Ingenious DIY Tiny House Design Ideas using Salvaged Materials! 🤯

Hi, it's Alexis and Christian from Tiny House Expedition, and we built our tiny house way back in 2014. With the help of friends and family, over nine months of ups and downs and trial and error, it was all worth it in the end. We built a cozy custom home of our own that led us to an adventure of a lifetime, and now we're working on a shuttle bus conversion. In our DIY Tiny Home Build Stories series, we hope to inspire and empower you to take on your own build by yourself or with help. I needed help. I definitely needed help. Hello, my name is Christopher Moorhead, and this is my tiny house I designed and built, and we are here on the outskirts of Asheville, North Carolina. The house was designed around the concept of being left-handed. I'm extremely left-handed, so everything has more of a contour shape or ergonomics or body mechanics that are centered around that aspect of my life. So some folks come in, they don't understand why things are a certain way, but pretty much everyone that's been on Team Lefty seems to jump right into the flow of things and says, wow, this really makes sense. All that to say, I think a lot of this came from my background as an occupational therapist. That's a big chunk of what we do is designing space for body mechanics and ergonomics. Some of the things I've learned since I've been in the house, which is now a little over three years, is that I have come to the point where I've really gotten comfortable with the amount of space that I've decided works best for me. There's not a day that I wake up in the morning and don't think, wow, I made this, and I've created a shelter, and it's not too unpleasant to see with the eye. One of the things I did appreciate about the house that I did have prior to this was that it had a cathedral ceiling, and I found myself spending most and the majority of the time of my life in there outside of other activities. So I wanted to somehow capture that feeling to give a sense of depth and also to not feel like it was too claustrophobic. The Julia balconies are to each loft, and I wanted to give it a little bit more character. So what I thought of doing was repurposing some wine bottles, which a friend was nice enough to secure for me. They're both the same on both sides. They're fused together, so these are both on the inside and the outside of the loft walls. The big problem I did have with this when I was making that is I used what's called a hole saw, and the problem is it left this really big gap, but it didn't take long for me to figure out that it was the same exact dimensions that is covered by a basic five-cent gasket that you use to seal in garbage disposals. So I was able to secure all of these bottles, and it locked them into place. So a little bit more about the design aesthetic. I really wanted an open kind of balcony-esque feel that just overlooked everything and let sunlight in from the windows when you were up in the loft. It took a little bit of engineering, but I was able to salvage some scraps here and there from various salvage stores and basically anywhere I could find some scrap wood. Believe it or not, after looking at various types of stains, I really wanted a yellow and I couldn't find it, and I wasn't really too good at using dyes consistently without seeing it wash out. I ended up using turmeric. So this is basically an application of turmeric that's placed over the wood, and then I just put some clear coat over that. You can also see from this side the other side of the wine bottles that I'd fused together, and once again I used the gasket technique. These are just the gaskets that go around basic garbage disposal units. Going into the bathroom, the little small hallway in here, on the left I have more paper bag flooring, and over here there's more found scraps of hardwood flooring and engineered flooring. I did design the door around an old shower door. My folks would get me when they're remodeling their own bathroom, and of course I had enough shower doors for other projects as you'll see, but I somehow managed to dream up a good old barn door. The problem with barn doors is they don't offer much privacy for people who are outside of the house as far as sound or anything else, and so I wanted to get it as tight to the wall as possible, and for that you usually have handles or flush pulls, and in order to avoid having anything stick out too much that could ostensibly bump into your trim, I decided to do the flush pulls as cutouts, which are just f-holes much like on an upright base. As far as reusing repurposed materials that are left over from the materials that I'd had from other projects, when I was done finishing the ceiling with some reclaimed flooring from the cabin that was up the mountain that I helped a friend remove, I used the rest of that and I repurposed that. It became such a routine throughout the house of doing things like this I ended up calling it super cycling. So you're super recycling your recyclables, and the stains were actually all left over from projects I'd had over the past few decades. So it just again became part of an experiment with just design and having fun. So I'd gotten a really good steal at a local surplus company on a set of a corner shower doors for 40 bucks. When I took it home it was brand new in a box from 1996, hadn't been open, and as it turned out it was a $1,200 jacuzzi unit. So talk about a good score. I learned very quickly how to tile and I nicked Macy Miller's idea for using river stones for the floor. I thought that was an ingenious way to wash your feet while you're showering, and I was very much inspired by that. And the ceiling itself to keep water out from the electrical and to stop it from getting up in the beams, I'd installed a Panasonic fan which is actually a fantastic vent, but I'd also put a board up here just to kind of help to keep moisture just because of the sheer height of the jacuzzi doors. And then I added a little bit of paint afterwards which was quite a traps workout I gotta tell you, and to make it look a little more like marble or stone. The kitchen probably took longer than any other room in the house and at this point I felt pretty confident with my carpentry skills. One of the biggest problems I had with the bedroom which was above it is that I used reclaimed barn wood flooring and the issue was after one or two winters of working and building the house that in spite of the strongest decking screws imaginable to put it together, it did start to buckle and bend. But what do you want for cheap reclaimed barn wood flooring? However, I did come up with an elegant solution which was just encasing everything in to match the sepale. So I just continued with the perimeters for the actual crown molding. As far as challenges go, in this room the biggest challenge was figuring how to configure lighting. You want a well-lit area but you don't want a bunch of wires running around in an open loft beam situation, so I had to get a little creative. Now for my drop-down lights over the bar I ended up using the remaining parts of the wine bottles that I'd used for the portal windows for the lofts and then I was able to encase everything in some leftover sepale again from the beams and I had a couple extra parts of those wood and for those who aren't familiar with sepale it's known as the poor man's mahogany. It is infinitely more affordable, it looks beautiful, it looks just like mahogany but it's cheaper than oak. So I basically just made a container that held it in and tried to follow the same style of trim work that I'd done for the rest of the ceiling. And then over here I had some other solutions for lights. I had to run three sets of lights in the middle path and so I channeled out with a router basically a long tunnel and then we put the lights through there and ran them to the wall and I used what's known as pancakes which are basically small little boxes for lights. Then for this particular light I just ran an extra piece of sepale perpendicular to the beams and then just channeled a hole through that. Keeping with the uniqueness of each wall I've done a combination of the paper bag technique where I glued paper bags up and added stain and a little bit of clear coat. And then for the backdrop I wanted to make the world's largest headboard which is basically these are just a total collection of cigar boxes and lids and I pieced them together to make a pattern and filled them in with a little bit of strips and sides of cigar boxes. Originally I had a great idea of having it all be shelving then I thought with so many cigar boxes that you'd probably lose everything you put in them and also you'd probably end up kind of hurting your head when doing various bedroom activities mostly reading books. So I decided to just trim everything up flush and make it relatively all the same depth. I could tell you a little bit about what went into making the studio is definitely the most fun aspect and mostly everything was leftover from the leftover so this is super super cycling of materials. The biggest problem you have in any recording studio especially one this small is slapback and reverberation from all of the acoustics that are going on. So the way you manage this is through two techniques one is called diffusion and the other is called reflection. Diffusion or absorption rather is usually handled through foam which I have these up for and then more scraps of sepale and also the triangles that were cut off of the leftover framing from the house I was able to make reflectors and what these do is they take the sound basically if you think of sound kind of like water you're able to distribute it and have it splash in other areas and then it controls a lot of echoes and feedback and comb filters and things of that nature and so this seemed to be a really great setup for me and it's worked so far with both live instrumentation and for listening when I'm doing mix downs for songs but I did put them on giant command strip velcro in case I did need to move things around if it didn't work out. My advice to anyone building a tiny house and starting out and wants to do it themselves is become familiar with your local contractors and also become familiar with a lot of the resources in your area the more you put out what you're doing the more you broadcast to your community and to your associations what your intentions are and I believe that's a big part of getting a lot of generation coming and going as far as people finding things sometimes even just mentioning it to someone they subconsciously have their radar up for some thing you're trying to do and I noticed a lot of resources came in through that hey you know I've got these extra flooring scraps or you know I've got some wine bottles if you're making portal windows or do you need wine corks you know things of that nature I think it's very important to stay in communication with you know the people within your life so that they can also in any way possible kind of contribute and makes them feel like they're part of your process and it also strengthens your relationships I think. The most rewarding parts of building the home were being able to find materials that somehow seemingly would never work together and being able to come up with creative ways to manipulate them a lot of examples would be a neighbor up the mountain was refurbishing an old cabin and basically he said I could have all the flooring for free if I helped him take it apart so I did refinished it and I put it on the ceiling he was very disappointed with the fact that he was flooring for the ceiling and he said what are you just going to put flooring all over your house and the idea was born wow well if I salvage enough flooring scraps you know and do enough dumpster dives and just tell everyone to put their feelers out or give me the remnants of their projects I might be able to do a type of mosaic and so that's basically the irony of the entire house is that almost every wall every other surface has hardwood flooring except the floors they're bamboo floating bamboo floors but it took a little time obviously you got to have some order in the chaos okay so making patterns and finding things and wrapping but it was a fun project a lot of the things that were the biggest challenges ended up being the most fun you know and you probably see that in some of the details around the house that required an infinite amount of time and energy but in the end the reward made it so worthwhile I'm very much on team unity so everyone has their own way of doing things whether it's building a tiny house or just their approach to life or their approach to autonomy of any type I fully support that and in that sense building this house has really brought me into that space a little more intimately I have more of a deeper understanding and respect for the very different ways we do things and I think with a normal housing market you're kind of just stuck and put into these areas and I believe it does a lot to homogenize the way we feel we need to fill those spaces when you actually create your own living space it just shows how appreciative you can be of other people's unique interpretation of what works best for them and again much like the experience of building the house it also shows the rich tapestry of the contrast that we all have that actually is what makes everything so amazing as far as our approach to life hey it's Alexis again and Christian from tiny house expedition don't forget to like comment and subscribe and to watch the full tour of the diy tiny home you just learned about click over here