From Shed to Tiny Home - A Stunning Transformation

Some may say you should be a perfectionist when building a house. I'm saying just go for it. I also didn't have any power at that time so all of this was built by hand. Eugene likes to build little, we call them features, so this is a feature because I'm a little challenged in the height department. When I met him in 2016 he was like I live in a shack in the woods and I just loved that idea. Hi I'm Marlena and my name is Eugene and this is the house that we built all by ourselves. Come check it out. So this is our kitchen and it's a small little kitchen in a small little house but it kind of gets the job done and this is our fridge which is nice and large actually and very exciting because we had a small like propane powered fridge for a while and it was just hard to keep a lot of stuff in there so we have a big fridge now. We're grid connected now but we were fully off grid for a while and so everything was like propane or solar powered and we got more solar panels so we could have a bigger fridge and that was one of the first things we bought. It felt like a very nice purchase, a good upgrade. A lot of stuff in here as in most of our house was reused and taken from other places and sort of repurposed into here. This butcher block came from my grandfather's house where I'm from in Mississippi and we went and got it and brought it here and used some more of it in other places but it feels really nice to like have a piece of his home like in our home. These cabinets I think were some maybe some old fence panels and these were doorknobs were in some trash pile. Our whole thing is like repurposing and just seeing like where things will fit in. A lot of things we we learned as we went and didn't learn once we completed something so this is not the best rendition of a really easy to use kitchen cabinet. I will say it gets quite annoying you have to kind of shine a flashlight in and like get your things out but it works. One of our mottos is good enough for our house and it is. This is a propane stove which again we were fully off grid for seven years so you know wasn't electric and it's kind of like built in here at this point. Most things we didn't really plan we just kind of tumbled down a hill and landed. We don't live too far from town but we don't really go out that much to eat so we pretty much just cook everything here and it works and then like we have a nice deep sink like a mop sink I think they call it which is helpful you can kind of stack stuff up until you need to wash it. So under the sink is just recycling which is kind of full right now and soap and like cleaners and stuff and then this is Eugene likes to build little we call them features so this is a feature because I'm a little challenged in the height department so we have these storage shelves up here so we have this like little step stool where I can get up and kind of get to what I need to get. I don't know how much weight this holds. It holds me so it's good. It was a very sweet gesture. I appreciated it. So on the other side of the kitchen is our pantry. It's very skinny. If I ever became larger in some way I would really struggle in there it's like a really tiny pantry but it works. This is open right now. It has screen here and it has these big glass shutters that close because being off-grid it's really important that we can open the windows and open the house because we're in Texas and it gets quite hot and you need a blow through and it's just really nice to be open to the elements but these were made with sliding glass doors that Eugene found on the side of the road and framed them in and they now are here. Yes we have our little table. It's a small kitchen. You can't really have a dinner party in here but you can have one other person if you want and it works. I first came out here as a caretaker for the property and after nine years the owner allowed me to purchase the top of the hill here in the middle of her property. It was kind of like a challenge that I took on for myself as I really wanted to not live in the city anymore and so initially I went ahead and built this deck. I got a tent and I started living out here not full-time but I would try to squeeze as many days as I could out of living here and then at one point I decided that I needed a room because the bugs would attack my tent. The wind was really thrashing my tent. It felt like I was living on a ship and I started finding little jobs in town, well construction jobs and handyman jobs and so I started accumulating materials and it took me about two years slowly to build that room. When I met him in 2016 he was like I live in a shack in the woods and I just loved that idea. For whatever reason it sounded very romantic. So I came out and it kind of was and then you were saying that with two people the building really went a lot faster. Yes, within three months I think we built a whole other bedroom, the entire kitchen, the bathroom, the bathroom, put in the running water and got a water tank so that all happened really quick. It was also kind of summer fall at that time the winter was coming and I really wanted her to stay with me so we quickly built it all up and still here eight years later. And I think this house all together with even with all the recycled materials wound up being about $20,000 including the solar systems and all the water systems. I mean most of the money is in the systems we had to get new like the filter system, the pump, the inverters, like all that kind of stuff. It's about $20,000 for this house all together. This is our living room. This was the first room that I built when I first came out here even before Marlena joined me. I just wanted to see if I can do it. It was kind of a challenge and I wanted to see how long it would take me to just do it completely by myself with no help. I also didn't have any power at that time so all of this was built by hand. So most of this room and the lumber in this room was leftovers from different jobs. I used to do a lot of kind of little construction jobs and helper jobs. The floor was a job I did in town where we took apart an old kid's gym. A lot of it was untreated and just raw wood and a lot of it had lines so they had like little red and yellow lines and so when we put it back in we just kind of broke it up to make it really cute and checkered. At first we only had a couple of solar panels then we got more and more so at one point we had 12 solar panels which was enough to get an air conditioner. The first three years here we did not have an air conditioner. As summers got hotter, noticeably hotter, we wound up getting this mini split. So this stove, so these people I worked for, I did a paint job on their house and they had this thing in their garage. This stove is perfect size at this point and it heats the whole house really well. We can get it up to 80-90 in here if we wanted to and then we have endless supply of cedar and oak and so very nice to be self-reliant in that sense and have all the heat we need whenever we need it. So this desk actually is something Marlena grew up with. It was a nature desk at her house in Mississippi where she grew up. The chair is just an old thrifty chair that matches it that we found at a thrift store. One of the reasons I chose this spot is it has a beautiful view over the hills and just we love natural light. We are in our bathroom now and our bathroom, I love our bathroom, it's so cute. We recently redid it and we are on a compost toilet here. So we built this cute little setup. You've got like a toilet and it's a dry compost toilet system. It has just a five gallon bucket under the toilet seat and some cedar, well really ash juniper, but some cedar tree fallings to like flush with. I mean I am okay with it because I'm not the one that empties it so I'll say we love it. Eugene may say differently but it's okay, it's great. We don't pee in it. This is a chamber pot. It's really old, my parents gave it to us as a wedding gift and so we pee in here or outside depending. So that really helps keep this not smelly and dry and really like light to empty it when it gets full. So I don't know, it's just something we're really used to at this point. The system doesn't use water. We're on 100% rain water so all water is important to us so we don't have to just flush water down the toilet which is nice. This sink was a new purchase. Our new purchases we're very proud of. We love them but we love used stuff too but you gotta have a mixture of both sometimes. And our shower here, everything again was like secondhand. I don't even remember where we found this shower. It has a cute little rock floor. We have water heaters here. They're like those on-demand propane water heaters. They work really well. So being off-grid and on 100% rain water, I think I have learned. I never was a long shower taker in my life in general but showers are pretty short and if it's summer and it's really droughty and we notice the water getting low then it's like turn it off while you're washing your hair kind of thing. And we have in here is our tub room so we have a bathtub in there but I take maybe one or two baths a year. I like the option but it just pains me to wash so much water down the drain when we're so reliant on every bit of water that we get. This tub was, I think we did some kind of trade. I don't remember what we traded for but we got this from somebody and we had to get the tub in. We got the tub in before we got this. Also someone gave us this window. Before we got this in, we got the tub in. So again, it's like we have built ourselves into our home. We will never switch the tub because I don't know how we get it out of here. So it is staying. One thing that worked for us as we look in retrospect about our lives, I think we both wanted this life and neither one of us really knew how to necessarily make it happen. We didn't have like lots of money to go buy a property and just build a house or have somebody build a house. Before I even found this place, I already knew I wanted to live out in nature and so I had a friend out in a nearby town who had a property and I would just spend time out there. I think it's about not feeling like you have to have every resource at your fingertips that you need to create the life you want. It's more taking steps in the direction. Like I was woofing and living on other people's land and I think there are opportunities like that available in probably around whatever is important to you. So I think that's a big piece of advice and also not being a perfectionist feels really important because if we were perfectionists, we would still be building this room probably. Some may say you should be a perfectionist when building a house. I'm saying just go for it. Your house will be good enough for you. So we are in our bedroom now where we sleep and our cats sleep. As you can see, there's only one here, but we have three that sleep on the bed, two wild ones. They don't come in the house, but if they do want to come in the house, specifically into the bedroom, this is how they can do it. Here's their little cat door. We put the cat door up high because we have critters. You know, I don't want to wake up in the night and have a raccoon. Although I guess a raccoon could actually come in there too, but they haven't yet. So for now it's just the cat's door, luckily. This is a queen-size bed, but we're really ready for a king-size bed. We're getting a little crowded by our cats. It's becoming a wonderful problem. And the little wood in the back that's a little bit different is some cedar fence leftovers from a friend that we got. These dressers hold a lot of clothes. We do have a closet also that's like a kind of double layer. My stuff's on the bottom. He's got some of his stuff up top. And yeah, it works fine. We don't have a ton of clothes. Whenever anything starts to become overflowing, it's like, okay, it's time to clean out and get rid of some stuff. So we kind of try to keep like a handle on it in that way. This is my grandfather's guitar that he left for me. I like like the history and the things that we have, like the family history. My favorite part about the bedroom is just waking up and pretty much feeling like I'm outside. Whenever I go stay like in a hotel or travel and I'm somewhere else, it's a little claustrophobic feeling to wake up and there'd be like there's one window over there. So we just love having the fresh air, like having these windows by the bed is really, really nice. Yeah. So welcome to the outside of our house. This is our little back screen room. It's the great place to hang out. The idea I got is when I lived in Peru in the jungle, everyone's home there is covered in screen. People don't even have walls. And so I really love that feeling where you're kind of protected from the bugs, but you can still be outside. So this is our utility closet. We did connect to the grid recently, but before this was where all our off-grid things were located. So here we have inverters. We got power coming down from the solar panels and then it gets pushed into these batteries. These batteries we actually found on eBay. They came out of wrecked electric vehicles, Nissan Leaf. And there was a company that would just resell them, supposedly at 80% capacity. Great batteries. We got them real cheap and they stored enough power for us to run our homestead. And at some point it was running even other structures that we built, but then we got too big. So now it's just our backup system at this point. So then we have our water. Our water is stored in water tanks and it goes into this house through the filters. So we have a sediment filter and like micro filter, which eliminates some plastic can leach into the water. So rust from the roof can leach into the water. So there's little micro particles all get filtered out. And then there can also be like viruses and bacteria in the tanks. And so we have UV filter that kills all of that. So our water is like really pure. We have a water tester and we have amazing water out here. So we have about, for the entire homestead, we have about 20,000 gallons of water that we store. And usually every time we're constantly searching on marketplace, every time we find a tank that's cheaper, because tanks are kind of expensive, when we find cheap use tanks, we quickly run out and grab it. So at this point, we probably have upwards of 15, 16 tanks all over the property. We actually have a propane fill up station that we set up. We used to have to go and fill up our propane in town, which was really annoying because we have propane stations everywhere. And so here now we have a truck that brings us, we have a giant propane tank that gets filled and then from it, we can fill all the little tiny tanks. So we're on our roof deck. I kind of got obsessed with views. So I really, one of the reasons I chose this spot is because it has really incredible views over the Hill Country. And so we build this little roof deck with little spiral staircase that comes up here. So yeah, we can sit and enjoy the Hill Country. You can see there's our solar panel setup. All the roof for this house is also came from projects that I used to do. So I didn't buy any of this roof and it's hodgepodge together. You can see there's different types of roof that were leftovers from different projects. Well, we work full-time here. We have three Airbnb rentals that we built ourselves and rent out. And then we have like a small retreat center. So we run that. I have a small jewelry business as well. So we're able to be here full-time and invite other people out here to enjoy the spaces and the land. So very, very lucky, blessed, privileged. So we are called Hill Country Nature Retreat and you can find us at that.com, Instagram, Facebook, all that. You can, if you want to stay in one of our rentals, you can find those links on our website too. Well, thanks for checking us out. And hopefully somebody that watches this might come out and stay at this place and get to experience this land.