Her Custom 14ft Wide Tiny Home Has NO LOFT Unique Design

I've been living in a tiny home for two years, and something that's changed about me over the last two years is it really lets me be me. I'm able to do all the things I love, enjoy the things I love. Saving money is a big cost of that. I have money to spend on all those things. Now my space is my sanctuary. Hi, I'm Crystal. In this tour, I'm gonna tell you how I found my tiny home community, who my builder is, and why I went tiny. Welcome to the inside of my tiny home. The dimensions of my tiny home are 14 wide, 32 long. I do have a screen porch that's 14 by 14. It doesn't count for the square footage, but any way to make the tiny home look bigger, you look like you have more room, add yourself a screened-in porch to it. When I first saw this place, I walked in the doors and immediately said, where do I buy? I love the design of it. It's a U-shape, so I can walk all the way around. It's big enough for me to pretty much do whatever I want. I'm one person, but I have everything that I need right here. The way that my tiny home is laid out is perfect for day-to-day life, because it's almost just like a small home still with individual rooms. It's not one big space. But my living room, I can have a part-time workspace. I have a chill space, but then it's still completely separate from my bedroom and my bathroom. I love when my daughters come over, so I do have entertaining here. In this room, I comfortably hold six to eight people where we're not stepping on top of each other. Again, I have luxury being 14 wide, so this one big open space, we can all be in here and sit very nicely together. Part of the love for the design of my tiny home and the layout is the fact that the kitchen is right here. I love a big open room. It doesn't seem like it. It doesn't take up a lot of space, but it's a full kitchen. I have a full-size oven, stove, full-size fridge. I can cook, bake, do whatever I want in here while I'm still kind of in my entertaining space. As you can see, it is a little bit of a smaller counter than most kitchens. So when I'm prepping to cook, I eat a lot of fresh vegetables, fresh fruits. So I am cutting fruit a lot, cutting vegetables a lot, making salads, things like that. I use this countertop. I will take my dish out here and I lay, like I have a bigger cutting board. I'll lay across there so I can use the sink as an extra countertop space, one side of it. So I have one side open to wash the fruits, cuts here, store here. Cooking for me is a lot less these days than it used to be. I was a single mother of three girls, three athletes. So they ate like grown men. So I cooked a lot when my girls were at home. Now that they're growning out, it's only just me. I actually do make my dog's food also. She's very spoiled. So I only cook for the dog and myself. I'd say maybe three days, four days a week, I'm really cooking. Shopping, changing was a big thing for me. Obviously, I had three children that grew up and left. So I used to do big time grocery shopping. So I had to learn how to go to the grocery store and only shop for myself. And they even toned that down because I really only have a fridge and one and a half cabinets for food. So it's kind of toned your diet a little bit. I guess you could say I don't buy all kinds of different snacks. I only buy one kind of snack because you don't have enough room. So it actually helped my diet also. Organization in the kitchen is key to me. If I'm cooking especially, I want to be able to grab everything. So this side by my sink, I keep all my dishes, glasses, things like that. This side is a food side. So my cabinets have very little space that way, a lot of stuff in the fridge, but the fridge is full-size. So it's great for storage. So I say if you get a full-size fridge, I'll take less cabinets for a full-size fridge. One of the big draws for me in a tiny home was when I lived in a bigger home, it was a lot harder to go away for an extended period of time. I had to worry about trash cans, the pool, nobody running the water if I lived on a well, everything maintaining here. It's great, I don't have to worry about that. I just kind of close it up and go if I'm gone for an extended period of time. Escape property management comes in and they will flush the toilet, run the water, make sure plumbing stays fine, make sure that everything's okay, nothing has happened to the home. They check on it for me. My kitchen is perfect for me to be able to cook in. It's ideal. I can actually cook kind of two things at once. I meal prep for my week. So it's great for that. And I love the fact again that it's in my living room. So I actually can cook and do other things at the same time. One of the things that attracted me to tiny homes is always the organization. I am a person that everything has a spot. It's gotta go away. I don't do clutter anyways. Having a tiny home just helped me hone that in a little bit. So I try to maximize the space that I have would be cabinets that fit in as other things. Storage unit, because you don't have a lot. My table doubles as a part-time workspace. So that's why I use the risers for the computer. I do have storage underneath my printer that I use. My fireplace, it came with a mantle, basically just kind of how you would get if you lived up North. So that was a great place for like my little mementos. The great thing about my home, which lured me to it was I do not have a loft like a lot of tiny homes on one level, but I have storage up above here that goes all the way through to the other side. So from the bedroom, I store stuff like suitcases, boxes, old pictures of my daughters when they were little. Everything can be stored up out of the way. It has its own spot. As you can see, my home has a huge window in the living room. It actually is one in the bedroom as well. One of the biggest draws for me when I opened the doors and saw that was the windows. It lets in so much natural light. I live in the sunshine state. When it's not hurricane season, it's perfect. Everyone does have its own set of blinds. So I can actually private off my living room if I want, just private off my bedroom when I want. Pull the whole thing down at night. Even my front doors are French doors with blinds. So I can be locked in or open up and free. I came from a 7,000 square foot home with two acres of land and a pool. My girls were moving out, having lives of their own. So I decided to downsize. Moved into 399 square feet. Obviously, I had a lot to get rid of. So I basically kind of scratched and started over. The only thing I moved in were close personal items, things that were maybe like mementos, but I got rid of a lot. When I was in my downsizing process, I kind of went room by room in my old home and decided if there was anything in there that I was going to keep, take with me, if my children that were moving out were taking any of it with them. If not, I either sold the rest or donated it. Most people think that when you downsize in space or you move into a tiny home, you might be sacrificing a lot. I didn't sacrifice anything, really. Nothing in my daily life or things that made me comfortable. I did keep some personal items, but everything else was just stuff, right? It's a better way of life. Found out about this neighborhood in an advertisement on the radio. So the community that I live in is an Escape tiny home community. So we're Escape Tampa Bay. They're only homes that are made by Escape. We purchase directly from Escape or rent directly or mortgage, lease, all of that stuff. He has plenty of different programs, but it's all Escape homes. You can't have another tiny home from another manufacturer that you move into this community. So this Escape classic tiny home cost me $193,000 furnished also. My lot fee here is 735 a month. That includes water, sewer, garbage, and all the outside maintenance. When downsizing to a tiny home for myself personally, I went from a very large home to actually a smaller home. So, I mean, I save monthly, probably better than two grand a month because I had a very large home with a lot of upkeep. So I don't even want to say they were cut in half. It was way more than half. If you don't live in a tiny home community in Florida, you have to find a vacant lot or vacant land as much or as little as you want, how it's divided, parceled out. You have to make sure that there's water, sewer, electricity that can be run to the lot. You can put your tiny home on it. You go to your local county office. You make it real property. So you're making it all one thing. If you ever want to five, 10 years later, move it off, you can go to the county and have that stuff reversed. Then you can move it off of the property, move it to elsewhere. If you do buy a vacant lot and it's ready to have the tiny home moved on it, you can leave the wheels on it. The state of Florida, we're a big hurricane state, we'll actually ask you to have them put hurricane straps on it. Obviously, so you don't blow away in the wind, big storms. We got a lot of wind and storms happening here, but those are all removable things if you decided you wanted to move it off in five or 10 years as well. I am a real estate title agent in the state of Florida. So I've been doing it for 30 years. So I know the issues with owning land and making something real property. Floridians have a lot of mobile homes. So they make it all one. So they try to have stationary structures now. So I do this every day for a living still. We went from the front room, living room, kitchen. Now we're to the next room, which is obviously where the toilet is. I love it because it has its own space. So I have pocket doors on both sides I have a ton of walls in here. So I was able to kind of put my own personal touch on the bathroom. So when I go from the bathroom where the toilet is, go right behind me to the rest of my bathroom, to the sink and the shower. Huge draw for me when I bought this place was a double sink, even though I'm one person, I take up the whole space. So it's nice. I also love this bathroom because all of these are storage. So I don't have to put so much on a countertop. They built it in. I do use certain things like this to hang and store things. So everything has its own spot. My favorite part of the bathroom is the stone shower. It's amazing in here. And it's big enough for two. One of the things that I also love about this bathroom is the fact that it's so close to the bedroom. I can close it off, but it also has a full mirror here. So in a tiny home, and if you're a woman, mirrors are important. So I use this mirror a lot to help me get ready in the morning. And I have a tiny full length mirror in the bedroom, but it's, everything is right here. Get right out of the shower, get ready for my day. If you're looking to downsize and you wanna move from a bigger space to a much smaller space, my recommendation is looking for someplace where you can store all your stuff. So it either has cabinets built in, or you're able to buy storage units that might stack on top of it. Storage in the bathroom is a big spot. It's where you'll collect everything. So you gotta have a space for it all. A big plus about my bathroom is its vicinity to my bedroom. Right here, getting ready, I immediately am in my bedroom. My bedroom is actually one of my favorite layouts of the tiny home. Of its vicinity, obviously, to the bathroom, shower, still kind of all in one. So I agree, for a tiny home, you don't really see many en-suites where everything can kind of be together. Mine is set up that way, with the bed being pushed all the way back against here. This way, I still get all the lighting from the big window in my bedroom as well. Queen size bed on each side has its own lamp, its own light, its own nightstand. I got USB ports, plug in everything that I can charge it. I get a little bit of natural lighting up behind the bed, but it's just perfect for at nighttime, that it stays dark enough back there, so I never have to shut those blinds. It's high enough to keep me in a little bit of a cocoon. Also, part of the bedroom is, is that as in the front room, storage goes all the way through. So up here, I have storage where I store suitcases, but it goes all the way around. My AC is up here. It's a split unit, but I can also store all the way around to the edge there. I do have inset lighting too, so the whole top of the roof lights up also. Big sell for me when I bought the home also was this, I kind of have a built-in closet, so I didn't fortunately lose a lot of storage space. All of these are drawers, just like a dresser, cabinet. I do have a closet here where stuff can hang, so it is full size. My bed is lifted up off the floor, so I actually can store underneath the bed also. So this was a big sell for me, because I had a place for everything. I didn't have to buy any other storage. The only issue that I have with a tiny home, I'm big on everything has a spot. I had to find a place for a clothes hamper, right? Everything's tiny. Where do you put your clothes? My washer and dryer's in the front of the unit. It's not always conceivable. I don't automatically put it in the washer and dryer and wash. So I bought a skinny, dirty clothes hamper, and I set it here, kind of out of the way. And actually, this basket for Florida, it stores my winter clothes. You don't need very many where I live, but sweaters, sweatshirts are bulky. They take up space. So I just put them in a decorative basket. So it's a spot I can sit on it, stack other stuff on it if I want, but it keeps them there and out of the way. And it doesn't take up any hanging space or storage space for my nine months out of the year clothes for living in Florida. I have been living here for two years. It's changed a little bit from when I first moved in. I've moved some furniture around. Functionality changed a little bit, but one thing about a tiny home is that you maximize your space and make it work for you. Had to be very organized for me, at least. Everything has a spot. So I love my space. It's home. It's my peace. I'm always excited to be away on vacation, but coming home to this space and what I've made it is who I am. I think living in a tiny home is a great affordable home solution because you still get the feeling of a home, right? You have your own space, your own things. It's very functional. You maximize it, but it's very cost-effective. I think it's a very affordable way to live a full life. Thank you for touring my tiny home with me today. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I loved showing it off to you. If you would like to reach me, you can go to Instagram and I'm at KDK underscore 927. Have a great day.