BEAUTIFUL Tiny House With Spacious Single Floor Design & Cost Effective Features – FULL TOUR

This is the Bard Owl tiny house. This tiny house is 34 feet long, it's extra wide at 10 feet instead of the standard 8 foot 6 that you usually see, which provides a lot more extra space for a ground floor bedroom. Everything is on one level, there's no stairs or loft, so it's very accessible. We've got full height ceilings throughout, which really helps to keep it nice and light and airy in here, and a pass-through bathroom into the bedroom, which just provides a lot of flexibility in the space. This home was designed as a legal accessory dwelling unit for a property that already has a house on it here on Vancouver Island, so there's going to be a long-term tenant living in here. So having a nice clean exterior and having the septic connection, those were really important. And then budget was also a factor for this one, and so this was an example of making some cost-conscious decisions throughout the design process. This home is built directly onto a custom tiny house trailer. It's a 21,000 pound GBW, so the weight will stay below that. Typically something of this size will end up weighing around 18-19,000 pounds. Since we do build directly onto trailers, we have to stay within road legalities, so 13 foot 6 is as high as you can go. Most tiny homes that you see tend to be 8 foot 6 wide. We tend to go more for the 10 foot wide, which does require an overwidth permit for transport, but it's not a big deal. The exterior of this tiny house is a combination of metal and cedar, and the roof is standing seam metal roofing. The siding colour for this home is called iron ore. It's not quite as bold as black, but it still gives you that nice modern clean finish. Another nice thing about having metal on the outside of your home is it makes skirting a little bit easier. You can kind of match up to it and then make it look a little bit less like it's on a trailer. Skirting is required regardless for insuring your tiny house, so it's definitely something that you want to be considering when you're planning your exterior. This home is insulated with 2 pound closed cell spray foam. We do floors, ceiling, and walls is all 2 pound closed cell spray foam. Since we went with an end door, that provided us the opportunity to do a built-in overhang with some recessed lighting in the fascia, which I just think looks really sharp. I'm really excited to see once there's a deck and everything installed outside. This is our living room in this space. So you'll see there's lots of space for a couch. We can do a pullout bed. A lot of people want to have guest spaces, so typically they're going to be about 7 feet in length, so it's really nice to plan that space. And just because you're in a smaller space, doesn't mean that you're not going to want to host. We've also got a nice little fireplace here as your heating source for the main space, which provides some nice ambience without having to actually have a fire. And since we are limited on power, they are low wattage electric heaters. The connections in this home are super straightforward. So we've got a standard just 50 amp twist lock RV style power connection. It's basically a really expensive extension cord. We can go up to 100 amp or even 200 amp, but when you do those, then it has to be hardwired with an electrician. We've got a full septic connection, so there's no dealing with separation of grey water and black water. And we've just got a standard garden hose as your potable water intake, but don't use a green garden hose. Use a potable water hose. Some of the appliances in this house are propane, whereas others are electric. In order to stick within that 50 amp power limitation, you do typically have to use some propane. This is a galley style kitchen. Galley style is definitely one of the most popular because it provides you with a nice walkway without intruding into the space. Since we are 10 foot wide instead of eight foot six, we have a lot more room in here to play with and it keeps it feeling nice and open. We always have our recommended finishes as far as what is cost effective and what is durable. So this home in particular has our standard whitewashed walls and some basic shaker style cabinet fronts. The countertops are butcher block. It is sustainably sourced and it's nice because with butcher block you can refinish. We've got a huge sink and we have an exterior mounted propane on-demand water heater because it takes up quite a bit of space. The other aspect of this home that runs on propane is the range. These propane ranges that we use are very popular in tiny homes because they're fully off-grid. You can run them when you don't have power. We go with a full-size residential fridge. When you go with RV appliances, you're generally pretty limited with size. So we go with full-size residential appliances like this one for example. All of our doors are made in-house. So our lead hand Brent hand builds all of our doors and the barn door hardware is just a really nice feature both visually and from a functionality perspective. As we step into the bathroom here, one of my favorite things about this tiny house is that it has a full height ceiling in the bathroom. So more often than not when you look at tiny houses, you're going to have a loft over the bathroom. Whether that's for your bedroom or a storage loft, it is a really great spot to have a loft. But there's just something so special and luxurious feeling about having a full height ceiling in your bathroom. And then by having a tall window, you negate the need for having a skylight and you still can let all that light in and get a view of the sky which is awesome. This home does have a flush toilet but we've got power installed there to swap that out for a composting toilet at a different time. And vice versa if we are installing a composting toilet, we will oftentimes prep the space so that someone could choose to put in a flush toilet later on because that can be a really big limiting factor. Another great thing about this bathroom is the massive shower. We really try and encourage people to take a little bit more extra space, make that bathroom feel good because that really is going to make you feel like you're in a house instead of in a tiny home. Another nice thing about this bathroom is that we've got a combo washer dryer. The load time is a lot longer than a standard washer dryer so you just have to be conscious of the size of the loads that you're putting in there. But you don't have to transfer over from your washing machine to your dryer, you can just put your load in there and then you set it and then the whole thing is done at the end of the day. These are able to run on a very small amount of power whereas if you're wanting to go with a separate washer dryer or a stacking washer dryer, you're going to need to up your power service. So now we're heading to the bedroom. Pass-through bathroom heading to the bedroom is one of the more common layouts that we see in our 10-foot wide models. It's a pretty simple space in here. There is room for up to a king-size bed, nice big bright windows in here and of course a safety egress window. You'll notice that there's not a lot of built-in closet space in the entryway and bedroom. They might end up fully furnishing it as a furnished rental but also they figured their tenant might come in with some furniture. So there's some aspects of this home that have been left a little bit more simple. And then we've got an additional heat source in here too. So despite the fact that the heater that's in the living room is sized for the whole space, we really like to add another heat source in the bedroom because it just really helps to keep things ambient throughout. Creating an ambient temperature is one of the most important things that you can do. Not letting your home cool down and then heat back up and then cool down and then heat back up. That's what can cause you to get sweating on your windows and things like that. So these panel heaters, we actually use these in our house as well and they're nice because they stay cool to the touch. It's got an adjustable thermostat and super low power draw so you still have no problem running these little heaters. One of the challenges that people face in a small space is moisture management. So we always have a ceiling fan and then we also always have a range hood fan. It is vented so that acts as a great air recirculation. And then we also have a bathroom fan that is an actual exhausted bathroom fan. So having that bathroom fan on and then also making sure to be using your ceiling fan, two really great ways to help mitigate any moisture build-up. Since everything is fully custom, there's a wide range in costs as far as our tiny homes go. So this is a great example of a house that has more affordable options. This is our standard pine tongue and groove walls and it's this white wash instead of going with a full paint. Another consideration for cost is a simple roof line. So going with a shed slope style roof as opposed to going with a peaked roof makes a really big difference when it comes to cost. As soon as you start adding any brakes, that's going to be more labor in making sure that that is super watertight. And then on that note skylights is another area that really adds quite a bit of cost and so you'll notice that there's not any skylights in this home. Going with a more galley style kitchen, so not having a lot of returns or built-in shelving, things like that, makes a difference. Anytime that you go outside of standard box sizes or standard styles or colors, it really starts to add up. Kitchen and bathroom is always where you're going to be spending most of your money because generally you have the same number of appliances and even same amount of cabinets as you may find in a full-size house, just in a smaller space. Which is also why cost per square foot is not usually a very friendly way to look at the cost of a tiny house because you're sometimes going to have the same amount of windows, same amount of appliances, same amount of cabinets as you would in something that's two, three, four times the size. So this home in particular was around 160,000 Canadian. We're seeing now some of our homes that we built even up to 10 years ago reselling on the market which is really exciting to see them not only holding their value but actually increasing in value because that's a question that we get asked all the time. Is this like an RV or a vehicle that you drive it off the lot and it immediately depreciates? What we're seeing now is actually no, they're holding their value and often appreciating. Something else to consider when you're thinking about building a tiny house is do you want to do any of the work yourself? Either from a personal excitement point of view or from a budgetary point of view. So we also do a variety of shells of all sorts of different levels ranging from empty trailers up to almost finished with just a few things missing. So then people can do that on their end. Which is also a really good way to source reclaimed items like cabinets and sinks, a lot of flooring places if you go to them. They'll have off cuts from these huge you know 3,000 square foot homes. Then they'll have the really fancy flooring in just enough to do a tiny house. So there's some really cool opportunities there. Ground floor bedrooms have really risen a lot in popularity over the last few years. When we started building tiny homes 10 years ago we were seeing primarily smaller tiny homes with loft spaces designed for young couples. But we've seen a big shift in the last couple years to be more ground floor bedrooms, no loft, no stairs. A lot of our clients are planning to either age in place themselves or they're buying these for their parents or family members to help them age in place. But it's not just people with mobility issues. We find that most people these days are a lot more comfortable on a ground floor bedroom regardless of age. Subscribe to Exploring Alternatives and check out our playlists for more videos like this. 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