Her Custom Tiny House That's Breaking All The Rules

$4,000 a month down to $100 or $200 a month. I wanted to have easy access to it and to be able to get old in my tiny house. Hey, I'm Laura and I'm living tiny because it gives me choice about how I want to spend my time. So welcome on in. I'm super excited to show you our house because we designed and built this all ourselves. The kitchen was really important, of course, understanding what I was going to need from a storage perspective and how I was going to use the kitchen was really exciting to design. When I put together the appliance package, I did 24 inch appliances. So everything a little bit narrower and the fridge is counter depth. So it doesn't stick out too far. And why that was important was because that all of these cabinets are a little bit smaller than regular kitchen cabinets. They were repurposed out of a high end bathroom. So they're a little shallower. And so I wanted to have that nice, smooth sort of experience with things not jutting out too much into the floor space. And of course, we have a little bit more floor space than we would have had if we had used regular cabinets. I downsized out of a much larger kitchen into this obviously much smaller kitchen and things that really work well for me are drawers. This is my one of my two baking drawers. All those mixing bowls go right down in there. All of my kitchen towels are in this drawer. Then, of course, there's the obligatory junk drawer because you have to have, you know, space to drop off the things. You don't know where to put them. This cabin is kind of narrow, right? It holds the plates really well. It holds the toaster. So it's not out cluttering the counter space all the time. I keep all of my, you know, seeds and nuts and and things like that in jars. And so they sit out so nicely here behind the glass, which is kind of cool. And then when I didn't have enough cabinet space, I went up further with baskets up on the top. So we have this upper cabinet here, which has the glass front and the lights in it, which is really lovely. This works well because we eat here. So it has to be lifted up a little bit. Chose butcher block, which I've had, you know, great luck with so far. And we created this island out of an upper cabinet and that provides us with seating for two. There's such a huge waste stream, right? Especially in wealthy areas where people are, you know, buying a house and they immediately tear out the kitchen and bathroom. And so things like this become available, which makes me feel so good because I think they're great cabinets and I'm super glad to have them and glad they didn't end up in the landfill somewhere. The sink was also repurposed out of someone's remodel. Used to be a laundry sink. It's nice and deep, so it holds a lot of dishes. And I've got this rack sitting here so that when they get washed and then they can sit there and dry on their way back into the cabinets and then, you know, the pot chain, of course, my idea of how to keep the pots from filling up all the storage space. They ended up on a chain instead of a pot rack because there simply wasn't room for a pot rack. And my stand mixer hides out behind this garage and gets popped out whenever it's needed. And the washer dryer is here and ready to do laundry. The machine works really well. And here in the desert southwest, you can hang your laundry out and it dries super fast and it works perfectly well. I have to say that it's kind of cool to not have to walk yourself to death when you're moving between chores, right? You can go straight from cooking to doing laundry all in a small space and not in the past. I felt like I just was walking, walking, walking in my big house. So I love that it's so condensed. Of course, the bathroom is super important. And when you think about people trying to access the bathroom, we wanted to put it in between the space so that anyone who might be sleeping as a guest would have access. And then you have access from the bedroom with pocket doors at both ends. The other pocket door was designed in our two by six wall, which was used for our vent stack. And so we were able to expand the depth of the pocket door to turn it into a shelf. The pocket door shelf holds all of the things you need in the bathroom, as well as paper products and cleaning products. And it tucks right into the wall so that you don't see all that clutter generally. And that's a great use of space in that two by six wall. We had to redesign the space a couple of different times based on what came to us in terms of the features of the bathroom. And one thing that came into our life was this six foot bain air jetted tub, and we couldn't say no to the tub. So we had to expand the bathroom and shrink everything else a little bit in order to accommodate the tub. So then if you're going to have a big tub, then you've got to have a big window to look out over the beautiful White Rock Canyon while you're soaking in the tub. That was really important. I had to figure out, you know, waterproofing elements. How do you hang a shower curtain inside a big tub? So thus the freestanding ring. We wanted to have the plumbing on the exterior. It looks kind of pretty with the brushed brass and have the tub spout as well as the rainfall shower head. I can't say that any of this I would change at all. It is just divine. I can it's really hard to get out of the shower sometimes. So I love this setup. And then a lot of the other fixtures here in the bathroom were again, repurposed the toilet, the sink. They all came out of the trash. So super excited to have repurposed so many things in the bathroom as well. Here, our tiny house set up, we do have grid power, but we do not have a well on this particular property because I wanted to collect rainwater for our water, which is something that we can do here in New Mexico. We have guttered off the roof. So we collect rainwater here and a cistern and we pump the water into the house after a thorough filtration. And that is the water that we use both for our tub and for our sink and for our drinking. All of our water is filtered rainwater. I'm a huge advocate for tiny living because we all know the numbers. We know about this time in history that we're in where interest rates are extraordinarily high, that we have housing shortages at the price of the American dream is extraordinarily high. And we know that people only have a finite number of dollars that are going to pass through their household. And the fact that they're going to spend such a large percentage of that just for the roof over their head restricts the other things that they can do with themselves. It restricts their time. It keeps them locked into this hamster wheel of going to maybe a job that they don't love so much in order to continue to pay for 30 years for the roof over their head. We purchased this land for $24,000 and an online auction. And so all of a sudden we had eight acres in this white rock Canyon. And we said to each other, well, what are we going to do with this land? That's when we started the tiny house. We're like, let's build a house on a trailer. So we went back to our home in Florida. We bought a $3,000 trailer off of Craigslist. We stripped the old boards off of it. And we started with the floor system. And in a year of Saturdays, we built the tiny house. While the tiny house was being built, I was having some development done on the land had septic installed, had the cistern put in. Then in 2017 we got in the truck and we towed the house across the country and put it up here on the land that we're sitting on. And the intention for the house was yeah, just a place to get away. Then the pandemic happened. I'm a financial advisor. My income was plummeting in that moment. I said to Eric, my husband, Hey, why are we not going to the tiny house? Why are we going back to this life where everything is so uncertain and where we have this huge mortgage to pay? And so that's when we hatched a plan to start working on moving towards our tiny house full time. We're about nine months into tiny living full time. We have been debt and mortgage free since October of 2024 it is a deep change being debt and mortgage free in the sense that you feel a lot less obligation and therefore you can be obligated to yourself and what is truest to yourself. The overall cost difference is like $4,000 a month down to, you know, a hundred or $200 a month, huge change in a cost of housing. So tiny living is a way that we can stop spending so much money on the roof over our head and instead focus our time, our energy, our human capital in ways that we can make a difference and in ways that we can do things that truly matter to us. Coming up from the bathroom, three steps were up here on the gooseneck. When I was looking for the trailer that we use to build the tiny house on, we were looking for the gooseneck both for towing, but also to have that taller space. So we have a maximum if you're towing your own tiny house, right? You can only be so tall to go down the highway. When we chose the gooseneck, we created a space that was tall enough for us to stand up in the bedroom and that was important. I didn't want to climb up a ladder into the bedroom. I wanted to have easy access to it and to be able to get old in my tiny house. We have a queen size bed up here, shelf above the queen size bed to hold knickknacks and we use the ceiling above the bathroom as closet. So lots of bins for clothes. We also have the heated floors up here, the beautiful transom windows capturing all that warmth from the sun. And so we have enough space up here for dogs to sleep and it works really well. I thought a lot when we were designing this house about how we were going to heat and cool the house. I came from a place where air conditioning was running 24 seven and I really wanted to be more part of the natural environment. And so when I was designing the house, I was thinking about prevailing wind direction and also how to cool the house without so much use of air conditioning in the summer and also how to heat the house in the winter time without so much use of heat. So really focusing on the natural environment and how to capture the natural solar and the natural wind. So all of the windows are designed as casements. So they crank out in order to pull the airflow in from the West and move it towards the East. The house directionally is faced broad side to the South with these high transom windows and that's to capture the warm sun coming in and to heat the space in the winter time. We do have radiant floor heat electric that we put in the house, which was just such a nice treat luxury. There is nothing as delightful as having your feet on a warm floor in the winter. It definitely makes you feel a lot warmer than having warmth around you. Then of course we have the mini split to add extra heating and cooling as needed, but I really try to rely a lot on the sun for the warmth and the wind for the cooling. When I was thinking about the wind movement through the house and how to circulate, we know that warm air rises and we know that cool air falls. And so trying to get cool air from the mini split up into the bedroom, you have to create some sort of circular motion there. So I added that pass through up there through the loft above the bathroom with the stained glass. So the stained glass slides off to the left and it creates an opening which allows the air to circulate more and the heat to move around in the cool to get drawn up. I don't know how exactly I came up with that, but it just was we need to bring the air in from the West and move it to the East. And so as many openings as possible to get that air across the house was important. Our tiny house is laid out so that it is living room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom. And so we're now in the living room, which has some cool elements to it as well. First of all, we have a loft above it where my stepson used to sleep there and now I work from there. And then all the wall coverings that you see are all repurposed as well. They came out of extras from someone else's construction project. I was concerned about towing a house full of drywall across the country is concerned about cracking. And so we went with this wood wall that got painted. All of the colors that you see are from a particular paint palette that I felt appropriately represented the geography where we were moving. We have a futon in here for extra sleeping space. Should we have a guest? And that is helpful because it pops out into a bed. When we designed the house, I thought about where can I work from? And so we designed this to be a little bit of a desk. It has, you know, a nice little drawer in here to capture pens and things and then a file cabinet drawer below. And then this overhangs so a chair can be put here and this can be used as a desk. It has a lot of plugs. And this unit we purchased to run all the AV. So it runs the speakers in the ceiling, the speakers outside, runs the TV. It has everything run and it's a RV unit, right? So for multipurpose for both audio and video. Yeah. A lot of thought into that corner for workspace and for entertainment as well. After my stepson moved out to his own 400 square foot living space, I had the opportunity to move from working down here to working up in the loft. And part of that decision was just having a little bit more horizontal space for a double monitor set up. It was also about having a some separation between personal and work. It's always kind of nice to walk away from your work and leave it be and come back to your personal life. And when I was working from down here, it was a little bit too much of inner mix of the two. So it's nice to have a loft space where I can work from that separate from the rest of my living space. And it keeps things a little neater too. Our tiny house, we towed it across the country ourselves. It's eight by 40 about 300 square feet on the inside. I designed it specifically to capture all the beautiful South facing sun with all of the transom windows and all of the glass on this side planned for the French doors to open up so that we could put a deck out here on the South side. And we have built this pergola over the South side in order to add some additional shading. We're here in Northern New Mexico where the climate is really conducive to being outside a good bit. And so having this porch and other outdoor spaces has been a great lifestyle shift for us to be able to spend a lot of time outside and have windows open and be out in the environment. There is no way that I would have ever been able to leave my six figure salary and start my own business and launch a podcast. If I had been worried about my $4,000 mortgage living tiny has allowed me to focus on this lifestyle completely and to walk away from my desk every day at two o'clock and take my dogs for a walk in the Canyon. And that to me is the most valuable thing. Just having control over my calendar control over my schedule control over my trajectory. Thanks so much for coming to check out my tiny house. Super excited to have you here. You can find out more information about me at the tiny house advisor.com I also have the podcast less house, more Moolah. See you on the socials.