Resetting my Tiny House & my Mind | Deep Cleaning Vlog

Has anyone ever vacuumed on their back before? It's a real talent. This is one of the most satisfying cleaning areas. There's sludge in here. That sucked. On your birthday. Hey guys, today I decided to bring you along to my tiny house. I'm waiting in line for the ferry right now. You can see it just over there. That's the boat that I get on to get to the island where my tiny house is parked and I have not seen my tiny house in about four or five months because I rented it out to a long-term renter. I like to do this in the wintertime because I don't use it very often and so she moved out yesterday and I'm going to clean it and see if anything needs fixing and just visit my tiny house for the first time in a long time. So thought I'd bring you guys along. Just a side note that today is my birthday so it's kind of a funny birthday activity to go basically do spring cleaning but uh hey you know I'm turning 39 so it's really not about the day but I was also thinking about how long I've owned this tiny house and basically I built it back in 2014 finished building it in 2015 and it's 2025 so that's 10 years so that means I was like 28 29 when I moved into my tiny house and I lived in it for three years and um just how different I am now you know so like cut to images of me at that age building my tiny house but I mean when I look at those I think wow that girl was skinny that's one thing I think but uh it's so funny when you're about to be 40 thinking about when you were about to be 30 you know and how much has changed and uh yeah I mean I'm very nostalgic for those days traveling around in my tiny house the entire year of 2015 was one of the best years of my life. I saw the entire country. I saw a lot of Canada. I saw I went all the way up to the Arctic Circle in Alaska like over 25,000 miles in a year which is just crazy and now it's been sitting on Whidbey Island in the parking spot that I'm about to get to. Gosh it's been there for seven years and it just doesn't get as much love as it should you know I really need to do more maintenance on it more on that later I have ideas for upgrades that I'm going to try to do this year now that my kids aren't babies anymore but yeah I mean it's time for her to get a little love she's 10 years old it's time for me to get a little love I'm 39 years old so that's where we're at I'll show you some of the areas where uh the tiny houses started to show her age once we get out to the island it'd be so great if I saw a whale for my birthday I've only seen a whale out here a couple of times I've probably done this ferry ride I don't know more than a hundred times so that would be a good birthday gift thank you for sailing aboard the Washington state ferry we look forward to seeing you again soon that's where the million dollar homes are and then my um thirty thousand dollar tiny home is about a mile away I think it's it's a pretty good deal million dollar homes thirty thousand dollar tiny home here she is looks like I need to do some roof maintenance pretty soon as you can see we got some moss growing I'm thinking the shutters might have seen their last days but yeah I'm seeing a lot of moss on the roof so I'm gonna need to get up there at some point like I said I'm uh I'm here to clean and make a list of things that need to be repaired since I haven't been out here in so long all right let's see what the inside's like okay turned on some lights I realize why it's so dark in here it's because I got some I have some light bulbs out so that makes sense um but altogether the house is looking pretty clean evidence that she cleaned right there so thank you to my long-term renter for taking care of the space as I go through it I'll definitely be able to see what areas need deep cleaning and whatnot but yeah everything looks pretty good so I'm pretty happy gonna fire up the wood stove make sure it's working fire up the projector make sure it's working and then just clean it head to toe one of the dirtiest places I find in a tiny house is underneath the sink and that probably goes with any house um but I just store so much stuff under here and it gathers dust so this is definitely an area where I like to hit a couple times a year it's just difficult to get back here with like a mop you know and a broom so kind of has to be done by hand so what I'm finding is that I need to do a ton of dusting this house is full of like reclaimed wood so there's a lot of nooks and crannies and holes you know I have hidden compartments just going in and out of every drawer clearing all the things putting them on the counter gonna sweep out all these drawers all of the shelving units what do you know this isn't charged okay so I've gone through the whole house and I've made a list of what I need to purchase at the store because there's a lot of stuff that I've run out of so yeah I need to make a run to the store and then come back and refill everything like shampoos and soaps and hopefully by that time this will be charged because as you can see I've made a huge mess it's a process it's like we need to do some cobweb maintenance um and dusting out here too and how does this even happen a bird all over somebody was probably sitting right there nice little perch and just pooping all over my front porch so gotta love it as much as I'm mad at that bird for pooping all over my porch I gotta go get more birdseed because this is an incredible place to bird watch and my poor little birds I don't know if she was feeding them or not maybe she was but they're coming back you know it's springtime I need to go stock up on birdseed not only do I use this tiny house but in the summertime when I'm not using it we rent it out as a vacation rental for others to use it's the beginning of the season and prices have gone up everywhere and not to mention I'm on an island it's a local grocery store it's not a big box which you know I like supporting um but it probably is going to be pretty expensive one thing they don't tell you about shopping for a tiny house is that you don't have a whole lot of storage so you can't really buy in bulk because even that box compared to this size it's going to take up too much room underneath my sink so you end up spending more gotta get the one ply toilet paper because uh composting toilet I'm not trying to be cheap just the way it is uh degrades faster you know so because I had to buy a new rv hose I noticed our rv hose is split so that'll be a fun little activity probably a dirty activity that I'm going to do this afternoon and right now I'm going to go get myself some lunch and then this afternoon's activities of more cleaning and repairing things continue all righty got my supplies ready to deep clean this bad boy I get how some people would find it odd that I am cleaning on my birthday but as an introvert this is actually kind of relaxing I am somewhere quiet and it's satisfying too you know to refill things and to clean things and just I don't know to me it's a little relaxing actually like after about five years a trash can just needs to be replaced it's like stained and disgusting but so hard to find a trash can this size this exact size that fits in the exact spot fits like a glove this is one of the most satisfying cleaning areas I can tell people really struggle with the wood stove because there's always a bunch of black soot on the front of it and I get it if you're not used to using a wood stove especially a small one can be challenging look at all that so I have to do this every couple months but it's pretty satisfying because it really shines afterwards and you wouldn't even know it until you do it definitely have to put a little muscle into it you know could use a couple rounds for sure but you can see how it's polishing up so I might just do one round today do another round next time so let me show you where my sewer line which is actually just gray water so nobody freak out that it's going into the woods okay it's just water from the sink and shower where it broke sometimes in the winter the line freezes because I don't have enough of a slope that's just the way it is where I parked so it freezes and then cracks open if I could do it again if I could park here again I would lift the house a little bit on this side and then have more of a slope or I would dig out a drain but it's just too difficult now so instead every couple years I spend $30 on one of these luckily there's enough of a slope where the water doesn't come back into my shower so it's really just I have to replace it every once in a while so that's what we're gonna do so this is the part I really hate where because there's sludge in here I have to take this off to be strong I might have to go from the other side I am not gonna be able to do this today it looks like because I can't get the leverage I'm gonna try one more thing I'm gonna try using a cloth because my hand keeps slipping that's what I want to do is just loosen or break that off hammer wasn't too bad not too disgusting smells a little bit but luckily you guys don't have to smell it remember that it's just stuff from the sink it's not real sewage it's gray water it helps helps the psyche there we go got it okay throw that away new line coming in goes from there all the way over to there has a little bit of a downhill and that's that who's ready to clean some bird on your birthday clean a bird gonna throw away this rag afterwards this is its last task so I don't think I'm gonna get to do everything I wanted to do today and I haven't even gone into the loft or the bathroom yet it's amazing how long it takes to clean deep clean a tiny space but uh yeah be back tomorrow okay it's day two of spring cleaning and the weather is crap but uh we're mostly gonna be inside doesn't look like I'll be doing any exterior cleaning today have to come back another time for that I spent about three hours yesterday cleaning and I haven't even finished the downstairs space so it's funny how 165 square feet can be a two-day deep clean session half of the day yesterday I spent shopping and replenishing things in here so that took some time but now I'm going to check out the downstairs bed slash couch I am super stoked about this find I found it for like a hundred bucks on um on craigslist or facebook marketplace and uh it's pretty sweet it fits look how perfectly it fits and the color of it pretty much matches my walls but look how great it is folds out into a bed super easy see if I remember how actually only done it once or twice oh there we go and then folds this way nice this folds down so this is a great downstairs bed option I just wanted to check it out and make sure that everything still looks good on it which it does and there's actually some hidden storage inside as well so excited about that some trash back here of course what the random things you find when you're turning over where someone's been living for six months five months so random all right well I'm gonna vacuum this guy all right how great is that oh that was such a good find one thing that I'm really missing in the tiny house is I don't have like a table and chair set for people to eat at or myself to eat at so I mean these fold down tables which are great for like a drink while you're watching a movie on the projector but um I don't have like a table so I'd really like to get some sort of fold down option I had one at one point and then it broke and I ended up switching to tray tables which work in a pinch and in a way they're kind of better because if you had a fold down table option you're sort of locked in with all your food and if you have to go to the bathroom or something it's hard to get up whereas this you can just move away so sometimes keeping it simple is better than trying to over complicate things and you're storing these right underneath so I have two of them so it's kind of a cool option as far as like it tucks away so yeah that's kind of what we use the renter already dumped the toilet so that is super nice I don't have to deal with that today so it's really just cleaning it like you would a regular toilet well you don't have to clean the bowl because it's full of dirt and it's just dirt because like I said she already dumped it I'd like to see what the inside of a composting toilet looks like it's perfectly clean so just a regular milk jug this is a water jug actually it's the pea container I prefer that because I can replace it when it starts to get gunky but that's a brand new one never been used and then this is the poo container right now it's just full of coconut coir so that's just like dirt but you can use peat moss when you're using it you remove this privacy door and after you go number two you use this crank and put the privacy door back on close the lid put the crank in and you spin spin this about 20 times and that will spin the matter that's in that compartment back there so that spins I don't know if I can do it this way yeah you can kind of see what it does spins the whole thing so toilet paper goes back there poop mixes with the dirt pee goes in the front and you know when to dump it because you look at this little peekaboo here and that's pretty much it we dump the pee maybe every two to three days and the poop probably it depends on how many people use it and how for how long but maybe every week or two but if it was just me using it nobody else I could go a couple months because I would I know how to use it you know I would be diligent about adding peat moss after each use I'd be diligent about turning it so a lot of it's based on like user error and so because we rent this out I'm probably dumping it or the team that you know takes care of the tiny house when I'm not here is dumping it once a week so because using a compost toilet is um not something everybody knows how to do I do have instructions in my tiny house so you don't have to ask when you come over how to go to the bathroom you can just read a one-page instruction try to make it simple looks like a lot of words but it's really just more information than you need there are some areas I absolutely hate cleaning in my tiny house one is the shower I think I need to replace the shower pan it's 10 years old it's an RV style shower pan so it's like fiber glass but it's cheap and the thing about this corrugated metal is that it comes down and creates these gaps down here that make it extremely hard to clean the water seal is actually behind it there's actually a gap here between the metal the corrugated metal roofing that's what this is and this tub so I feel like I can never get in between there and properly clean and I'm not worried about getting it wet back there because like I said the seal is behind it there's a lip to the tub that comes up and um we put like grace ice and water shield to that so but that being said I'm not sure how well this roofing actually is for a shower because at least the way we did it it does not make it easy to clean and it's definitely something that I would love to upgrade one day maybe one nice thing though is having a shower pretty powerful shower head you know that you can use all right the last area is the loft so here we go so here we are in the loft and I brought up my vacuum on the short level which looks a little ridiculous but honestly this is the easiest way to vacuum up here so I like to vacuum along the side and underneath the mattress now I'm gonna vacuum the roof I mean why not right that's what we do sometimes I think it's funny because I will vacuum on my back has anyone ever vacuumed on their back before it's a real talent here's an area I find extremely satisfying to clean right in here finishing touches because everyone knows you gotta finish with the floors right all right that about does it for spring cleaning for this year that was about six hours of pure cleaning and two to three hours of shopping and restocking changing light bulbs a little bit of maintenance with the rv hose so yeah that's like a day and a half and I could definitely do more but time's up it's time to get back to life um that sucked so moral of the story is spring cleaning sucks for everybody doesn't matter if you're in a tiny house or not it's a lot of work some of it's relaxing most of it's disgusting um I don't know if I can tell in the end rather than just a regular clean I know it's cleaner but can I tell smells good all right let me know if you feel the same