Living in a Tiny House is easy when it's this nice!

When we were traveling and living tiny in an RV, we just thought how could we build something that was gonna last, that was comfortable and felt really good to live in. We have two daughters that join us in this tiny house sometimes when they're not at college. They're not little kids. We need room for four adults in this tiny house. It's hard to find a place to live tiny legally. This tiny house right now is in a neighborhood that we chose, but it's actually not legal for us to keep this here long term. Hi, we're Gina and Andy and welcome to our home. Gina and I have been married almost 28 years now. We took our teenage daughters on sort of an epic full-time travel adventure, which included a year and a half in an RV. And it got us thinking, how could we build something that gave that sort of feel, enabled that sort of life, but was more of an asset, was something that was gonna last, that was comfortable and felt really good to live in. And that's where we started thinking about, you know, building tiny houses together. And so in 2020, we built a house and a shop with all the cash we had, but hey, it got us started with Gina's, you know, design sense and my background in construction. We started this company called Firefly Tiny Homes. Most people just don't assume that I help build. They, they'll say, oh, you just clean up or, oh, you just kind of help decorate. But no, I'm there every day in the workshop building alongside him. When delivery men usually come to deliver supplies, I'll be standing out there in the workshop in my work clothes with my work gloves, obviously working. And they'll say, hey, how long does it take him to build one of these? I'm like, oh, well, if he built it all by himself, it would take maybe closer to three months. But for us, it takes an average of two months. The things that are most important to us is the durability and the comfort of the homes that we build. And so we have four models ranging anywhere from around, you know, 60 ish thousand dollars up to, you know, well over 130. And this is our biggest, fanciest model. We get questions all the time from our clients, people who are interested in having us build them a tiny house, but don't know where to put it. That's problematic. Let's just be honest. It's hard to find a place to live tiny legally in a place that you want to be. This tiny house right now is in a neighborhood that we chose. You know, we, we bought an anchor here in this neighborhood, but it's actually not legal for us to keep this here long-term. We have permission to have this here while we build the house that is, you know, permitted here on this lot. We may be able to have something in the future, but we're going to try to advocate and we're going to use this house to try to convince, you know, not just our neighbors, but our town and people around us that this is actually a really good solution. A tiny house, whether they're on wheels or on foundations or whatever, like this is worth considering and everyone has different values. And the fact that we don't have small homes in neighborhoods or in places people want to be as a choice, I think it's just tragic. And so it's kind of cool that we get to live in a tiny house in a neighborhood, even if it's just for about a year. All right. Let me tell you about the outside of our house. This one is 42 feet long by 10 and a half feet wide. We are always thinking about how the inside relates to the outside. And we assume that most of our clients and with most of our builds that people are going to want to put a deck, but also people are probably going to want to do some lighting around their porch or their patio area to make it more inviting. So we often put a plug that's controlled by a switch that can add some outdoor lighting and invite people to live inside and outside. We have this deck attached to our tiny house right now with lots of tables and chairs. The other thing I would like to say about our tiny home, just because we're passionate about it, is we are incredibly careful about what we build with. And so one of those things that we have just settled on is all of our siding, all of our cladding is steel, is metal. So we have metal siding, we have metal roof, even the bottom of our tiny homes is a metal skin. This product has a lifetime warranty against, you know, fading, but against, you know, hail damage. But I'm also confident in the way that it helps shed water and keep water out of the tiny house, which means we'll have a durable, comfortable home that can last a really long time. And it also looks great. We build on a chassis. It is a trailer. It can go down the road. We're in South Carolina now, but we have, you know, a couple of tiny homes that have gone all the way to California. The way that we build is on an I-frame trailer, and then we add a wood subfloor system on top, which gives us a chance to put R23 insulation in our floor system. It's kept our floor nice and warm and comfortable. We put some mulch down to kind of help us avoid the muddy construction scene while we live here. This is a dual head mini-split, so we have lines going to both, you know, the master bedroom and the living kitchen area. We're hooked up to regular services here. We had our, you know, septic system installed in our property ahead of time, before the main house is built, so that we could put the tiny house here and use that for our wastewater. But we also have run a water hookup and just a traditional RV style plug. So we've used a few different kind of sidings over the years, and we've actually used all of them on this tiny house, almost as an example, so we can show people the options. This one is an option that I particularly like, and it's this sort of HD textured black metal board and batten. So as you step inside our tiny house, you step right into the kitchen, you'll see that we like to gather people with food. And so the kitchen in our tiny homes is incredibly important, and Gina is always thinking about how it functions on a day-to-day basis. When I look around at other tiny homes and their kitchens, it's usually pretty evident to me that a person who doesn't spend a whole lot of time in a kitchen is usually designing them. So I think it's really valuable to have someone on your team who spends a lot of time in the kitchen. My biggest pet peeve in a kitchen is to have doors on cabinets in the bottom, because you have to end up getting down on your knees to see what's in the back of it, and that's just difficult. I have drawers everywhere so that you can pull it out and see what's in the back and change it out as needed. We actually put a full-size dishwasher in our kitchen, incredibly important. We have a roll-out drawer for trash and recycling under the sink, otherwise that space gets kind of wasted. That's even where the water heater is in this particular build. We do all electric tiny homes, which means a full oven is not really in the energy budget, if you will. So we have been using a really fancy toaster oven, air fryer, and so how can we fit that in a pantry cabinet and still have it usable? So if it was a single door, which most 24-inch cabinets are, it would be out in the way. So this cabinet system, which, hint hint, is from IKEA. I hope that's not a dirty word to some people out there, but we find the flexibility and customization of the IKEA cabinet system to be incredibly useful and much more of a benefit than any sort of drawback. So that's what we used. We went with a engineered hardwood in this. It feels really good under feet and it never repeats its pattern. And then moving out of the kitchen was really important for us. We have two daughters that join us in this tiny house sometimes when they're not at college, and so they're not little kids. We need room for four adults in this tiny house, and as we keep going, you'll see just how we accomplish that. So as we head this way, this is again kind of our family cozy spot, putting as much storage and thought. I mean, I don't need to talk about this couch, you know, right? You've seen this on a million tiny house IKEA with storage and pull out. But we also look for opportunities to tuck things in walls or little nooks. If you're on that side of the couch, you could put your glass or something on the counter. On this side of the couch, what are you going to do with your water bottle, your glass? So we take the time to think through, like, how can we add little touches, little, you know, nooks to make living tiny just more enjoyable to live in a small space. So we've done a lot of things on the walls of our tiny house builds over the years. One of our favorite is this wood nickel gap tongue and groove material that is milled for us locally here. It's actually really light, almost as light as cedar, and for a lot of reasons we like it. But sometimes you don't want to be entirely surrounded by wood and feel like you're in a cabin. Some people like that, but often people, you know, request cleaner white walls. Can I, can I get that as well? So we kind of do a combination of both by default. We have drywall on the long walls, which we've never had trouble with drywall cracking. I know people like tend to avoid it. I was a little nervous about it at first, but because our structure is so strong, the sheathing is actually glued and ring shank nailed to the outside of the studs. The drywall is glued to the inside of the studs. Even though our tiny homes go all over the country, we've never had the drywall crack by the time it gets to the piece. So if it doesn't crack in transit, probably not ever going to crack. So we use a combination of drywall and wood to kind of break it up, soften it a little bit, and just create a really nice, you know, cozy feel inside our homes. As we head in here, this is a bunk room for our daughters. We wanted to make sure that they enjoyed coming home. So we put in these bunks, made them nice and cozy. We wanted to make this a comfortable place. So there's lots of windows, lots of light, and they have space for all their stuff. These are full wardrobe, 24 inches deep, happy to open and show. This middle one they share. These other ones have full hanging and drawers down at the bottom. They go to school fairly nearby. So they come home often because we have laundry, which I will show you in a little bit. In their actual bed space, they have these nooks that have USB plugs. They can plug their devices in and charge them and just space for, you know, a glass of water, tissue box, whatever they need. So one of the challenges as a builder of tiny homes is how do you create a comfort, a comfortable climate throughout the entire space. So in this tiny house, since we have two bedrooms and a living space and bathroom, and it's all separated out by, you know, physical doors, and we have a pocket door here for them. And we actually have too many split heads in this tiny house, but that still doesn't account for this room. And so here we put a temperature controlled room-to-room fan that is connected through a in-the-wall duct to a vent out here. And if this room is too hot or too cold, that will turn itself on and bring the conditioned air into this space and keep the girls nice and comfortable. All right, and then if we go back through the living and kitchen area, you'll go into our laundry and bathroom area. Right here, immediately as you walk into this area, we are trying an all-in-one washer-dryer combo unit. The new kind that has like the heat pump on top. This is going really well. Happy to continue to recommend it. And it works incredibly well with our energy budget. Because of the heat pump function, it's super efficient and it only plugs into a regular 120 volt outlet instead of having that 30 amp, you know, energy draw. We have our 36 inch shower unit here. Happy to say I'm not a small guy and it works out just fine. Works out great. And then over here we have the vanity and toilet area, which can be separated by just pulling this pocket door out. And then when we have all four of us here in the tiny house, it's just really nice to be able to separate the toilet room from the rest of and including access to our master bedroom. This is kind of a layout that we took from our time when we were traveling and living tiny in in an RV. We just thought that that was a smart setup. But how can we do it in a way that feels a little more high quality and just a little bit more comfortable? But we we included a full wardrobe cabinetry and storage around the bed. Still enough room for a full system of drawers over here on this side and hampers on either side. And again, in this room, you'll see that it's just really important for us to open up the space with windows. In this one, we included a bump out over the tongue, put a window here, put drawer systems here, and then kind of made it a nice little spot if you want to sit and read. We did full hanging wardrobes here on either side. We have built in nightstands with drawers. We have this whole bank of six drawers over here. So we find that we actually have plenty of room for our clothes. I think a lot of times people discover that all of the things in their big house are just kind of weighing them down. And this one thing that we have learned going tiny at various times and then deciding to build tiny homes together is that it can be an incredibly freeing thing to think through. How can I make a happy, you know, productive, thriving life and not have quite so much things to manage, stuff to manage in my life. So our plans for the future are to keep building tiny spaces. This experience of living in this tiny home has, you know, confirmed what we already knew that this is a valuable addition to housing options. Living small, living tiny can be the right option for many, many people. And we just need to make it more accessible. And so we want to continue to put these sort of quality small homes out into the world in many different forms. Thanks for watching this week's episode. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Please make sure to like, share and subscribe. And I will see you soon with another unique home tour.