A Stunning Family Tiny Home & Multigenerational Homestead

Today, financial stress and pressure is making life harder and harder for people. And one of the things that I've always loved about tiny homes is that it is one less thing in life to worry about. It's something that genuinely makes your life a little bit easier. And here in New South Wales, we're about to visit a family and their beautiful tiny home that just illustrates that perfectly. Hi Tess, how are you? I'm good, thank you. How are you? Great, it's so nice to meet you. G'day Sam, how are you mate? Good mate, nice to meet you. Very nice to meet you both. And wow, this is an enchanting place you've created here. Thank you. Yeah, we love it. Enchanted is a very good word, I think, when you look at the space at the moment. Yeah, especially with these flowers, actually. These have just bloomed. But yeah, we've put a lot of time and energy into the garden and the house. And yeah, it's slowly turning into kind of what we imagined it always would be. Yeah, I can see that. These gardens are exquisite. Yeah, it's, you know, ebbs and flows. The garden has gone through so many facets and it's looked different ways. But at the moment, this is our vision coming to life. And it's nice to see that progress. And yeah, it's definitely comforting to look at it in the space that it is now. Now, I know that in reality, this must have just been so much work to create. But from the outside looking in, this just looks like the most idyllic homesteading life. You've got the beautiful gardens, you've got the chickens hanging out in the sun. This is just a dream. When we decided we wanted to move and move into a tiny house, our kind of dream was that we would have a small living space that encouraged us every morning to, you know, get up, open the doors and go outside. And so we're trying to grow some of our own food. You can't really tell, the trees are still really small. But eventually, the idea is that we have lots of food growing on our patch and on the hill. And then our home that's kind of like sitting amongst it. So yeah, it's nice to see that it's, you know, certainly looking a lot better than it did over the last few years. How long have you been here now? Three years. And homestead is such a perfect way of putting it, Bryce. Having an abundance of, you know, life, whether it be plants or whether it be animals, was always the vision for us. And that's really kind of warming. It's still got a lot of work to go. But yeah, it's certainly challenged us in many ways to think outside the box. Well, we've built a lot of it ourself, not the house itself. But, you know, I think, I mean, this house has allowed us to have time with our three-year-old. So we've been able to work less and have both of us home, which, you know, pros and cons to that. But it meant that, you know, like we've built the trellis, we built a deck and then that rotted and then we built another one, you know. So it's kind of, it's a bit of a knock-up job. But yeah. What you see is what you get. Yeah. How did this all come to be? What inspired you to do this? Well, I think we'd been thinking about it for a long time and chatting with my parents who live up the hill. We were living in Adelaide and it was a bit of a pipe dream. And then I got pregnant, unexpectedly. And I think for us, that really kicked us into gear of, if we're going to move and, you know, we can see this life that we want, especially for our children, we've got to do it. And thankfully, my parents were on board. They sold their house. We moved out of our unit and we all moved up here together. And this kind of multi-generational living situation just works so well, especially when you have young ones, eh? You've got the grandparents that live right next door, built-in babysitters. And it also means that they get to be so much more involved in their grandchild's life. Absolutely. I mean, I remember joking around when I was about 15 with my mum about her living in the granny pod in the backyard, you know, when she gets older. So we're always nice and close. And now it's kind of become a reality. And it was the decision between, you know, at the time, renting in Adelaide really for us. And it would have meant an enclosed home that wasn't as free for our child. And we had a vision. We're both teachers and we have a very unique vision of what education looks like and the child's development. And so as soon as pregnancy was a thing, it was like, we want to do this the best we can. And yeah, what a beautiful thing it's been for him, for our little boy. I love that. One of the things that I've always loved about tiny homes, especially, is exactly embodied here, which is less house, more garden, more room for your son to explore. I absolutely love the sentiment behind that. Yeah, I think that's perfectly put. It was how we wanted it, you know, being able to open the doors and being able to go out and just let everyone be free. And the tiny house itself just looks so beautiful. Can you tell me about that? We had this vision of being in a forest and it was like, what's going to be the backdrop and what's going to make that pop? And the colour was something that I was really, and we were really brave about in terms of the lightness of it because of the difficulty to clean it. But yeah, really happy with the choice. We've obviously got the wooden cladding that we put on the outside, which equally, I think, helps it blend into its surroundings, which is what we ultimately wanted. Most of the exterior add-ons that we have at the moment, we've built ourselves or dragged my dad down here to build. So it's been a bit of a DIY job in the outside. Your dad coming down and helping out with the little provisions outside, building onto, you know, little parts of the deck and the bathtub. Yeah, thank God for my dad, really. But I think we've really enjoyed, and we've learnt so much moving up here about, you know, how much you can do by yourself that maybe we never would have ever tried in Adelaide. And, you know, financially, doing it all ourselves has given us so much freedom to be with our baby and be with each other. So yeah, we're grateful for our little knock-up moment. Yeah, and are you off the grid here? We are not off the grid. So we're connected to the solar that's up on the larger house. We're in talks with council to figure out how our wastewater, rainwater situation goes. So that's currently a bit up in the air with council. But eventually our plan is by the end of this year, hopefully, to be completely on rainwater off of mains and then we're on gas. So that should be... Really, it's just the water that we have to figure out. Yeah, I think the vision was to be off grid because, you know, when things like the weather happen and it's just nicer. It's a better feeling from an eco perspective and that's what drives us, really. Well, the house looks absolutely gorgeous. These gardens are just stunning and I cannot wait to see the inside. Can we check it out? Let's go. Let's do it. Let's go. This is absolutely lovely. Your colour choices in here just make the space feel so happy. I love it. Thank you. I worked hard to try and find some colours that I thought would work together. Sam gave me ultimate creative freedom and I just painted. I did all the painting, didn't I? I was worried what you were going to say there. Sam didn't allow me to. Yeah, no, creative. Yeah, when Tess is creative, good things happen. So I think, you know, being able to let go of that was such an awesome thing coming into this space because, yeah, wow, you really just hit the nail on the head with it. Oh, you know, when you get a new house, it's all white. Yeah. I can't stand that. It's nice having the proper colour in here now. It feels a lot more homely. Yeah, absolutely. It feels like a really creative space in here. What size is the tiny house? Yeah, it's 8.4 metres long by 2.4 metres wide. It's a good size, yeah. Now, I know that the kitchen is a really important part of this home for you and I can really see that in this design. Yeah, the kitchen is definitely my happy place. Yeah, there's a few things with the kitchen that were really important. That breakfast bar was hugely important for us, just being able to have that space where, again, you can look out at the trees and feel like you're having breakfast with nature. It was a huge sink, yeah. Yeah, full-size oven, a large pantry, comparatively, I guess, in the tiny house. But it's definitely got all the space that I had at the apartment that we lived in before in a cute little package. So yeah, we do lots of cooking, we do baking, processing of all the bits we bring in from outside. It's a neat-looking water filter that you've got as well. It's very unusual. Yeah. Yeah, we got that in the Willam Bar. It's got a big ding in the back of it, so they were looking to get rid of it. And it was exactly what we needed. The water here, we've been on a boil water alert since we moved here. So we're connected to mains, but you can only really use it for showering. And so we have to get water in from town. Yeah, we're pretty fussy water consumers as well. Like we want, you know, really nice water for our family. And it's sometimes a bit of, again, another labour of love of having to fill it up all the time. But we're really happy with that choice of the design. We found that in the Willam Bar and it was a good fit. Well, and that's where we got the fruit bowl as well. Yes. Just a giant hunk of wood. We found quite a few bits in our house, just locally, you know, in flea markets. Yes. It's nice, you know, I feel like there's lots of the pieces in our house that have a story to them. Yeah. And I love that I've met some fellow water snobs, because I am exactly in that camp with you. That's so great. Look, coming from Adelaide, we can only do better. Yeah. I love that in your kitchen design as well, you've got lots of counter space and prep space, because especially as you lean more and more into the homesteading, that becomes ever more important. Vital, yeah. I wanted lots of room to move, lots of room to have projects on the go, to be, you know, I mean, we brought in a bunch of ginger the other day and had to wash all of that off. So there's dirt everywhere, but we've got the room for it. You know, in not a lot of space, you can still have enough to do what you need. And Sam teaches online sometimes, and he'll teach from down here. So it's kind of multi-purpose space. But I mean, you know, even just looking in the kitchen, I have got a loofah next to the sink there that we pulled in out of the garden maybe a couple of weeks ago, and that becomes our kitchen sponges. We've got another couple. So like everything that we have, yeah, I don't know, it's bringing flowers in, bringing the loofah in, and, you know, having things that we created on the land, that feels really special to me. Yeah. Lovely, very comfortable looking couch here. Perfectly positioned to soak in the garden views. Yeah, definitely. We lived without a couch for probably the first year that we had this house. We just had our toddler's play rug on the floor. So when we got this, it was like ultimate luxury. We can lounge, look out of the garden. We've got this blind here that we can pull down and a projector so we can watch movies on the blind. Great. Yeah, it's a really cozy little space. The good thing about this couch is that it is washable and also you can get different covers for it. And honestly, it wasn't massively a big thing for us, a selling point. But now having the toddler in here and the toddler Tulsi in here, it's always something that you just have to kind of let go of. And we wanted it as well to be able to be shiftable. So it's got two main pieces so you can sort of shift it around and we like that flexibility. Great. And I love all of the pops of wood and character in here as well. Especially this banister is just beautiful. We had a friend of ours come and do some gardening on the property and he was cutting down weeds, like weed trees. Camphor? Camphor and devil's figs and things like that. And he pulled this out and it had a vine wrapped around it and we saw that and we thought that's the one. So I sanded it, prepped it, varnished it and now it's on the wall. It creates such a beautiful, unique feature in the house. Yeah, we love it. Yeah, it's good. It really does. It almost looks like a wizard's staff. It does, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah. It's very Dungeons and Dragons. It's cool. It's stuff like that that also really connects the house to the land as well. Yeah, well that's the thing. I think you bring in a house and it comes as it is but then you slowly turn it into your own. Having things like this makes it, for me, feel so much more like ours. Yeah. And the little one's bedroom is upstairs. Well, he sleeps with us. So this is more of a playroom at the moment. We had a bed and then we decided why do we have a bed? He never sleeps in it anyway. So we got rid of the bed and we turned it into a playroom which he loves. So it is his space. That is such a great idea because, yeah, life with toddlers in a tiny house is not always easy. Having a playroom and a separate space where all the toys can go and it can just stay messy all the time. What a great idea. Yeah, yeah. And I think as well, you know, he's almost three and it's that age where they feel like, well, I think they feel like they need their own space. They need their own thing that is theirs and it means that we can work down here or get some cleaning done and he doesn't, you know, he's not kind of caught up in it. Yeah, yeah. If anyone's worried about having toddlers in this space as well, just don't because the amount of benefits he's got from, like, he's Quadzilla now being able to go up these stairs. He was doing that from, you know, nine months. You know, he was traversing these even earlier. And, you know, we kind of worried do we need to put a gate on here? And we never needed to. We have a gate on his bedroom from when he was smaller. But yeah, it's actually been a space that's been super conducive to having a toddler in it. It's another benefit to living in a tiny house as well that he can never be too far away from your attention. Yes. And behind me, we've got your bathroom. Can we have a look in there? Yeah, sure. Let's go. This is lovely. The plants in here just steal the show, don't they? Yeah, this jungle aspect was something important for us. Well, they were only small plants when I first put them in here and it's just gone wild since being in this bathroom. It looks really good. This basin as well is just a work of art. Oh, this was from a man called Mustafa in Egypt on Etsy who made us a copper sink and we got here and it's pretty moldable and the plumber didn't think he'd be able to get it in, but he did. And, you know, we love it. Yeah, we love the way it's patinaed as well. Yeah. Yeah, it's really nice. We talk about this sense of place here and being connected to here, but I've always been someone as well who likes feeling connected to other cultures and other people from around the world, bringing some sort of splash of international in was really nice as well. The mirror is just beautiful as well. That was another Merwillimbau find. Yeah, Merwillimbau has really done a lot for us. Yeah, it really stood out in that antique shop and we kind of rolled the dice we didn't measure and we were like, this is a very stupid idea, but it came here and it fit and I think sometimes you just, you ride your luck and you get away with it. Very cool. And is that a DIY composting toilet you've got there? It is. That was a Sam and Dad knock-up. They built it in the shed. Again, it was another challenging thing of how can we do this with the lowest footprint possible? It felt nice to just go to something that we had never tried before and something that was really bare bones and natural and it might not be what we roll with for the future, but it's a nice, easy and a cheap alternative. We're thinking our next plan as we build a deck is that we'll probably build on an outhouse and have a composting boot out there. Great idea. But in the meantime, I mean, we've been using this for over a year now and it's working really well. Yeah, really nice decision there. And this shower is palatial for a tiny house. This is a definite bit of luxury. It's huge. It is a definite bit of luxury. All three of us fit in there. It's, yeah, we feel very lucky. I was pretty sad moving out of a house that had a bath. Baths have always been my go-to, but this is kind of, what more could I have asked for really? And you cannot beat an outdoor bath. No, well, that's the thing. I have a bath now, so I've got everything I need. Absolutely. And you've got a good amount of storage in here as well. You've got a big vanity unit here and you've also got the extra storage here as well. Yes. So the original plan for this was having a washing machine on this side. So you just have the drawers, but we decided it would be more useful for us to have the storage and then we'll sort a washing machine later. So yeah, we have tons of storage in here, more than we could need really. Some of these drawers are almost empty. Especially with a toddler, there is so much washing to be done though. How do you tackle that now? Oh my gosh. Well, it's been a challenge. So our laundromat in town is our laundry at the moment. So it's kind of a fun family outing, isn't it? You know, we all go to the laundromat and have a good time and get all the laundry done. But yeah, in the future, we would like an outdoor setup, I think. Yeah, I honestly think that's one of the best ways to tackle tiny house living as well, especially in this kind of setup where you've got such beautiful gardens, being able to extend into the outdoors with things like outdoor kitchens and outdoor bathrooms. Just what a nice way to live. Yeah, you're right. What a fabulous concept to be able to go and do the laundry, you know, amongst the birds and watching Tulsi play outside. Well, and he's outside most of the day anyway, so it makes sense that we would be too. Yeah, great. And up the stairs, we have your sleeping loft. Can we check that out? Yeah, let's do it. Oh, again, I just love how colourful the space is. The green and the orange was, I wasn't sure about it, but now I am. Yeah. It's nice having a walkway here as well. It's lovely. And that was one of the reasons that we did go with this house is because when we had a newborn, I didn't want to be climbing up a set of stairs. So having a loft that we could just walk into that is, I mean, for me anyway, head height has been really nice. Yeah. I was a little bit worried with like having to crouch all the time up here, but it's not a problem. Like I'm kind of like a little bit hunched anyway, so it kind of works well. Probably not a good thing for my posture, but yeah, it certainly helps me to be able to kind of clamber in and out to have this space. And also, you know, like accessing wardrobe spaces and things. Having some standing wardrobe spaces. Yeah, yeah. It's been a good decision. We'd love a king bed, but you know, who wouldn't with a co-sleeping toddler? I think that's the thing. If we didn't have a toddler in our bed, then we would have no complaints. Yeah, yeah, definitely. They take up an unreasonable amount of space. Unreasonable, yeah. Legs in all directions. Nice to see the skylight here as well, especially with that N6 screen. So you can just always vent the hot air. That's such a nice feature. We always talk about how sleeping in this room feels like we're camping because we can have all of the windows open and the skylight open. And so all night you've got the fresh breeze. You've got the calls of the birds. You know, you can kind of hear the wallabies around outside at night. Yeah. It's really nice. I love the stars as well. So, you know, and the stars are just incredible in this part of the world. Yeah, there's not much light pollution, which is really awesome. Another example of how much this house leaves you feeling like you're a part of the outside, even when you're inside. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice to have the shutters up here too. Really nice. Yeah, good for airflow. You can open these and the fan and the heater comes straight through. So it's really comfy in here, even if it is cold. Yeah, fantastic way to play games with Tulsi as well. He'll be up, he'll be like, I'm coming and he's slamming the shutters. It's great. It's again, this nice extension of this is a house that is all encompassing one space. And I like that, being able to know you're down there and say hi. And, you know, it's just, it's that, yeah, that feeling that we're all connected in the one space, which is, yeah, it's important to us. Yeah, I love that sentiment. So you have both been living here now for about three years. How was the space working out for you? Really well. I think I never had any doubts that this space would be good for us. You know, there's moments where we think, oh gosh, you know, it's been raining for a week. It would be really nice to have that covered deck or, you know, some of the things that we don't have that we know we do want. But the space itself is more than enough for what we need. It's cozy, keeps our family together. It's been exactly what we needed, I think. Yeah, we love it. And without a shadow of a doubt, it is so us and we fit it and it works. I mean, you know, having a space that I love indoors, but having this space outdoors as well, this is just the combination that I always dreamt of. This house is what has enabled us to move from, you know, two kids kind of shacking up in a rental in Adelaide to now we have a family and this is our forever space and we can have the garden the way we like it and build our house the way we want it. It's actually really emotional when you have a child in so many ways, because yeah, it's a full-on journey. It's the most intense journey. And this house is a marker of that. So when we look at it, it's hard to not get a tear because you will see all of the sweat and the tears and the happiness that was poured into this place. You know, you can get wound up in things, but it's a sense of our base for who we are as a family unit, you know. Can we talk about the cost of building this home? Yeah, so it was about $160,000 for the tiny house itself. And then all the add-ons have just been at our expense and it's been really slow and been really cost effective sort of planning and implementation of things. We had an incredible amount of support to be able to afford it, which has been so great. And we feel so lucky and privileged because yeah, this can be a reality for our first part of parenting, which has been huge, not only for us, but for our little guy, so yeah. Yeah, one of the things that I really love about this home and your story is that this house has enabled you both to be home for the first years of your son's life, which is so rare. Having my partner at home and my parents up the hill during the first, I mean, really for the most part of the first three years of Tulsi's life, Sam's been at home. Like I couldn't have asked for more than that really. And without this house and the situation we have, I mean, we paid the deposit for this house, but then my parents were the bank, so we pay them back. If we hadn't had that situation, we would have been renting somewhere in Adelaide. But I think the main thing of like being able to just be at home when Tulsi was in his infancy was just hugely important. And we would have been working, both of us, to be able to make things work if we'd stayed in Adelaide. So he would have copped the brunt of it, which would have been sad for all of us. Yeah, because especially in today's culture where it is so rare for even the mother to be home full time with the child, having both parents at home must just be amazing for your son's development. Definitely. I mean, he's got such a great relationship with both of us, with both of my parents. I mean, we knew before we even got pregnant that we wanted to homeschool. And so to know that looking ahead, it's comfortable financially for me to be at home with any children that we have. Yeah, it's allowed us to be thoughtful as well of like who wants to go back to work and how long for. It's given us that luxury of being able to choose that and think of everything. So it's this real holistic approach to parenting and it means as well that we live in this community, in this hub of Nana and Papa up the hill and mum and dad down the hill. And he's got these elements of being able to breathe out from us, but always come back to that safety. And having those four people as a safety net means he just gets vibrancy all the time. Someone can take a break and he'll get someone's full energy and attention and that's just awesome. And yeah, from a perspective of like our careers, I've just gone back into full-time teaching for a little bit just to see how it goes so that maybe we can expand. But just knowing that I can pull back from that is nice, it's comforting. So that flexibility is huge for us. Well, I just think you have built the most beautiful home here. I love the house itself. I am completely enamored with the gorgeous gardens that you're creating. And I would love to be able to visit you again in a few years' time and just see how all of this has evolved. Thank you so much for sharing your home with me. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming, Bryson. You are welcome anytime. Come and stay and yeah, you'll always have a place here. Thank you so much. I know that it's a cliche to say that our children are our future, but cliches are cliches for a reason because they're true. Our children are our future. And in today's modern society where the focus has shifted away from family and onto basic survival, just trying to make enough money, it has meant that the mother and father normally have to work, normally can't be there for their children in the same way that they used to before. And I absolutely love that for Tess and Sam, this tiny house has given them the ability to be there for their son. Yes, it's a beautiful home. Yes, the gardens are absolutely spectacular, but to be honest, none of that means as much as being able to be together as a family. And that is what I love most about this home.