Living in a Tiny House w/ a baby changed our life!

I'm Joel and I'm Abigail. Welcome to Rudolph tiny house. Our last name is Rudolph and we love Christmas. You have to have stuff that's collapsible. If you're going to have stuff for your kid, because there's just not more room just because you bring in a third person. So this bookshelf, the reason we built it ourselves is because it's actually a secret door. We not only wanted to be able to stand in the bedroom, but we wanted to capitalize on the amount of space you can get under your bed. Welcome to the outside of our house. We've got about 36 feet long, 13 and a half high and eight and a half wide. My favorite part of the house is our front door. This was a Craigslist find for $25 and it is gorgeous. You can't find a 21 panel door anywhere. So when I found this, we had to have it. It was originally wood and we painted it this, I call it granny June blue, which is Joel's granny who passed away. And when she did pass, we went ahead and got a swatch of the color of the outside of her house and then we color matched it so that we could have a little piece of her coming into our home every day. So this sighting is new ish. We originally had this gorgeous dark walnut. It was pine stained dark walnut wood and it was very elegant and gorgeous and very rustic looking. And we eventually had to tear it down because it started to rot. One thing we learned with wood sighting is if you're going to go with wood, make sure that you're treating all four sides of the board. We did not treat the backside and boy did we pay for it. Back around here is my other favorite outside feature and that is these quad windows. These are all the way the whole height and width of the living room. So it makes it when we're sitting there drinking our coffee with the morning sun coming in or gorgeous sunsets, we get to look out into the nature and we love this feature of the house. So now let's head inside. So welcome to the inside of our house. Behind me we have our bedroom in the office up on the gooseneck. I'm standing in the living room behind there is the kitchen and then the bathroom. Joel had this great idea to replace a couple of our walls with this beautiful Texas cedar. And honestly it just sings in our house. And we have a lot of little features here and there just to add some pops of color. We have our Florida on the stairs with the oranges. I crocheted a curtain over here. Any chance we get to put in something special, we go ahead and add that in. So our last name is Rudolph and we love Christmas so much so that we got married the week of Christmas. So a lot of our Christmas decor around our house is actually from our wedding. So this shelf, it changes kind of with the season. This is most of our wedding decor. These are actually the cake toppers from our cake the day that we got married. And these were on the tables and around wherever we were having our reception. So it's a great way to kind of have these sweet memories of our wedding every time that we decorate for Christmas. So in our living room here, we actually built this couch. I put in this little third of a mattress as our couch cushion because this can actually convert into a bed. So if someone comes to stay with us, it can become a queen size bed. We also like to have storage underneath it. And one funny thing about the couch and something I would do differently is our house, we can see the wheel wells on the inside. And so the back leg of the couch actually has to detach when we put it up against the wall and we have to switch sides if we move the couch to the other side. So I would say if I did it all again, I would make my floors come up to the level of the wheel wells so that I don't have to deal with that. Back here is our Christmas tree. Yes, we have room for a full Christmas tree. However, if you can't go out, you have to go up. So we got a seven foot Christmas tree. It fits all of our ornaments. It keeps it merry and cheery, but it doesn't take up too much floor space. So behind me here is a bookshelf that my husband and I built. We try and put functional items on it because we want to grab and go all day. So one of the things is my sewing machine. I sewed a lot of the curtains in this house. I sew all the time just little projects. And if I had to get this out of storage every time, I just wouldn't. So we try and put things out that are functional. So this bookshelf, the reason we built it ourselves is because it's actually a secret door that opens to our storage. We store everything from stuff that we only really access once a year or two. We have the rest of the guest bed. We have arts and crafts supplies, tools you only use once in a while, stuff like that. This picture was painted by my sister Alison, and this is the tree that Joel and I got married under. It's a part of his family's property that's no longer in existence now. So it's a way to kind of honor that memory. And it's so beautiful to us. And this frame was built by our neighbor, Mike. He's my bestie. And this is our old siding actually. So this gives us a way to have two things we love so much that are no longer here that we get to keep in our house. Up here are our bikes. We originally stored them downstairs and as life has moved around, so have we, and we decided they were taking up too much room. We found this pulley system, which are, I think they're for garages, but in a tiny house you just find fun things and make them work. So we installed them up here so we can actually pull them down onto the ground and hoist them back up. And that way we get to keep our bikes, but we don't have to waste floor space with them. This little shelf here is a new addition for our daughter. These are all of her little clothes, all tucked in all these drawers and her shoes and socks, her diaper bag. So we had to add this in. It wasn't a part of our floor plan before, but we kind of tried to make sure there was a little extra room from the get go so that we could rearrange as needed. So we talk about space saving and things folding up. So this is actually my daughter's stroller and it pops open and closed. You have to have stuff that's collapsible if you're going to have stuff for your kid, because there's just not more room just because you bring in a third person. So it's good to find stuff that can condense down as tight as possible. For us, having a baby in a tiny house is a, it's a very, very new adventure. I mean, we are just over seven months into this and it's been pretty crazy, but it's been rewarding at the same time. Challenges really have been just like anything in a tiny house would be finding space for stuff for your child and necessary things for your child. We thought we really had released all the stuff that we could have and then our beautiful daughter came along and I was like, man, there's just so much more stuff that we don't really need in order to make room for our new best friend. You know, I know we had to prioritize the Harry Potter collection, her inheritance. So that was, that was the toughest choice by far. So this table I have seen in a lot of tiny houses. It's pretty standard. It folds up and becomes this huge, you could seat six table. So it also has drawers for storage. But one thing we did differently is we installed wheels on the bottom of it, which makes it taller so you can store something underneath it. But it also is very heavy cause it's all wood. So it makes it to where you can roll it around your house. The amount of times this table has moved away from this wall to become something for arts and crafts or company coming over or just to hold things. The wheels have been huge for us. Over here is this curtain. I actually just put this in and I crocheted it because when we have the window down, we actually have a privacy filter, but when we have it up everyone can see straight inside. So this is a way to give us privacy, but in a really pretty way. All right, come with me. Let's check out the kitchen. We wanted to have a giant kitchen cause my husband loves to cook. So we ended up taking up a good third of the bottom of the house with it. One feature that we used to have was a propane stove, but we ended up ditching it cause it just wasn't the right fit for us. And we opted for a toaster oven, which actually does work better for our needs. And another feature is this dual top cooktop. A lot of people I see put them in this way, but we ended up going this way with it because we wanted to have room for stuff behind it and a little bit of prep space in front. Over here behind our cute little spice rack is our refrigerator. We went with a three quarter size. This one's frigid air and we feel like it has everything we need space wise. We usually go grocery shopping a couple of times a week. It has room for all we need. We have this cart and this area changes all the time. Used to be our washer dryer, but it would shake the whole house. But now it's our little baby food cart and our cooking cart. We also have her high chair, which goes open and closes all tiny so we can fit back in here. And then we have our sink. This is actually a pasta drainer, but we found it works best for draining dishes cause we only have a few at a time. And then we have our pantry up here, which we originally forgot about and we had to install a cabinet to create something to put food into. So now we have a beautiful pantry in the middle of our kitchen. We started out before we went tiny. We wanted to make sure that we could handle it. And one of the things we did was we got rid of all of our silverware. We put it in a plastic bag and tucked it away and we had one fork, one spoon and one knife per person just to see, can we do this? And honestly the dishes have never been less. My last favorite feature of the kitchen is this map picture and not for the reason you think, actually, this is exciting because we pop out our ladder and it becomes a secret door to our upper storage. We have diapers up there, all of our Christmas decor, toilet paper and tissues, anything that we need that we don't need to access every single day. We just pop it up in here. It even has a light up there. And then we just tuck it away. Nice and pretty. So the bathroom is pretty standard. We have a normal size toilet, normal size sink, and we wanted to have a big shower. So we opted for this because we stayed in our friend's tiny house right before we moved into this one, just to kind of confirm we were cool with this idea and it was great, but their shower was so small and that was something that we, it was a deal breaker. We couldn't live without having a big enough shower to really move around and get nice and clean, nice and airy, not be sticking to the shower curtain. Every time you're taking a shower, the shower is about three by four. So it's as wide as the bathroom is and it goes all the way to the back wall. We opted with a normal toilet. We used to have dual flush, but it was having issues because maybe with leveling the house or whatnot, it might be a little complicated there. So we ended up just installing a regular toilet, but we did try out compost in our apartment ahead of time. So it's not impossible. We just opted for regular. All right, let's check out the rest of the house over here is our stairwell. Cool, fun little pocket down here. We store some stuff down in so we can get it out easily. Speaking of the stairs, let's head up and see the bedroom. So welcome to the upstairs. We're a tiny house. We call this area the boffice cause it's half bedroom, half office. So let's start in the office area. In this area. I used to work from home. This is my computer. This is my desk, which used to fit between our dressers and they had an office chair here. But since having my daughter, I've been out of office. So she is in my office area as her little nursery, if you will. Beside her are our dressers and our closets. So we have our clothes down here and we have hanging clothes up here. These actually open for more storage. And then over here is our TV and it's super cool. So we watch the office from time to time, but we don't watch a lot of TV. So we wanted to have one around, but not always around. So we came up with this idea where we hinge this out so we can face this towards us when we want to watch TV. And when we're all done, we just put it right back. All right. So this is our bedroom area and we wanted to make sure that we could stand up in our bedroom. We've seen the lofts and we actually slept in one in our friend's house when we stayed, but it wasn't for us. We not only wanted to be able to stand in the bedroom, but we wanted to capitalize in the amount of space you can get under your bed. So this is up on a riser and underneath is just bins of stuff. We have our winter clothes, we have laundry, shoes, anything you can think of that we access all the time, but we don't really want to have out in the house lives under the bed. One more thing on the other side of the bedroom. This is what the mini split looks like on the inside of the house. We have two, one is here and one is in the living room. If we could do one thing differently, we would have installed this on the far wall in both rooms because the way that these work is they try and go down the long way of the room to make it cooler or hot as needed. And we installed both of them on the short side. So if we could do it again, we would have made that change, but they work all right. And honestly the mini split is such a good feature in the house. It really doesn't matter that we put it on the wrong wall. Going tiny is a wonderful thing, but it's really hard if you really want this. If this is the right lifestyle for you, none of that will matter. It brings a discipline to your life. Just kind of breaking it down to what do you need as opposed to what are all of these things that you want. The tiny house movement is this beautiful way to really appreciate what you have, be a good steward and less really is more. I know that's so cliche, but it's so accurate for what we're trying to do here. And we've never felt richer with the little space we have. We really capitalize on every inch of this house and we really feel so much wealth and joy here. Changed everything in the way that I conduct my own life, the way that we conduct our marriage. And now a child. All right.