Couple renovates gorgeous 12' wide Tiny House! On large community lot

Hi, I'm Bo. I'm Peggy. And this is our tiny house. We are in Hermosa Orchards Village in Durango, Colorado. We've been living in our tiny house for about five months now and the dimensions are 12 by 36 feet. So here at Hermosa Orchards Village, we pay $900 a month for the lot and that includes trash, water, beautiful apple orchard, sauna, pond, and some pretty epic views. Million dollar views, mountain biking, hiking, camping. Everything is just right outside the door. So it's pretty epic. One of the more unique features about our home is that we have a fenced in yard and a shed in the back, which allows for a little bit of privacy as well as storage, which is really important when you're living tiny. So that's pretty much it for the outside. If you want to follow us, come on and check out the inside. Welcome to our tiny house. 423 square feet of love. I found this tiny house pre-owned online. When we first got it, it was pretty bare bones. Since we've moved in, we've done a lot of little changes here and there just to make it work for us. I think some things that I like about the layout now is that it's starting to feel more like a cozy home that you, you know that you have a spot for this thing because you built it and that's super important. I really love that. We've really taken into consideration the storage that we do have and we've maximized those things to work for us. Starting behind me is the kitchen. First we have this little pullout when we are preparing meals, bring over a prepping station. If I was doing the dishes or what have you, it's so lovely to have this extra space. So I'm thankful that we kept it because it's really quite lovely. Moving into some of the kitchen storage. All of these were just bare bones squares, just empty. So what we've done, one of my favorite things that Bo has done for our dishes is that he created this pullout shelf so we can have our dishes more accessible easily. And the same thing with the glassware, having this pull out instead of just a huge square because looking at it and stacking it wasn't practical for us. It wasn't usable. So he's done such a great job and even down here he's placed more of the pullouts as well for our glass storage and things like that. Having multiple tiers really helps add to the storage capacity for the space. We also didn't have any pullout drawers, so where the heck is our silverware going to go? Bo did all of this. He put on these faces, measured painstakingly to make it work for us so that there is a place for silverware, there is a place for gadgets and there is a place for our like our bottles and things that you just kind of take for granted in a normal home. Usually that's just part of what is, but here it wasn't. Even like you're used to cabinetry mounted on the walls, which we don't have here. So making this space work was really lovely. I have a lot of plants. I am a plant mama and Bo helped accommodate them by creating all these shelves. We'll probably add some more shelves at some point, but this whole space has really transitioned in a lovely way. Something that I'm used to in my former house was a lot, a lot of counter space. So I had my appliances kind of lined up and living tiny. When you have a giant air fryer or you have your rice cooker and you have all these things that you're used to having on your counter space, you're again forced to become mindful of what do I need on the day to day basis? What needs to be in my immediate reach and then what can go up and store. So I'm really thankful that this was a preexisting shelf on top of the microwave. So we're able to put like the rice cooker and the Ninja up there and the steamer and things like that. So the original sink in the space was this size of usable metal sink and this much of a built in dishwasher that was very tiny that also took up a ton of space down here. It took up probably like this much of the inside space, which doesn't make sense when you enjoy washing dishes and also live tiny and need somewhere to put your cleaning supplies or your recyclables or things that you want hidden in a kitchen. So we purchased this sink from Costco. Thankfully it's really lovely and it's got the depth that we need and the space we need with also this drying rack on top. Because again, like you need to utilize your space. So having a drying rack was really important to us as far as the sink goes. We have this beautiful window behind us, which allows us this gorgeous view of this red mountain scape and on this side of the kitchen we have our refrigerator. One WTF about this is that the molding is actually missing from here to accommodate the door opening and this was something that was part of the house before we purchased it. We're still trying to work it out because we'd really like it to look finished and both probably going to create a piece of wood that will fit perfectly. I really love the kitchen space as in a lot of homes. The kitchen is the heart of the house. It's where you hang out the most and having this nice counter space to accommodate both our bodies and even that pullout butcher block is really nice so we can be in here without being on top of each other. Right through the kitchen is our living room where we, you know, live, hang out, drink coffee, do crossword puzzles every morning. We wanted a couch that we can both take naps on, so we filled the space as much as we could with this beautiful couch. It's really nice as we have these glass doors that we can kind of separate our space and Peggy's up in her office working and I'm down on my computer. It's kind of nice to have a little bit of a separation. It's a very cozy, nice, comfortable space. I am a lover of wood. 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You know, my previous tiny home, of course there was one door in one door out, and it's kind of nice to have multiple doors. You know, this just leads out to the backyard, straight shot to the shed so I can go build some stuff and grab some bikes or whatever out of the storage. And over here, you know, we have our TV and I built these shelves right here, which was a fun little project for this wall. I would like something that's either just stationary shelves, kind of an extension of these guys, or we've been talking about getting one of those tables that kind of sits really close to the wall and then slides out to where we can almost have like a little dinner party or whatever in here. And then we walk across the house on the other end is the bathroom in here. You know, is one of the huge draws to the house was of course the little Japanese soaking tub, our swimming pool. We do like to soak. It took us a minute to really figure it out because when we moved in, the water pressure was almost nothing would have been able to turn it on in the morning, gone to work, come home and turned it off and it would have been full by then. That's how bad the water pressure was, which was a luckily just an easy fix. Whoever plumbed this house didn't know what they were doing and they put the wrong little adapter on the house and now we have enough pressure to take baths, which is really nice. Besides adding some artwork and plants, we do have a new sink that we are going to replace this one with the showerhead and everything. We had to kind of put the little extender. Otherwise you're literally just standing there staring at the showerhead getting just drilled in the face. And then I think we're going to also try to figure out how to make the shower to a full square just so there's a little more room in there, which is funny because my last tiny house, the shower was smaller and it seemed like there was more room in it just because it was a square. So kind of extended this out a little somehow. I don't know. And then we added our fancy Japanese little toilet seat, which was really nice. We stayed at an Airbnb and they had all Japanese toilets in it and it was a thing that we got a little too used to. It's got warm water, heated seat. It's got a dryer on it. It's the most luxury part of our morning. This door is really nice of course. Is it just a space saver? Just added some hooks to the door. I'm going to cut out the drywall and create little cubbies. I'm going to kind of cut out and just create storage for little things that necessarily don't fit under the sink. More and more storage that can also be hidden when the doors open, which is really nice. The size of this bathroom is I think the size of my kitchen and almost living the area in my last tiny house. So it's really nice to where actually, you know, we could both brush our teeth at the same time or, you know, if someone's in the bathroom, it's not a complete no go area cause there's no room. So it's really nice. How people meet in this day and age on Tinder. We met, we met on Tinder. Actually we were both in salt Lake city. I was in my van and she was just cruising the country. You know, I think looking for a new place to live. We connected online and a month later she flew. I was in Southern California and she flew out to California and jumped in the van. And then like our, we like say our first date was like a week in the van driving through the desert all over California and kind of traveled around, ended up in Durango and I'm the front of the house manager at a local brewery called Anarchy Brewery. I pretty much moved here to ride mountain bikes. I am from New York and I moved out West about four years ago to Denver and have been in the Durango area for the past three months. I own my own business. I do consulting, coaching, spiritual cleansing work and hypnosis. It's called stay true wellness. I also do graphic design and social media. I love snowboarding. It's my main passion in life. Moving out to Colorado has been amazing for that. My commute used to be six hours from New York to Vermont and then went to 45 minutes from Denver to Loveland and now it'll be like 20 minutes. So I'm so looking forward to being spoiled in that way. I lived in, you know, I had a traditional house built in Austin, Texas and when I was done with all that, it was kind of like the let's sell everything and buy a van and built it out myself and drove away and kind of cruise to the West for a little over two years just riding bikes and snowboarding. And childhood best friend Brian decided to buy a catamaran sailboat and I spent sold my van and moved onto the boat with him and we sailed up and down the East coast and then into the Caribbean for a little over a year. Just kind of figuring out life and hanging out and meeting a lot of cool, interesting people and bought a motorcycle in Phoenix, cruised on the motorcycle for about a month or so, a little more and kind of just camping and driving around and came out to Durango to stay with a friend, kind of figure out what I wanted to do and eventually moved into an apartment which I did not like. So I got my first tiny house in New York. I had been living with like at the time three other people and was over New York living, had been on the road with Beau for a month and I didn't want to go back to New York. I was just done with that and I had friends in Denver so I went to Denver, found a property, a little Casita in the backyard of these people's property that was awesome. And it's funny that in my mind I was like, well, it's one more step closer to a tiny home. And I've been following a bunch of accounts on Instagrams like bungalows and cottages and tiny homes that just fell in love with the idea. And I loved that cottage that I had and I was there for maybe two years, two and a half. And Beau and I had reconnected and six hours of a commute for a relationship. One way is kind of rough. So we just started looking at how we could start a life together and started just looking at what was around and available. And I came across this place cause his tiny home was too tiny for two. There was no way. And this was just like a, and here we are. Now we're in the center of the house and we're going to go upstairs. Something nice about the kitchen area is that there is this tuck away stair system. So if we want to create more room in the kitchen and kind of block office area to make it private, we can, which is really nice if there's a bunch of guests in the house and up the side we have my office area on the way to my office area. We are created by Philip. He was a gift from my father when I was managing a speakeasy in New York City. And here's my office area, which I can almost stand up in fully. I'm five feet tall, so it's for something, but it's perfect for me to come over here and sit and work on my hypnosis scripts or meet with clients or also create content for social media. I love coming up here and listening to records too. I'm so thankful that this piece of furniture kind of fit here in the way it did. And also I have like some record storage as well and plants in the window, which gets the most sun. So I'm really thankful for this creative cozy space. The floor can be accommodated for even a yoga mat or a small fold up chair. A mattress for a friend who may want to stay the privacy that I do have, although it is open and there is no wall, it's still really nice to just have this little nook that I can zone out, put headphones in and listen to records or what have you. And that's it for my office loft space. Now we'll make our way to our bedroom loft on the other side. And here at the entrance to the bedroom, we have Miguel and back here is our bedroom. Something that I love about the bedroom area is that I'm able to stand up completely still. And then even when you move up the platform, I've still got quite a lot of headspace. And even for Bo, although he's taller than me, he's able to stand pretty comfortably in this area. I've noticed with a lot of tiny homes that a crouching thing happens when you're entering the bed space and to be free from that is so lovely because my back wouldn't really appreciate it. Despite how much yoga I may or may not do, being able to stand upright is more favorable for sure. We have in this space, a queen size bed also has drawer storage underneath because again, like can't say enough that storage is key in tiny homes. So we each have our own sides of storage, the lighting and the windows in here are really wonderful. I love to birdwatch. So we're able to look into the backyard and look at our bird feeders in the mornings, which is really great. On this side of the bedroom, we have the same showing that we saw on the other office side. Although this has a bit more depth, it's still not very practical for usage. So Bo was going to gut it and we're going to put in some drawers, which will be really lovely. So we can have access to clothing items that may be seasonal, but we still need access to. So I'm really looking forward to that home project happening. Overall, I love this bedroom so much. I love the spaciousness that there is in such a small space. It feels really open for me. It's like, this is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with and I get to hang out with her every day. And that is fricking awesome. I'd say that getting jars open is a lot easier. She's gotten stronger. She's working out. She's opening all my jars. It's super helpful that, that if there's something that is lacking in the home that would serve functional, I was like, I can build that for you. And it's so lovely that the way that he expresses his love by creating things that help make my life easier, but also are beneficial to you too. When, when you do that, this house was a one 65 and some friendly family, you know, loans made it a lot easier as opposed to trying to go through a bank. Cause it's basically a personal loan for a vehicle, which is not the friendliest loan. We love living at Hermosa Orchards. I mean the owners, Chris and Michelle and Larry are phenomenal humans. It's such a nice property too. There's adequate space between the homes, but also like you have the neighborhood kind of vibe of living here. The grounds covered in apple trees. It's so wonderful to have that accessibility to fresh fruit. If you want, if you're into apples. Well, I lived in Island Cove, a little more in town Durango, and I'm in a much smaller tiny house, which I loved. And it was perfect for me. It was great. The community was awesome. Everyone that lived in there was really cool. And it was a little tighter because it was in town. So, you know, it's just like the further away you get from any city, the more open everything is. So moving out here, it's really nice. Like Peggy said, it's, you know, our neighbors are not on top of us. And it's like, they've done a really good job at just laying out the space in between houses here. One of the largest benefits to choosing to live tiny for me is that it forces you to become mindful with your purchases and the decisions you make and what you bring into the home. You know, we don't have that guest bedroom closet that we get to shove all of our seasonal stuff in. We have our shed, you know, but it's like, that's mostly gear. I am a sentimental person. I'm an art collector. I like things and for the first time had all my belongings in one state of Colorado. And throughout my life, I'm used to having a storage unit, especially living in New York. It's just something that you always have. You live in a bedroom, you've got your stuff in a storage unit. So selling things and downsizing has been a work in progress for me, but I love that I am able to kind of curate things in a way that's very thoughtful. When you have minimal amount of space, it really forces you to assess what's important and kind of Marie Kondo things like how much joy does this bring me? Do I need this? Like a tangible thing is lovely. It doesn't replace a memory. It always lives inside our mind and our hearts. However, you know, the physical thing is just the reminder. So to be able to shed that, it's been a really nice personal growth process as well. Remember save 15% off your Holzkern purchase with our code tiny house. Use our link in the description or scan the QR code on the screen. 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. Thanks guys. Have a good one.