10 Yrs Ago He Built Tiny House w- No Experience NOW Amazing Homestead

Hello everybody, I'm Richard and this is my tiny house on my off-grid homestead down in southern Arizona. I have lived in my tiny house for over nine years now and the last five years I've lived on this off-grid property building it out. One of the nice things about kind of owning your own land out here and where I'm at in life is I kind of get to do whatever I want and with the way that our county does the building stuff you can kind of build whatever you want. So I've really had an opportunity to be like really creative with what I enjoy building out here. I got into ceramics about a year and a half ago because we were building a earthbag house and I had a ceramicist helping us with the earthbag house and he basically told me you just live in a giant coil pot. So I was like that's cool I should get into ceramics because I know so much about dirt and so it's just kind of a cool transition from the natural building world to more like functional wear and fine art sort of stuff. Really I just build. I love making things. I love being creative, just being outside, being in nature, hiking, rock climbing, stuff like that and just kind of exploring. I realized I'm kind of like a 12-year-old boy with a source of income and no rules out here. I live on a 24-acre off-grid property out here in southern Arizona. So I've lived on this property for over five years now. In that time we have built all kinds of different properties including a root cellar, workshop, studio space and a bunch of different dwellings for people to live in but more on that later. The tiny house is 32 feet long. It is 8'6 wide and it is 13'6 tall. So we are totally off-grid out here. We are completely 100% on solar. At this point we are having water trucked in but eventually our goal is to be completely off-grid with water and rainwater collection and then for a lot of our heating sources we'll use just normal propane tanks. So let's take a look inside. Welcome to my tiny home. This is a 250 square foot tiny house on wheels. When building this house I was really considering how to live in a tiny house as a 6'2 person. I didn't want like a super tiny loft or anything like that so for me having a house with a lot of big windows a very open feeling, very high ceilings was really important to me. So in building this house I had no construction experience. Over the last nine years I've gained a lot of construction experience and so there's definitely been some changes in the house that have upgraded now that I know what I'm doing a little bit more. Starting here in the bedroom, this is our little loft space. I wanted something where I could stand up and sit up comfortably and not feel really tight and constrained. Once we got this built out I have updated the closet a little bit to give a little bit more functionality. The original closet that was in here just felt very cramped so we ended up ripping that out. A couple other things that have changed is our couch situation. I had like a little pull-out couch and then just realized I never use that so we switched to a more traditional couch. So the other side of the house is the kitchen. This has been the biggest change that I've taken on over the last several years. We actually ended up completely ripping out the old kitchen and putting in brand new cabinets or new-to-me cabinets, concrete countertops which you don't typically see in a tiny house but this thing is not moving anymore. So I was comfortable with that and yeah just made it a lot more of a functional space. After living off-grid for so long I kind of learned some different skill sets and just yeah made everything better. So this house as it sits, I really love the functionality of it. You don't see a big difference from being on-grid to off-grid now that we've got a good solar system. We're able to plumb in water from our tanks and everything like that and then one of the features I really like is all of our gray water. So from our sink and our shower goes into like little garden beds and gets reused on the property. Recently we upgraded our solar system from 10,000 watts to 30,000 watts and that has been a huge game changer for me because I'm actually able to use electric heat and typically during the winter is the only time we would have problems with the 10,000 watt system because the daylight is so short but now I really have no issues running electric heat, our little heat pump mini split, anything on the property we can run including welders and crazy stuff like that. I worked in a corporate office kind of situation for like six, seven years and just was not really happy with that lifestyle and didn't see a good future with it. Went through like a two to three year period of like I hate my job and I would like sketch and start designing this house that I was going to build and then I would get stressed out because I didn't know how to build anything and had never built anything before and put it away and then six months later I'd hate my job again and like get it out and start working and eventually just like pulled the trigger and I wrote a $14,000 check for the trailer and the SIPs. SIPs is a construction style. It stands for structural insulated panels and so basically it's a chunk of foam between two pieces of plywood. You send your drawings to a manufacturer with all the windows and doors and measurements and stuff like that and then they cut all of your windows and doors and panels out and they'll mark them like wall 51, wall 52, wall 53 and so it's a really, really efficient way to build. It's a lot stronger than like a stick-built house so if you're building something on wheels I highly recommend it. And the big benefit of it is it goes up super quick so when we were doing our original build days on this we had 10 people who had never built a house before and we got the shell up in two days. It was dried in in two and a half weeks and I was living in it in four months and that was working nights and weekends on the house because I was still doing my full corporate gig. The week after I moved into my first house, quit my corporate job and started my own like marketing and design business and was able to do that because my monthly, you know, rent and mortgage and all that stuff just basically went away. After living in the current house that I'm in for about a year I was like, you know, I know I want to get out of Texas but I didn't know where I wanted to go to so I planned a two-month road trip that turned into three and a half years. In that time lived in a Honda Element for a while. I got tired of that super, super small space so I built what was a mansion to me at the time which was a 54 square foot tiny house on wheels. Lived out of a Toyota 4Runner and I actually ended up doing about three months on the Pacific Crest Trail so lived out of a full backpack. Did some time in Europe living in backpacks like all over the board as far as what my living situations have been. I ended up finding Bisbee in 2019 right before I did the Pacific Crest Trail and just fell in love with this area. It kind of checked all the boxes in the sense of like I was able to live in my tiny house legally, the weather was good, we're close enough to like amenities and stuff like that but far enough out to like actually not have the noise and neighbors and all that kind of stuff. So I bought this property back in January of 2020. The intention was just to live simple, own my own home, live off-grid, kind of have self-sufficiency out here but over the last several years of hosting people and seeing a lot of change, giving people an opportunity just to work with tools and work with their hands, this place has really evolved into kind of an educational community so I love giving people the opportunity to live closer to nature and live kind of an alternative lifestyle and we've definitely had people that have lived out here that have gone on to buy their own homesteads and build their own tiny houses and for me that's just a really fulfilling sort of thing. So on the property we've got all different kinds of buildings and all different construction methods. I really love experimenting and learning. So this behind me is our first really big build. This is an earthbag root cellar that is around 10 foot by 10 foot squared. We built this completely by hand with no power tools. It is a place for us to store food and other things in a nice climate-controlled environment which was really important as we were starting our community to have a place where we could store bulk food and people could get access to it. During the winter when it's like 20 degrees outside it'll be in the mid 50s. During the summer when it's 105 out it'll be in the 70s. So I'm a big fan of building underground especially out in the desert just because you get that natural climate control. This is our pallet and rock workshop. This was a build that was not planned at all but just kind of put together with all these scraps and different materials that we have around the property. Honestly it is probably my favorite building on this entire property. So this is my workshop. I have all the tools and fun stuff that I could ever want to play with. So I do rock work, pottery stuff, I have my 3D printers, my laser cutters, all the woodworking tools, all the metalworking tools and just stuff that I've accumulated over the last five years that really gives me the opportunity to kind of make whatever I need to make. So looking back on this whole property build I think if I were to do it again the workshop would have been the absolute first thing I would have ever built on this property. We went two years with having just a tarp over a greenhouse frame which limited the tools that I could get because you didn't want to buy nice stuff that may get torn up by the Arizona weather. Now that I have a shop I can kind of get whatever I want and yeah it just makes me really happy to have everything secure and have the options to do things that I couldn't have done whenever I first started on this property. So this is my work in progress pottery studio. I got this after our permits had already been signed off on and it is a old 1970s trailer. So the advantage of having it on a trailer is that we don't have to get it permitted. Basically we gutted the thing and have turned it into a little studio space. It's really nice and comfortable and eventually we'll get totally finished out. So this is our underground school bus. Its functions have changed over the years as we've been hosting people. It's kind of nice as like an all-purpose building. So we originally had it as our overflow housing because we were hosting up to 15 people at a time and so we had bunk beds and stuff in here. Now we've kind of switched it to a little bit of an office gym hangout space and just kind of nice to have the extra structures. For me on this property, the bus was the quickest and easiest way to get some square footage that was indoor that we could actually climate control and have people comfortable for game nights or hangout or movies or whatever. So with me on the property right now, primarily what I use this for is kind of a sauna gym. So we actually ended up setting up a little sauna in the back. I have plans to build a cold plunge and then we also use it a little bit as an office space when I want to get out of my house. So this is my 54 square foot tiny home. This was actually the second house that I ever built. After living on the road for a couple years in the car, I decided I wanted something a little bit bigger that I could at least stand up in and that was a little bit more comfortable. So I took a six-hour art welding class and decided that I could build a trailer and a house on it and this is what came to be. After a couple years of traveling around the country and doing some pretty sketchy dirt roads, the frame of this house actually broke. We strapped it together, drug it out here, cut the axle and the tongue off and then we turned this from a three-season home into a four-season home using aluminum cans, cob, and plaster to actually create a exterior insulation on this build. We've used this for hip camp and also work trade program dwellings and yeah, it's just a cozy little cabin to kind of enjoy this environment in. So this is my 300 square foot hyper adobe home. It is currently a work in progress. We've been building on this for the last couple years. This structure is built with a process called hyper adobe and hyper adobe is a fairly new building technique that kind of harkens back to the original adobe structures that were really native to this land. So the process is we're using native soil, sand from the washes. We do include a little bit of cement in our builds just to add a little bit of extra security and then basically you take that mixture, mix it in a cement mixer, get it a little bit wet, and then start packing it into these perforated bags. Wet clay likes to stick to wet clay so each of these layers is basically glued together with the soil itself and creates a really strong, really long-lasting structure. Adobe buildings have been around for literally hundreds of years and I fully expect this thing to be around for the next 300 to 500 years. Total will be in it for about $15,000 and they are also built to last. So this is my 300 square foot hyper adobe tiny home that is currently a work in progress. The goal of this home was to build something that is going to be weather resistant, that is intended for the Arizona climate and something that is also sustainable and natural. So we use all natural plasters. The building itself is mostly made out of dirt from the land and we use a ton of recycled and reclaimed materials including bottles. Tried to build this as inexpensively and as sustainably as possible. So the big benefit of doing a hyper adobe home is our walls are 18 inches thick of just solid earth so you get what's called thermal mass and so basically all day the sun is beating on this home and that wall is actually soaking up that heat keeping it cool on the inside during the day and then will release that heat into the home at night. So out here in the desert where we'll get 30 degree swings from day to night basically you have a nice cool space during the day and then a nice warm space at night. I've noticed in here even without a front door during the summer it'll be like 80 degrees in here Fahrenheit and 105 outside. During the winter it'll stay like 50-60 degrees in here when it's like 20 degrees outside. So on this side of the home we still have a lot of work to do but eventually we will have a full kitchen here with a little office space. Behind our bottle wall is going to be our shower space and a composting toilet and then up in the loft we will have a queen-size bed and a full nicely decked out bedroom setup. It was about three months to get all the bag work done. The following season we got the roof on and long term this house will be fully self-sustaining. The roof is large enough to collect all the rainwater you need through the year. We will eventually have solar for the power for the home and because the house is the hyper adobe build we need very little in the way of heating and cooling in this house. Whenever I bought the property originally the idea was just to kind of have a place to live that I could actually own outright. I purchased the property whenever I was 29 and so the idea of like full home ownership in my late 20s early 30s was something that was really aspirational but seemed obtainable by doing the off-grid sort of thing. Quickly I learned that living off-grid is a lot of work and that I needed some help and so I started doing work trade programs where basically I would provide housing and food and then people would help me on the property with whatever builds we had going. With that program I saw some really amazing changes in people. I didn't really intend for this to grow into a big thing but that's when I started Terraform Together. I started a non-profit back in 2022 called Terraform Together. The goal of the non-profit is to give people an opportunity to work with their hands and really build self-confidence through just building. On our board we also have a financial advisor so we've done a lot of work with people doing some like basic financial literacy stuff, teaching off-grid living and just really giving people an opportunity to kind of escape that rat race sort of thing and learn how to live in a different way. So my first tiny house I ended up building for about $40,000. Given this was back in 2015-2016 so I know stuff has gone up quite a bit since then. The property itself I was able to purchase 24 acres for $23,000. Did some creative financing because it was a owner carried loan so basically got a loan from him at 0% for $12,000. So I paid $1,000 a month for a year and then ended up doing an $11,000 down payment that I put on a 0% interest credit card which I don't recommend to people but I had the cash in the bank. It was just like I didn't want to spend it all at once because I knew there would be development costs getting onto the property. So that was really cool to be able to like pay my land off in one year. I would estimate I probably have I would say about $100,000 into the construction of everything but that has been spread out over like five years now and that includes our solar system, our water tanks, all of the structures on the property. All said and done probably about $150,000 into the property and from a market value I think I could easily get like $225,000-$250,000 out of the property today. I think the median home price right now is like pushing $500,000 and I cash flowed everything on the property or got 0% interest loans to kind of work the system a little bit but yeah that's the thing is like I own it outright. Our taxes are $235 a year. Right now we're having water trucked in about twice a year but eventually it'll be on full rainwater collection but even with having water trucked in it's about $700 a year so I don't know with $75 a month in water, propane's maybe $10 a month, prepaid all my electricity bills so we've got a big solar system so we don't have any electrical bills. Yeah it's just really inexpensive once you get the property built but even during the building process I was spending I would say about $2,000 a month kind of my general budget on whatever we were working on and that's median rent for most people. Through most of my 20s whenever I was living in the car and traveling and stuff like that I was having the time of my life but I was also working remotely and running my own marketing business and so I was able to have like a 50 to a 75% savings rate. Now like in my early 30s I'm like I can pursue pottery as a living like you don't make any money as a finder unless you're like really big but I'm like cool I've owned my house we're on solar like my expenses are so low that like I can pursue the things I want to pursue instead of having to like work a corporate job and so yeah like for me I was shown a lot of kindness with the couple that let me build on their property and like I really want to like pay that forward to people by providing like an affordable place to live you know nothing fancy trailer bus or whatever and a place where people can build their own house because in my opinion the 20 and 30 year olds now are just you don't really have an option for like building long-term wealth and sustainability it's just housing and everything has gotten so expensive but wages just haven't statistically kept up with them so I see the do-it-yourself approach and living a different lifestyle kind of as the new American dream and the only way forward. The amount of knowledge I've gained and skill sets I've gained from building out this full property over the last five years is insane and what I've learned is like it's a weird thing but like when you learn plumbing all of a sudden electrical gets easier and when you learn that these skill sets just stack on top of one another so I've noticed over the last like five years when I go into a task that I've never done before like my brain's able to comprehend it a lot quicker than five years ago or 10 years ago when I first started building this house where it was like every little thing took like hours and hours of research to get like to that next step. I think one of my favorite quotes is live a few years like most people won't so you can live the rest of your life like most people can't because I mean building the property this is year five but the first four years every bit of time I had was either working on my business, working on the property, working with the work traders like I had no life for four years but now on the other side of it like I kind of get to do what I want. 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