Finding Freedom- How Tiny Living Transformed Our Retirement

We are at that age in life of retirement. All we did is just kind of downsize our pieces. It can be done whether you're elderly, married, or if you're single. Welcome to my home, and this is my living room. This particular space, I wanted comfort for my husband and myself. Coming from a townhome that was 3,500 square feet, I made sure I had the house planned for this particular tiny home. A lot of these pieces came from the old home, from my couch to my pineapple sharing table there. We used this for our TV. This was a dresser piece that I had, as well as an extra nightstand piece that I incorporated into the smaller area, and it works for us. It's very comfortable. All we did is just kind of downsize our pieces. If we have people come over, I wanted to add more seating kind of in the breakfast area. I just wanted it to still feel like homey and not so crunched in here with all the furniture, so I tried to just space it out with just enough that we needed. I've had like little holiday cocktail parties, so then I pull out extra chairs for people to sit. We can have bigger groups up at our clubhouse, but just for having a cocktail party, this is perfect. I have the porches that you can set out during the summer, plus the one on the side of the house. I just open it up during those great months in Florida when it's nice and cool here in Central Florida, so you can use both porches at the same time and have people really free-flow walking through the home. Now we're in the kitchen part of my home. I'm not the cook in the family. My husband is, who owned a restaurant for 17 years. This worked for him. I wasn't sure, but in the beginning, he's like, yeah, this works. You're not lacking for space because even though from my 3,500-square-foot home, you still have a full-size refrigerator, the microwave and oven, along with the full-size dishwasher. I have all the amenities that I would need in a kitchen, so I haven't lost anything. There's so much storage and drawers and space from a kitchen, so it becomes more organized in the cabinets. I did have more stuff, and yes, we had storage for it, but was I gonna be needing that every day, or is that just particular holiday things? So I did shed more, but you definitely don't lose any space, so this was perfect for us. I love the kitchen because you still have all those things that you need that I had in a bigger home. It's just compacted a different way, but I still have everything that I need. One of our decisions to go from a 3,500-square-foot townhome down to a tiny home was really all the objects and shredding. I think in these days, there's so much in the houses, and simplifying it just kinda clears your mind from the clutter, so I was ready for that simpler life. My home, I believe they were listed around 189. I did come during a time of a special, and I believe we were at the 169 mark. That did include our carport and the two porches. I did pay separate for my shed, and that was custom through one of their vendors. Our lifestyle fee, I believe, right now runs 450 for the community. Again, the package was for the group of people of this neighborhood, just not an individual, so those discounts help. That includes all of your water, trash, lawn maintenance, cable and internet. It includes all our amenities. The only thing that I can think of that was outside that expense was just for our electric, and you can imagine coming from, whether it be a 3,500-square-foot home to 1,000 to now only 533, our costs have come down at least three times of what we were paying in a home. That helped with our next travel, and where we could spend some of that money that we saved on certain things. Welcome to my bathroom. This bathroom has the higher ceilings, which I love in the tiny home. It has your standard shower, tile wrapped all the way up, and then your sink area. All this is pretty standard, what I had in my regular home, so it's very spacious, and I like that you've got the sink and your toiletries on one side and then the shower on the other, and then the storage as well is abundant in this area. That's what I love about the bathroom. Here we're in the hallway where you have your laundry facilities, which is a full-size washer and dryer, plenty of storage space for towels and sheets, and then you have a full-size coat closet for hanging or shelves if you need more space for towels and things. Well, we've made it into the bedroom. It was important to me to have a king-size bed. They had units for the queen, and as you go through stages in your life, it's kind of what appeals to you. I did have other pieces of my furniture that fit this, so I'd have a nightstand with the light. I had a lingerie dresser, but then we have this nice built-in dresser as well, so it kind of gave us the his and hers as well as the full-size closets, so that was important for storage. In my other home, you always were looking for space, shoving things under the bed or trying to find attics and those kinds of things. That's one thing that appealed to me. I don't have anything underneath this bed in this room. This really opened it up with so much storage and having these great closets and extra storage here at the dresser. And then we just made it kind of into a small desk area for work until either we wanted to permanently be here where my husband worked out of the shed on a permanent basis or so that we could travel. It just made it convenient to have a base here at home with the computers and stuff. Right off our large bedroom, we have a patio. You can watch the people go by in the neighborhood and then have a great sunset behind you here on the patio. So it's great to have cocktails with neighbors and just catch up. I fell in love with this place from day one. It met all of my needs and my husband's needs. We did downsize from 3,500 square feet to a 533-square-foot tiny home with a shed. It can be done whether you're elderly, married, or if you're single, one of these homes will work for you. One of the things that my husband and I had talked about if we were gonna make a move, it was gonna be a move that we sold our home and that we took the funds from that to pay cash for our next home. We did that because we are at that age in life of retirement coming on. So that was important for us to have our tiny home paid for where we just had the lifestyle fee here at Simple Life. We liked it under one invoice, one umbrella to be able to do that, and that was a big choice, but it made a difference for us kind of just compacting our lives, our bills, our everything, and just making life easier to live. Thank you for coming to watch my tiny home tour, and I hope this brought you some insight where you can go next and see your tiny home.