Couple Living Their Dream in 2 TINY HOUSES Connected with Big Porch

For me the most important thing is the freedom. I don't have the overbearing expenses that I have living in a stick and brick home. When we were in California I think he was paying several hundred dollars just for the lawn guy because the lawn was big because the house was big. Or if he did it himself it would be a three-hour job outside because the lawn was so big. Now it takes him about eight and a half minutes to mow the little tiny piece of grass that we have out there. Changing our financial dynamics and the affordability of living tiny gives us the freedom to spend that money another way. We enjoy traveling together. We have a trip planned next winter in fact going to South Africa. Living in a tiny space allows us to live large and in other ways. Hi I'm Ed. I'm Durindy. And this is our tiny home which is actually two tiny homes put together here in Durango, Colorado. This month will be two years that we've lived here in Durango in our tiny home. The original house was a 10 by 40 built on a gooseneck. We lived in that about a year and a half and then we decided to do an add-on. We constructed a 10 by 21 add-on and we connected the two tiny homes to make one. The builder was Western Tiny Homes out of Central California. We're located here at Animus View Mobile Home Park. Uniqueness of this is that it's a 120 unit co-op so it gives us some ownership in the park. We're 1 1 20th of an owner with our build. Colorado is really defining the co-op initiative. It allows people like us to have ownership in a park and some protection from corporate America coming in and being able to buy the space out from under us. So it gives us a sense of ownership and some equity in our build. We pay $800 a month here for our space rent and we also pay for water sewer and trash which is an additional $35. So a total of $835 here for our spot. We constructed a 500 square foot deck outside with distinct and separate areas. A fire pit area, a flagstone patio area and a table area that we can enjoy most of our meals outdoors through most of the year. Along with enjoying the outdoor space we enjoy the outdoor living lifestyle. On the other side of the train tracks is a walking path that extends from about a quarter mile north of us all the way through town. So you can ride bikes or walk along that path or enjoy the river. And now that you've seen the outside, let's check out the inside. Welcome to our tiny home. We're in the original 10 by 40 tiny home 399 square foot. We'll talk about the add-on later. Another 10 by 21, 210 square foot for a total of 610. This is our tiny home. So the reason we decided on custom is we wanted something built to our specifications, not cookie cutter. We wanted separate and defined spaces. By building custom it allowed us to translate to the builder what we wanted and come up with our own creation. So starting behind me is our living room. When designing the home we decided we wanted a cozier feel. So with this living room it might be a little smaller to some people but it's a distinct room and it's super cozy for us and we like it. So because the space was so small we had to actually have a couch that was custom ordered to the exact width and length of the room. It also has storage underneath it. The legs are about five and a half inches so it lifts the couch up off the ground and within doing that we were able to use totes for extra shoes, socks, blankets. We also took this ottoman from the motorhome and works well because Ed will lay here and I'll lay here and we'll scoot the ottoman up and watch television this way. But most importantly it has shoe storage. With the coziness of the space we decided to add a fireplace. It's an electric fireplace but it puts out quite a bit of heat and the ambiance is nice. I'm from California. I lived there most of my life. I was originally from California. Spent the first 40 plus years there working and raising a family. In 2015 I had some health issues. More specifically I had a blockage in the lower descending requiring a stent and this is all before I met Durindy. That's a real eye-opener. When you're faced at 45 years old with health concerns it opens your eyes to what life has to offer. It wasn't until 2017 that I met Durindy though and when she came into the picture I had a few more health scares. I had a mild stroke and it scared us. She was the first that looked at me and said why are we doing this? You go to work every morning and I go to work. We don't see each other as often as we would like and what is it all for? I'm adventurous and he's adventurous and when we found that out about each other it just made sense to go see things and go do things. We ended up selling everything and we traveled for five years in an RV but before we did that we got married. We decided to seal the deal and have a commitment on the road. I didn't want her to jump out somewhere in the middle so we we got married and traveled the U.S. for five years which led us to Durango. She had a house and I had a house so we ended up selling both of those, having an estate sale, a yard sale, giving things away. How much did we get rid of would you say? Probably 98% of our possessions easily. And it was it was liberating that's the word that we use it's kind of cliche but there's nothing I've ever owned that gave me more sense of satisfaction than not owing anyone anything so that freedom not having to pay a gardener or a housekeeper or a mortgage or utilities was something different. So we jumped in the motorhome and we started traveling. In fact we had a total of 38 states total together. 49 national parks. 49 national parks right along the way. And capital buildings, presidential libraries, dive bars, lots of different restaurants. So yeah really gave us a bigger world view. We we were locked into an echo chamber there I think in California. So traveling the U.S. and seeing the gray scale in between you know we saw things so black and white I think being in California but but seeing the rest of the world and the population. Most people are not left or right most of us live somewhere in the middle so it was cool to meet people along the way from a variety of cultures. So just up these stairs is our old master bedroom which is now a yoga room, exercise room, stretching room. This was our original master bedroom now repurposed into an exercising room. The reason why we moved our master bedroom downstairs is as we age we didn't really want to keep walking up and down the stairs. So now we use this room as an exercise room, a meditation room for stretching and mobility. And with this space we can always turn it into another bedroom or we can put a dining room table up here. We've actually talked about that before. So it's kind of a multi-purpose room or a craft room, a reading nook. Plenty of options. Now we'll head down to the center of the house which is our kitchen. A few of the goals here in the kitchen was to have full-size appliances like you would in a normal house. You'll see that we have a five burner range here with an oven. We have a microwave up here at the top which is also a convection oven. We also have a dishwasher which is my favorite. Since going tiny I've been cooking a lot more. Actually my husband has too. And what works great for us is actually that it is small. When you're standing here you can get into the refrigerator, you can prep food here, you can rinse dishes and vegetables here. And we also have a pantry here that pulls out kind of like what we had in the motorhome actually. And if you can see there's you can actually fit a lot of stuff in here. One other design choice that we made was having the splash of color in the kitchen. We originally had white cream colored tile with the white countertops and white cabinets and we decided that we wanted a punch of color and we both like orange. We also decided to design the kitchen off to the side so that we would have a hallway to get to the rest of the house instead of having the kitchen turned and walking through it all the time. I've been trying more and more new recipes lately which is going great I promise. But I realize a better technique could really elevate my cooking. So big thanks to Gordon Ramsay for the expert guidance and to Masterclass for sponsoring this video. Masterclass is a membership to classes from the world's best. Members get unlimited access to over 200 courses and thousands of lessons across business, wellness, design and much more. All for just $10 a month billed annually. I've absolutely loved learning new skills and generally just getting inspired. One of my favorites is Amy Poehler's class on applying improv to everyday life. My big takeaways? Embracing a little discomfort, wholeheartedly believing in myself and building trusting relationships can lead to an authentic fulfilling lifestyle. Easily turn spare moments into fun learning opportunities anytime, anywhere. I really appreciate the option to listen like a podcast. During this holiday season you can get up to 50% off an annual Masterclass subscription. Click the link in the description or scan the QR code so they'll know we sent you. Learn from the world's best to become your best with Masterclass. Just off the edge of the kitchen and down the hall is the bathroom. Let me show you that. So in a bathroom you need to consider a few basics. A vanity, a commode and a shower. We went with the 30 inch wide vanity, a elongated commode and a four foot wide shower. You'll also notice a window behind me which allows for pass-through ventilation and then storage for towels etc. So this design works for us now. As we age in place we may want to make some changes. We can always change the interior wall slightly to change the access, move the shower slightly or whatever to accommodate any future needs for health, walkers, wheelchairs etc. But for now this bathroom works wonderfully for us. So this originally was our laundry room slash walk-in closet slash utility area. You can see we have a full-size washer and dryer. We went with a side-by-side versus a stackable unit. We like the convenience of having the front load system and if one component breaks you simply have to replace that component not a whole unit. Cabinets to the left and we also have a cat so we have her litter box and stuff down in the bottom of the cabinet. And this area back here was our hanging closets. With the addition that afforded us the ability to evolve and make some changes. This is now a utility pantry area and food storage. The add-on completely changed the configuration. It not only allowed more space in here for laundry but it added the pantry storage which gave us more room in the kitchen. It gave us a mudroom fill. We built this hanging configuration for our jackets. In Colorado that's important to be able to grab a jacket and go. Just a game changer all together. The evolution of the space is fantastic for us. So from the laundry room let's step into the add-on. This was originally an exterior door which led to the outside. It's now a pocket door which takes us into the new space. Follow me. And now we're in the add-on. To my right is an exterior sliding glass door that goes out to the deck. Remember the original house is in this configuration. The add-on is in an L shape. Gives us this space to the outside. To my left is the new master closet. Walk-in closet. So we opted for the walk-in closet to give us more space. This complete game changer. More rod space for hanging clothes. They're not smashed together. And the compartmentalized storage for folded clothes. Socks, underwear, jeans, etc. can go on this side. We use it all the time to dress or disrobe and change outfits here to get ready to go out. And this is our master bedroom. Remember before we had the master bedroom upstairs. As Journey mentioned going up and down the stairs for a year and a half we decided to have something on level. This was our idea. We were able to reutilize the space. Use our cal king bed in this area. Two nightstands. A separate mini split. A huge area. In the future if we ever need caregiving we can come and attend to somebody or change the bed configuration. And as you swing around we have windows on both sides and we have a fireplace and artwork and the tv and all sorts of things that make it feel cozy for us. The other thing that this allowed us was a little more private area. You can see with the original configuration even if you were upstairs you could still hear what was going on in the rest of the house. This gives us a separate space to come to if Journey's not feeling well. Wants to take an app. Read a book. Watch a show separate from what I'm watching. She can come into this area or vice versa. A lot of people get tied into the idea of that living tiny everything has to be small. For us that evolved and that evolution is okay. We were trying to live in someone's definition of what tiny was but realizing that we just needed a little more space we decided to to add on and build and that's okay. Whose blueprints of life are you living? It was all right to make a change and adjustment. There are a lot of misconceptions when you think of living tiny. Based on the economy of scale because you're covering less surface area you can go with a higher end tile. With the total build cost you can afford to spend a little more money in in the areas that are important to you. For us we wanted higher end appliances. We wanted a full-size refrigerator or maybe marble countertops or tile surrounds on the fireplace. A walnut hearth. Electric heat in the fireplace. Mini splits. A higher end washer and dryer. Those things are achievable because we're not spending as much money on the total build. We ended up securing this spot here in the mobile home park. Living in a motor home here in the winter is a little harsh so we started putting our heads together and she said let's think about a tiny home or something that we can build here. So even though we're in a mobile home park it doesn't feel like a mobile home park at all to us. We have a view of the Animas river, a little preserve outside of our deck and we've really made it a cozy spot. And we also have a great community like the mobile home park that we're in. We actually really like it and all the people that walk their dogs and walk by and we see up at the mailbox and the community here is is really good. We get along with everybody and everyone looks out for one another and it's nice. We were in a 30 foot motor home class a so we had the two captain's chairs in the front. You take that out of the living space that five feet so now you're at 25 feet the whole back half was the bed. Living space in there between kitchen and living room and the dining table was how many feet? 12 foot. So when you compare that to this it yeah I feel like we have gained a lot of space and it is tiny but it doesn't feel like it. For us buying a off the lot mobile home wasn't what we wanted. We wanted something that we could customize. Mobile homes they do make them a lot different now than they have in the past but I think the customization is what we really enjoyed with this and the fun in doing that and planning it out. We've had people say well why don't you just do this or why don't you combine this? Oh we did trust us we did several different renditions yeah of what we wanted. In order to fit the bed upstairs we have a calcined bed we had to bump the wall out a foot which takes away from the entire rest of the house so it's like you move one thing and it affects the entire rest of the house. I mean it was fun but it was it was work. So we built the 10 by 40 on a gooseneck. The original cost was $160,000. Keeping in mind that that's all custom it's two by four wood stud framed building on on a trailer foundation 16 inch centers like a traditional home we paid an additional $60,000 for the add-on and then with the outside seating area the licensing the moving etc were about $235,000 into the combined build. Can you finance a tiny home? Absolutely. We are actually working with a broker out of Texas who hooked us up with a mortgage company. We ended up putting $40,000 down to the builder to the builder to start the build and then at the end of the build the mortgage company steps in they pay off you know the remaining balance of the build and then you have a quote-unquote mortgage payment to that company. It's a manufactured home is how it's titled so it's still registered through the department of motor vehicles since it has axles affixed. The interest rate was slightly higher That's because it's a tiny home it's a higher risk for us there were other costs involved we paid a mover a professional mover to bring the unit here that was a $2,500 expense. Remember this is a tiny house on wheels it's registered through the DMV that was an unexpected expense so we paid $5,000 to the DMV when we originally took the home from California registered in Colorado Remember it's a vehicle so there's an annual renewal the first year we paid $5,000 on the original 10 by 40 year two it dropped to $1,500 year three should be in the $750 range. Since we've taken the wheels off we're not planning on moving it anymore can we non-op it we're researching the laws in Colorado to see if we can do a non-op on it because we had a mortgage on it originally the mortgage company requires that it's insured obviously for their protection and ours just like a regular house so we have a home owner's insurance policy on it it's considered a manufactured home we pay $850 a year for the original 10 by 40 and it's insured to a certain value when the insurance company appraised it because they want to get an appraisal on its value so that they can insure it properly it appraised for $255,000 the original 10 by 40 that was kind of a cool thing for us because we had spent $160,000 on the build it's immediately worth $100,000 more than we spent to buy it so we had some equity investments from the very start tiny home living isn't just for a certain group of people we we've met people in their 20s that are just starting out that are spending $30,000 for a shed style or an ADU we've met older people who are also downsizing maybe they lost a spouse or or they're in a state in their life where they just can't keep up with things so they're transitioning to a smaller footprint a different lifestyle so i think the tiny home movement community involves people from all social and economic for sure groups right from the young to the old and and us somewhere in between yeah it provides affordability for a range of people it really minimizes what you what you buy and what you spend and what you bring into the house because there literally is not enough room so sometimes we'll look at each other and say well i want this i'm going to bring this in well what are you getting rid of thanks for stopping by tiny house expedition i'm alexis and i'm christian and this is our diy tiny house on our homestead in oregon looking for more tiny inspiration watch these videos but if you're looking for something specific visit our channel home page to browse tiny homes by category and don't forget to subscribe hope to see you soon