Her 1 Level Tiny House dream come true after severe health problems

Hi, I'm Susie and this is my tiny house. She is the Tiny Purple Butterfly Dreamer and I am in Hidden River RV community by Sun Outdoors and I am in Riverview, Florida. I've been living in my tiny house since September of 2020. I chose Cornerstone as my tiny house builder. She is 24 feet long. She's 20 feet inside and I have a four by four porch. She's eight and a half feet wide, which means she is street legal to be able to take her on the road. Our lot rent here is a little over $600 a month. You do have to pay for your utilities, electric, water, sewer, but when you live tiny, 40-50 bucks will get you for the whole month. I chose this particular lot because of the beautiful trees that just kind of canvas over my tiny house and it's very cool. It is in Florida, so it does get quite warm, but you know, I think I have, in my opinion, the best spot. Here at the park, we have a lot of amenities. We have a very nice clubhouse. Personally, I host every other Wednesday, a Wellness Wednesday class, that I help teach people about healthy living. I'd love to welcome you into my tiny house. Come take a look. Hi, welcome to the tiny purple butterfly dreamer. She's 195 square feet. When I originally was designing the house, I still had limited mobility and climbing stairs was a challenge for me. I had to learn how to redo that. The design that I picked was to have what's called a day bed. So during the day, it's a couch and then at night, it turns into my bed. I do live here with my kitty cat, Avery. So I did build a couple little features just for her. So here we are in my living room and I have the day bed. It's made up right now as a day bed and the back cushions and the cover comes off. So it will transition at nighttime into my bed. The wall was blank because I wasn't really sure how and what I wanted to bring into the space and some friends helped me build my shelves. I picked and chose what mementos I wanted to bring into the space. Here I have like a little courier cabinet that just has little mementos from different family members that hold a special place in my heart for them. It's a way for me to bring them into my space. I do have a TV and it is adjustable that if I'm in the kitchen area that I can watch TV. I'm not much of a TV person. I'm just not quite ready to let it go yet. Some things we we hold on to. I brought my kitty Avery here and she needed to be able to look outdoors and she's a little older. She's about 14 now so she will use the cushions to jump up and this is her little space. She also has a kitty door that I did have installed. Currently she does not go in and out. At one point I probably will screen in my porch and at that time I will give her access to be able to go in and out but during my build I wanted to go ahead and integrate it into it. Again a living tiny you want to use every nook and cranny and what we have here is three drawers that go the full length. They go from here all the way back. This is my clothes in here. This one here originally I wanted this to be my office. Unfortunately my kitty cat decided she wanted it so she's got her little blankie back there and then in here I have some more of my business oils and supplies and things like that. So the drawers are very sturdy. I am 65. I had a career a 35 plus year banking career where I worked my way up from filing signature cards to managing several offices and I really enjoyed that a lot. In about 2014 I was raising my great-nephew and he was a Boy Scout so we were camping and I noticed that I was not feeling well and from that point to about 2018 my health declined very significantly. I became immobile. I could no longer work. I could no longer care for him. I could no longer care for myself and went doctor after doctor after doctor test after test after test pill after pill after pill and we couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. Nobody knew what was wrong and what was happening was my muscles were basically wasting away. I was breaking bones by just opening a door trying to open a refrigerator. I would break bones and it was a very long journey. I weighed 60 pounds. Bag of broken bones. My spine had collapsed and I lost seven and a half inches of height and every bone broke. I ended up hiring a new doctor. He walked in the room and he introduced himself and he says I know exactly what's wrong with you. No one is going to believe me or believe us because it's so rare. He said we have to build a team. He said because I can't get the tests approved to prove that this is what you have and it took him a lot of phone calls, a lot of work, but we did find an oncologist who ran the test and proved that I had this disease called hypophosphatemia, which is basically I waste all of my phosphorous. I don't hold on to it. When you don't hold on to it, you don't hold on to your calcium or your active vitamin D3, which is why my bones broke, which is why my teeth had decayed, you know the muscles wasting away. It explained everything. In 2020, I found through my research an antibody treatment and I started on that treatment in January of 2020 and the whole world opened up for me from there because I progressed from the wheelchair to the walker to a cane to I don't use any mobility anything and from there from 2018 to 2020, I was watching tiny house shows and I said I'm going to build a tiny house and I'm going to move to Florida and I said that every day to everybody I met for two years and I wrote it in my journal. I'm going to build a tiny house and I'm going to move to Florida and it happened. Outside of my living room is what I call my office and I have a standing desk that I work in and I'm able to just kind of do some work from here and if I seem to be working a little bit longer and get fatigued, I can always just pull the stool out, put my laptop down on top of my printer and work from that way and then we transition into my kitchen area. You see I chose purple. Purple is my favorite color and so I chose the purple laminate for the countertops. I did choose just the one big sink which I enjoy because I do have a little pan that I can put in there to do my dishes. I have a drying rack that the dishes can dry on. I chose to have the window right here again because looking out doors while you're washing your vegetables, cleaning your dishes always is nice. I do have my drawers. This is kind of my office work drawer and office supplies are down here. I have my diffuser going. I am a wellness advocate for doTERRA. That's very healthy for your respiratory system. What I have here, this is my closet and I have my hanging clothes in here and I have my shoes and pocketbooks down on the bottom and they are the soft clothes so they close very gently. Up on top I have more storage for more books that I like to collect. Then as we move back, this goes more into my kitchen area. So I did opt for the pullout drawers which I highly recommend because it's so much easier to assess and get products that you're needing. It just flows very nice to be able to do that. So I have three of those. I went with the Splendid. It's a washer dryer combo so it will wash your clothes and then it dries. When you live tiny, you have less clothes so you have less laundry which is all really, really good. So it is a smaller space. You don't want to overload these type of washer dryers. You want to load it about halfway which is typically a week's worth of t-shirts and jeans, shorts for Florida. Underneath my washer dryer, I built the litter box so it's just on a roller so she's able to go in there and have her privacy that she needs. As we move further into my kitchen, I have another counter that's purple and I opted not to have an oven or a stovetop. I have a portable. I wanted the freedom to be able to have this counter to do more than just cooking on it. I wanted to be able to do more. So I've got my upper cabinets there and I've got more cabinets here to be able to store. And again, it's the soft clothes. You know, I recommend that. So everything that I need to be able to prepare a meal, to be able to juice. Right now, I'm making applesauce so I've got some apples cooking over here in my crock pot. Now what I opted for is the regular fridge but I went with the larger freezer and the reason is I meal prep and I eat out of my freezer. I like to play music. I usually have music blasting in here because it feels good and I've got a great dance floor right through here that I can, I can dance because you should sing and you should dance while you're cooking because when you're happy it goes into the food and then that helps nourish your body. One thing that I've noticed about living tiny, everything is compact of course. So you're not running from one end of the kitchen to the other end of the kitchen. Everything is right here at your fingertips. If you need a spice, boom, it's right here. If you need a pan, boom, it's right there. So you're not wasting your energy going from one end of a massive kitchen to the other. Everything is contained and it's freeing. I love it. I love it. Moving back, we go into my bathroom and I have a barn door and one thing that's unique about this barn door is it has magnetic paint on it and that is something that I chose because I like to have inspirational messages. Being able to close the door, look at myself in my mirror which I have hanging and talk to myself and encourage myself every day. Stepping into my bathroom, a couple things that I've done is I have handrails next to the toilet and I did choose a higher pedestal. You'll notice a lot of your toilets are small and you know I'm 65. I didn't want to be squatting so I did have a raised toilet built. Transitioning over to my sink underneath here, I have more storage. I live in Florida so my hurricane prep is underneath here so if I have to leave, I can grab and go. I have an on-demand water heater that is back in here. My kitty cat currently is laying on top of it. This is one of her little hiding spots and she's hiding in there right now. When I designed my shower, I did go with a larger shower. When I was building my house and even when I first moved in the house, I was still in a wheelchair and a walker and I could not stand in the shower. I do have a handrail in there but I could not stand for very long and I needed a bench to sit down. So I did go with the larger shower and now that I'm mobile and able to do it, I am able to enjoy a larger space. What I saw in the shows that I was watching with the tiny house is how happy everybody was and how they expressed freedom that they had. They were free of clutter. They were free of things that held them back. I was in an apartment complex with people that were 55 and older and it's like we were sent there and that was it. There was nothing else left and I went, I don't want to be contained by these walls. I don't want to spend my Saturday cleaning my house and washing laundry and I wanted more and I wanted to see the world. The tiny house on wheels, I can go anywhere and I can do anything and I can go see the world and I just think that's a beautiful thing and I know in my health journey that I want to see more. I want to meet more people. I want to help people and that's how bringing doTERRA into my tiny house living, it kind of like fills it full circle. But when I started watching the tiny house shows, I went, I can't bring all of this into my tiny house. If this is what I really want, you know, it's not going to fit. So I started doing some of the hacks that they said on the tiny house shows like turn your hangers the opposite direction at the beginning of the year and what you don't wear by the next season then get rid of those and I just started transitioning slowly through the two years of that getting rid of things and realizing I could live with less and that's the beauty of tiny house living is living with less. I decided to go with Cornerstone. They're a builder here in Florida and they build very strong structure houses. You know, we're in Florida, we have hurricanes, so they knew the regulations to follow for that and I felt very comfortable hiring them to build my little tiny house. I did put down a down payment on the house. I did finance my house. I currently do have a mortgage on it and Liberty Bank out of Utah is who did my tiny house loan for me. It cost around $65,000 and I ended up financing around $39,000 and I was able to get a 23-year loan but my goal is to pay it off beforehand when I win that lottery. So, we're waiting on that, you know, but there aren't a whole lot of banks that are open to tiny house loans because they are a different breed. Being a banker myself, what I realize is, you know, we need comparables. A bank needs to compare and you can't compare tiny houses. Some people have, you know, butcher block counters, you know, some people have laminate, some people have high-end finishes on their cabinets, some just go bare bones. So, you can't really compare apples to apples because every single one of them are different but I feel that as the tiny house movement gets stronger that that will become easier for them to come up with comparables. I did have this big vision at one point through my healing journey that I was going to travel the world in my tiny and go and help people, you know, go from one coast to the other coast and I can still do that and I'm still manifesting that and it will happen. Thank you for watching our video and for stopping by Tiny House Expedition, I'm Alexis and I'm Christian. Don't forget to like, comment and subscribe and for more tiny home tours and stories click the videos below and join us on Instagram for bonus content including face-to-face conversations with us. We hope to see you there. All right, thanks guys. Have a good one.