Could This $39k Tiny House Revolutionize Affordable Housing?

This is our passive solar home that we affordably built in nine months for $39,000. With one costly mistake. Come on in and we'll show you around. Welcome to my kitchen. It's where I spend most of the time and it works very well. It is small, but it is very efficient and to me that is very important in a kitchen that you don't have to be moving from one corner to the other while you're working. It's just all right there a few steps from each other and you can get a lot done in a little bit of time. One thing I've learned from experience in our other house build is I had my kitchen on the south side of the house and it was so bright and so hot so I wanted it in the shade so we did it on the north wall. That is something to keep in mind when you are building is the location of like your main workspace that it is a convenient place to work no matter what time of the day. This part of the kitchen is my main work station. On this side of the stove we have just a small soapstone countertop and that is so anytime I need to take a kettle off the stove I have a place to put it that I don't have to worry about it burning the countertop without getting some kind of a hot pad you know protection on the countertop. So that's the purpose of this soapstone here and as far as the colors that we chose in here our home is a southwestern themed home and I wanted not just bright aqua cabinets but I wanted it kind of in that family so I'm really pleased with this kind of blue green color that it turned out. Our countertops are walnut we got them from a friend up the road and James cut them down and finished them off and they are very very beautiful and I don't have any doors on my cabinets because doors are in the way and people say whoa don't you have problems with them being messy all the time not really it's all right here and it's very easy just to quick quick quick you know rearrange it so it looks okay but the overall efficiency of it I like it and I have no lack of storage space I have 11 drawers here and we put all drawers in our lowers instead of doors with shelves because it's just so much easier to see what's in your drawers. Here is my corner pantry and the reason I love a corner pantry if you have your cabinets come clear to the corner it is a very inefficient use of your space you have these lazy susans and they're just hard to get to and you lose a lot of space but when you make a pantry in the corner you lose no space and it's not that big I mean you know it's like so but I have all kinds of storage in here one two three four five six shelves yeah just all my miscellaneous baking stuff and whatever else I want to store in there that I don't want anybody to see just come out shut the door and there it is it can be messy in there nobody knows the difference. Here we are at my island and I have a commercial sink I am in love with commercial sinks I had one in my bus this one has two sinks my bus actually had three but being as I have a dishwasher I decided I could get by with two sinks but one of my real selling points that I love about my sink here is I have a cutting board here and this is where I do all my prep work for my food my meat veggies whatever and it's very much easy cleanup it's right in the sink not on your countertop and so that is what I really love about it. Concrete countertops here James did that he molded them or shaped them so all the water drains to the sink I never have to worry about water coming off the sink there are all kinds of dimensions of commercial sinks different sizes and I wanted just a certain size of sink so we actually ended up ordering this one from Home Depot. We positioned our island like this a triangular kitchen with this island on an angle makes the most efficient use of your space everything is closed my fridge is closed my stove is closed and so it makes it a very easy kitchen to work in another thing I love about this island is when I'm working here I have these most amazing views and that is very uplifting when you're doing the dirty work of doing your dishes. So from the other side of the sink is the bar here and I like to have a bar on the outside of my kitchen so when my grandkids come over they can sit on the bar and entertain me while I'm cooking and James will sit here quite a bit and we'll talk while I'm in the kitchen it's just a good social space to have. Coming in from my kitchen there's the island and then this cabinet here is our coffee bar that's the main purpose of it and numerous more drawers for cutlery junk drawer whatever and then my dishes are here yeah it's just a very nice place and when I stumble in here in the mornings my coffee is made already by my barista husband and I look out the windows and enjoy the views and it's just a very nice way to wake up in the morning we're in the living room now the design here has to do with our views so we got a lot of windows on the east and the south and our views are beautiful and that's why we arranged this area like we did this coffee table comes from the house we built before and this was the biggest log that we had from that house I have my own sawmill so all of the wood in here I cut myself this log was from the wood that I cut for the other house and this was the largest piece and I thought it was really cool and so I saved it and made a coffee table out of it and the bottom is actually beer kegs that I just cut in half and polished and that's one cool thing about building southwestern style it's a little more rustic so like cutting your own wood it goes with that so yeah it all turns out cool it's also very economical so it's it's a cheap way to build I'll say economical it's not cheap because if you would hire this done it would be very expensive but when you do it yourself it's very inexpensive but it does cost you labor we're back over here by the pizza oven I've built several of these this is probably the third or fourth pizza oven I've built and this time I bought a kit and the reason for that is is the price of firebrick has really gone up over the last number of years like a lot of things have and this was the most economical way that I could do this but also it was really fast this also acts as a masonry heater and this really gets interesting so the reason I like a pizza oven for the base of my masonry heater is a pizza oven burns really really efficient they actually have their own catalytic converter in the pizza oven and it's it's totally natural so when you heat a pizza oven when it gets to a certain point the dome of your pizza oven gets hot to about when it gets up to around 600 degrees it does what they call flashes and it burns off the the soot off the dome of the pizza oven once it does that all the smoke that hits that dome ignites so it burns completely clean 100 well burns all your smoke every exhaust in a pizza oven is the front of the oven so it burns across the dome ignites the smoke and then it comes out of the exhaust and goes up now above this inside of this there's a heat exchanger and it's a 150 gallon stainless steel tank and so this this pipe goes into that tank but it goes into the tank about halfway up in the tank and then the exhaust out of the tank is at the bottom of the tank this is all by design so heat rises and when the heat goes into that tank the hottest air goes to the top of that tank and stays there and then your coolest air is what exhausts out the bottom and this is especially important after you get done let's say you burn your wood in the evening you shut it down you go to bed and there will be air that gets into this and it and is being exhausted all the time but it's always exhausting your coolest air instead of your hottest air your hottest air is going to stay at the top of that dome and in masonry stove jargon that's called a bell so these bells are placed to hold the hottest air and that way you're not exhausting the hottest air out of your face constantly and the way i did this one i bricked this all up and then stuccoed it but before i got done bricking with just a little gap at the top i actually filled this all up with sand so there's about 12,000 pounds worth of sand inside of this well the whole thing has about 12,000 pounds of mass so when you burn this it burns really efficient because you burn it wide open you never choke it back you never have creosote it burns up in there but your heat is stored in that sand so this heat will last for days it's really a cool concept it's been used for years and years in northern europe russia especially then in fact it has the name a russian fireplace that's how this this whole system works i know it's a little bit complicated but if you want to look it up you can look it up masonry stoves heat storage russian fireplaces bells of russian fireplaces it gives you the concepts that i used in this we were living in a bus for the last probably four years three years and we thought we would be traveling and the closer it got to traveling the more we realized that we didn't want to travel we are not rolling stones and that's fine for anybody that wants to do that but we decided we wanted to stay here so we bought this piece of property we have this house on 35 acres different states are different but here in colorado you have to have at least 35 acres to have what they call a domestic well if it's smaller than 35 acres you you can only get a permit for what they call an in-house well and that's exactly what that means you cannot water your lawn you can't have animals outside you can't have anything outside of your house it's only in the house and we paid right at 100,000 for this 35 acres then we had to drill a well and that was what about 15,000 some something in that price range i think 17 i think it was okay 17,000 that was the only real expense we had as far as buying the property and the well we moved to colorado because our daughter lived in the area this is one thing i do recommend when you are looking for a property it's best to move into the area and live there which is what we did we moved here and rented a place for a year and we shopped for property we did not buy the first place that we saw we started looking in this area and really it was almost by chance that we found the place that we bought it was the first place that yeah before that was that was the the lot just to the south of here it was for sale but it didn't look much like much from the road and so i was out there walking across it and when i hit the rocks kind of the back of the place i called doreen and i told her this is the place this is the perfect place to build a house and we built that place lived in it we owned that property for around 13 years and this property was just to the north of it and we just got very fortunate we made an offer on this place and the man that we bought it from was needing to sell just at the time when we needed to buy and so yeah we we just happened to get this property at the right time we built this house for around 39 000 is that including the the concrete mistake so when we were building the pouring the floor we made a three thousand dollar mistake that we didn't do our homework on we had the concrete company put colorant in the in the concrete brown we had them do it and we found out later that james could have bought it off of amazon for like 300 bucks and they charge us three thousand for it well the reason we made the mistake on that is we built a small cabin when we had the concrete delivered on that it was a very very small amount i never realized how much it was costing me but here's the thing you need to realize this this is done all the time in in sales and that is they make their money on add-ons so the basic product concrete is really quite economical anytime you add on just like colorant in your concrete that's where they make their money you need to be careful with that we could have built this house for 36 without that it's very economical i realize but if you're going to build like that economically you have to do your homework you don't just start building and then gather your material come up with your plan and then plan on gathering your material over a period of time and then start building because when you build this way if you're going to build economical when you need something is not the time to start shopping for it shop for your stuff store it and then build and another thing that does for you it helps you when you're building on how you build to utilize the cheap material that you've bought but one thing to be aware of when you build like this it is more labor intensive james asked me over and over why do i do things that that is so i mean it takes so much work to do i said well because it's cheap so you know it is more labor intensive when you collect your stuff like that than when you just go to the home depot and buy everything nice and new and ready to use and puts together easily this was definitely more work it took us about eight or nine months to build this and that was doreen and i doing 90 of the work we did have help with a few of the things that were really labor intensive that needed a lot of hands relationships are important you need friends and our friends are glad to come over and help us we go and help them and yeah took about eight or nine months as far as what this house costs to live in this is a passive solar so we have no heating expense at all no electricity the sun provides all our energy the really the only expense we have is our gas bill which is around 85 a month the property tax here is around 1500 a year so that's really the only expense we have as far as just out of the pocket expense to live here of course we got our groceries and things like that but as far as a house actually living here it's very very economical another real important part of living in the area that you're thinking of building on is the local codes your codes and your restrictions if you're going to be in an hoa we actually live in an hoa how they operate your county and its zoning laws all of that is important you can buy a piece of property and be surprised with a lot of different things and there's a lot of homework goes into this so don't just buy a piece of property and think you're going to build your dream because your dream might collide with the zoning laws and that's never pleasant so just be careful and again this is why it's so important to live in an area talk to the locals make friends talk to people that have done what you're thinking about doing they are a wealth of information this thing of independence is kind of a joke none of us can really make it on our own we need people in our lives and people that know what they're doing people that have gone before us and they can help us a lot so yeah make friends move into an area live there for a year it'll help you a lot so this is a desk area and we are not quite done with this area eventually we're going to have bookshelves here on the wall this is just a piece of walnut that i bought off my neighbor and it turned out cool it's got this little hole in the top that works great to run your cords through so you don't have to drill your own hole and also i'm going to eventually put a bank of drawers there on that side all in all it turned out really great this is a beautiful piece of wood and i think we're really going to enjoy it okay this is our little dining area we just wanted a small table here that we could sit out while we eat our meals and enjoy the lovely views also we didn't want just a square table we bought this wood from our friend and james had it in wedges and then we just kind of worked with it to make an organic shape you can actually seat around five or six people around this small space so it works pretty good and then another thing i like about this spot and our windows we have a little wider window sills we use saltillo tiles and they're great for setting on another thing with our windows they are just plain clear glass these are double pane windows but you do not want the low e glass that they put in most houses everywhere because that reflects the sunshine so it's for helping keep your house cool but it's not good for heating your house you just want the clear plain glass old-fashioned glass windows i love the curve that is here in this corner it breaks up the squareness of the house and small house you need more details and it's just a lovely place to have my plants so this is the back part of the house this is our dressing area also utility room we have our closed storage here bathroom behind me closet there yeah just a multi-function room and when you build small of course everybody that has done this knows this you have to use your spaces for more than one thing and that's what this space is yeah it works very very well we really enjoy this space whenever you separate your spaces out just like the washer and dryer here if you would enclose this it makes your space feel smaller and by leaving it open it makes your space feel bigger and there's trade-offs you will see the washer and dryer in here and some people don't like that you have to decide what's the most important to you and then just roll with that we like it more open we like the more expansive feel and so that's why we have it like we do we got onto this in our bus and when you're in a very small space like a bus you have to be very efficient with your space and we really fell in love with these open compartments what it does is separate your clothes into sections makes it very organized another thing i like is you can see it so there's no guessing what you have here and you you can just easily pick which color which pants which shirt yeah it's very quick we like it it's very efficient i custom built this these are just pieces of plywood with little strips nailed on the side and then i have a friend that has a cabinet shop he actually put the facing on these pieces and these are just simple little half inch pieces of melamine it's a very simple design very easy very fast to build and very inexpensive it was great we're over here by the vanity i am not done with this i'm going to put a mirror here on the wall and also the light fixture but the cool thing about this is the top this technique is called tattle act it's a moroccan technique and it's really cool if you look it up and you would actually buy material to do this it would be expensive and if you would hire it done it'd be very very expensive but when you do it yourself and you just use off the shelf stuff it's very inexpensive very cheap i made this sink just out of plywood and then i lined it the whole thing with which is what you put in showers and then i started with my tattle act top so it's hydrated lime and sand you mix that together and you just trowel it on and you put several coats of that on and then to finish it is really unique it's you actually use soap i've made my own soap i made olive oil soap and then you emulsify that in water and then you just brush it on and it ends up really really cool i didn't realize this but homemade soap like that actually has a certain portion of wax in it and that soaks into the lime plaster and it has a chemical reaction it makes this stuff completely waterproof and i'm sorry you can't feel this because the feel is really cool it's it's got a real waxy feel to it but it turned out looking really cool i think so i made my shower out of slate this would have been very expensive if i had just gone to the store and bought it but i had a friend that had a stack of this slate it was actually a whole pallet full that i'd seen in his backyard for quite some time so when i got ready to build this i contacted him to see if i could get some off him and he was glad to get rid of it so bought it for 100 bucks and install it so it turned out really cool when you're going to build inexpensive you have to be looking for those kind of bargains so keep your eyes peeled when you get in your friend's backyard we tried to keep a feel throughout the house this house is built with natural products throughout this is natural stone and it just it just all fits together and for a good house design that's what you want to do you want to make sure and keep a certain theme throughout and i feel like that this shower answers that our house is off grid we have used composting toilets through the years for different applications but in the county we live in you must have a septic tank installed before you can get a building permit so we have a septic tank and this is a regular flush toilet and those of you that live in town you would think this is kind of strange but this is the first flush toilet we've had for quite a few years the people that visit that aren't used to the more hippie ways they're they're glad for this but yeah it's it's okay but we still like our composting toilet pretty good here's our bedroom i painted the walls dark decided to do that in contrast with all the light colors in all the other rooms and i love the dark walls in here another thing i love about our room is the big windows it is amazing when you're laying in bed and look out at the stars at night it is really really beautiful and to wake up to the sunrise is really gorgeous also another thing i like about laying in bed you look up at the ceiling and see the warm beams the dark beams in contrast to the lighter ceiling it creates a really nice ambience in here our bedroom is really very minimalistic we only have a bed in here and right now our bed is on the floor eventually we will get a platform built maybe 16 inches off of the floor we'll have storage under there oh another thing of interest is the wall sconces in here james made those and they cast a really nice glow in the evening when we have them on yeah this is a really nice warm bedroom space that we really do enjoy i want to tell you about these roof beams these are spruce beams the university of alaska has a span table for round wood for poles so these are designed according to their tables for our snow load and actually our snow load here is 50 pounds per square foot and this roof has a hundred pound per square foot design so it wasn't like we just threw a dart at a dart board and and picked the logs these are actually using a span table just like you would for any lumber that you would use i put them on my sawmill and just flattened the top by flattening them it gives you a good flat surface to put your ceiling on but also an easy place to take your measurements like for notching into your walls and things like that it gives you a good good place to measure off of so that's how i did that then i cut my ceiling boards also and they are andressa pine so we got some variation in the color of the ceiling but it really turned out beautiful all the other wood in here also cut the beams on the windows and the uprights they're all dug fir so we have three different species of wood in here we have dug fir spruce and ponderosa pine and then i'm going to talk about the floor we really like concrete floors first of all they're economical you pour your floor and that's your finished floor like i said earlier we made a mistake on this we did have them color the concrete which is very expensive we could have done it ourselves for a lot less but we colored it dark because of the solar gain and this house works together with the windows and the way this works is the sun shines in on the floor heats the floor up during the day and the floor gets to around i don't know 95 degrees during the day and then it radiates that heat out at night but under the floor this floor is about five inches thick and under the floor we have two inches of insulation and that's critical for a passive solar house because if you don't do that you'll lose all your heat into your into the ground the walls are also concrete they're just block that we stacked and then poured full of concrete and all of that absorbs the heat from the sun during the day and that's all part of a good passive solar design now the floor as far as a finish i actually concocted my own finish and it turned out working really good you some of those things those experiments are fails but this one was success and it's just linseed oil and paint thinner and then a little beeswax and a little carnauba wax and mix those together heated them up and right after we poured the floor i went over and put my finish on the floor and just just dumped it on the floor kind of like just spread it out and then used a squeegee and just squeegee squeegee it out and it was real fast it probably took me i don't know hour two to finish the whole floor and then when we got done building and we're finishing in here i went back over with buffing pads and buffed it and it turned out really great i can't say that about all my experiments but this one turned out great our house here we built out of a stucco block you start out by stacking the block dry put rebar in that and then pour it full of concrete outside of that is styrofoam and then on the exterior it's stucco one of the things we did is you can see the sills are all copper the reason i did that it gives it kind of a classy touch most of the time houses that have copper trim on their bottom are very expensive homes and i just thought it would be cool to do a inexpensive home with copper trim the other thing we did is the black on that is not paint that's a technique called shosugi bond it's a japanese technique where you actually burn the wood and then you go back and put oil on it and it's very good in this locale because it resists uv rays and it's a very durable finish in fact the oldest building wooden building in the world is that that's where it's it's in japan that's the finish is a burn finish like that we did color our stucco before we put it on so that is more than skin deep it's the depth of the stucco so all in all i think it's a very durable very uh very nice home turned out looking nice the curve it's visual it's it's something that gives your house a look that kind of does away with the just the old square block this house is on the outside it's 32 feet square and it's just a square box but when you put those curves on it gives it a little detail that that kind of knocks at that look so yeah that's why we put them on inside they look cool outside they look cool but they also cut down on the wind noise because most of your whistling comes from a house the corners is where most of your noise comes from from wind as far as the maintenance is concerned this is probably the lowest maintenance house you could build with the wood burnt it will never need to be painted with the seals copper that should never need any repairs at all the stucco is good for 50 60 years and then the roof is 10 and that should last a long time so i don't expect any maintenance all in our lifetime when you design a house sometimes when you get in it you think well you know this we would have changed that we would have changed on this job i would say it's as close to perfect as we could have gotten we just really really enjoy this house one thing we have learned i believe in this build which we continue to learn uh we've been married for what 46 years now almost we've learned to trust each other with the things that the other person is good at we work together quite well as a team i learned that a lesson again on this project i just let my wife do the things that i'm not good at and it sure does lower my stress yeah i would say too with every build that we have done together that i've learned to trust him more he goes fast but when it's all said and done it turns out looking really really good we've learned to work together quite well i'd say a lot of people do not realize how much work it actually is and you're going to be weary bodily weary it's kind of like running a marathon it's not one the first mile second mile you got to run the whole full marathon it's not going to be easy and there are going to be times when you question whether it was a smart thing to do but you'll get there and don't look at the whole project you've only got to accomplish one little thing at a time but as you accomplish one little thing at a time lo and behold the house gets built we want to thank you all for watching our video we hope it inspired you maybe someday you'd like to build your own y'all have a good day