, because we don't have a handrail. It's just been aging with the tiny house. It's been on here for about two years now and every day it looks a little different and I really like it. I'm parked at an RV park in Oregon and this is my setup. I have my electricity here, it has a little meter on it. I just plug in right here, as you do. This is my sewer line, but since I don't have a black water system, I have a composting toilet. This is really just for gray water. Hello, Oregon. And this is my fresh water line, so this is going in with an RV hose and a filter into my fresh water system. I also have a 46 gallon, I think, fresh water tank in here, so when I am off grid, I can just fill. And I have a portable gray water tank as well that I hook up right where the sewer hose is hooked up when I'm off grid. And then I can dispose of that however. I also do movie nights out here, so I have a projection screen inside the tiny house and it can hang right here, that's what these hooks are for. I bring my projector out here, it's battery powered and everything works off of my wifi. It's hailing now. So now we're inside my tiny house. This first little area is just like this tiny little mudroom area where I put my boots. It's also where I keep my dog's dishes. Directly to my right in the bump out area, so because we have the porch, it creates this little bump out, is the living room slash office slash spare bedroom. So I spend a lot of time here because I work from home. It's constantly evolving. Have outlets back here because this is where I work a lot of the time. There's USB plugs everywhere throughout this tiny house. The whole motif of the inside is very rustic using reclaimed materials, like this is all reclaimed wood that's exposed here from a barn in California that I was able to get on Craigslist. This is sort of my desk area. I'll sit here if it's just me having coffee in this morning to maybe move this ottoman out and do some work. Or if I have people over, but this is the full table. So when I move these ottomans, which of course has storage inside, so right now I have my snow gear because it's still winter and I go snowboarding just up the street. Seating for four comfortably. I've had actually six people just really close together. Three back here, three there, and since this is a pretty thin table, I really have to think hard about what I want to cook if I'm going to have a dinner party. I don't want everyone to have a big plate, so I mostly do like chili night. Chili is a great tiny house food because you can make it all in one pot and they go in little bowls or mugs or whatever because I don't have six bowls. Underside and bottom side is painted with chalkboard paint. This also turns into a spare bedroom. This is a futon mattress that fits perfectly. I was able to find it on Amazon. I flip this piece of plywood over and then this would be like a full size bed, I call it. Everything fits perfectly. It is a Kimberly wood stove. You can cook on top of it. It's stainless steel, so it's lighter than a cast iron and has a double combustion system. So really, really efficient. If you have a nice piece of hardwood, it can burn up to eight hours. I have a stove plate here for the bottom. We decided to raise it up instead of just having it flat on the floor because we wanted it to be counter height and so that we could get some extra storage space underneath. Probably the next thing everybody notices when they first come into my tiny house is my staircase. I call it a hidden staircase because a lot of times people come in here and they'll ask me, how do you get up into the loft? It's my closet, it's my pantry, and it's also my staircase. This is my closet. It is a lot smaller than most women's closets. I think that it's plenty though. Everything I own, I care about is one thing I tell people. I like having stories around everything. I love to travel. So even what I'm wearing right now, like I bought this in Peru. I got this in Alaska on my trip up to Alaska. It's a piece of jade. This is actually Mount Hood, which is just down the street. This is from Taiwan. This is from El Salvador. So all of my clothing items or accessories are from stories and experiences and they make me think of those things and it makes me care about each item in here. Plates, bowls, this is my water tank. So yeah. And then if you look under the sink over here, you will see my water heater. It's a tiny water heater. It's propane. It's instant. This is for burnable trash. I live in a campground. I have campfires often. I keep burnable trash in there. I have a composting pile and system outside. This is my indoor compost. Over here, I have my regular trash can and my recycle bin. Over here, it is my refrigerator. It's a Dometic RV refrigerator. It's a three-way, so it works off of propane or DC or AC. Spent a long time finishing these countertops. They were just big pieces of alligator juniper wood. We actually routed them out so they look really thick and so that keeps it lightweight. It's actually hollow behind here too. So it gives the facade of having a thick wood slab countertop without having the weight. I found this at the ReStore recently and it's just a closet door, an antique closet door. So it can fold away. It snaps into place with magnets, so just like that. It can actually open up. I felt like my house got really dark when this was closed. So when nobody's using it, I keep those ventilated. I have a composting toilet, the Nature's Head composting toilet. It's pretty popular in the tiny house world. So this is my shower. It's 24 by 32 inches. So 32 by 32 is a standard shower. I think the smallest you can normally put in a regular size house. Mine's a little smaller than that, but because I've extended out this curtain rod and one bonus about having a metal shower is you can use magnets. So I'll magnetize things like even all the way out to here. So really the only part that's small is down by my feet. I decided to go with a tub for a couple of reasons. The dog mostly. I can't really bathe in there. It's for her. It's really nice for giving dog baths. Plenty of headroom for me. I'm five foot four. I have a five inch mattress. It's a Japanese style mattress. So it has netting underneath it, which is great. It means I don't have to flip it. I was worried about moisture getting underneath it and getting mold. And with that netting, it sort of has alleviated that problem. This is my dog, Celice. She has been part of the tiny house, the entire project. Got her when we were building. And so she's more comfortable in the tiny house than any other house, I would say. Five windows, they all open. So great ventilation. I don't have air conditioning. So I actually have a third floor, I like to say. This opens up completely and I can sit on the roof. It's really nice on a clear night to watch the stars up here. And when I want darkness, I have this little shade. So if I'm sleeping in or something like that. If you're looking into downsizing or building a tiny house, there's lots of resources out there now that were not available when I was building. There's obviously some great YouTube channels, as you're watching right now. I would say going to a build workshop is not a bad idea. I went to a tumbleweed build workshop at the time. It was the only kind of build workshops available. And it taught me a lot because I had zero experience. I used to teach them, actually, later on, after we finished building the tiny house, they hired me to teach those workshops. I'm a big advocate for them because I know what goes into designing those workshops and what they actually mean. And there's plenty of them out there now. What can a tiny house do for you? For me, I have always been a wanderlust kind of person. I like to travel and I loved traveling with the tiny house. But now that it's parked, I save so much money that I'm able to travel abroad. I travel three months out of the year. I visit five new countries a year as a minimum. And my goal is to visit every country before I die. This is a house that facilitates my life and my passions, not the other way around. I don't work for my house. It works for me. Thanks for watching, guys. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to hit the like button and subscribe. If you're new to the channel, be sure to check out Jenna's channel, Tiny House Giant Journey, linked up in the description. We did a video on her channel about my van as well, so be sure to check that out. And until next time, guys, we will see you later.