How We Designed a 3-Bedroom Tiny Home Wth Privacy

The reality is we couldn't afford land with a house on it. It allows a lifestyle that you may not be able to find in other areas while still living in a beautiful space, having all the amenities that a traditional home has without all of the distractions. We're Mark and Daisy and these are our kids Merritt and Morgan and we'd love to show you our home. Welcome to the inside of our tiny house. As you walk in you'll find our living room here. As you continue walking through you'll find the kitchen, the stairs up to our daughter's loft and then underneath her loft is our bathroom and laundry room and then on the opposite side of the house we have the downstairs bedroom which is Mark and I's bedroom and then up top in the loft is where our son Merritt has his loft. Because we're a family of four living here we really wanted to make this space feel spacious so we kept the ceilings really tall. It's a 14 foot from the ground to the roof which allows around 11 and a half feet inside. We also try to keep it as white as possible inside and as clear just to make it feel more spacious. The kitchen was an important design element for me in this house because we do all of our cooking for our family and so I make lunches and breakfast for the kids before they go to school so I wanted to make sure that we had a lot of counter space. I really focus on that in the design. We also don't have a dishwasher. We haven't had a dishwasher actually in our regular size home so I wanted to have a larger sink as well just to help with that. We have quite a bit of storage in our kitchen. We were previously living in a 1300 square foot house and when we moved to this one we actually didn't need to downsize too much with the kitchen because we though we cook a lot I try to keep it minimal with the amount of pots and pans we have. I definitely was surprised by how much space it does feel like we have in cooking. I thought it might get a little cramped because in our prior kitchen we had a huge island that I really utilized but what I've noticed is it just encourages me to have healthier habits or better habits of putting things away and being more conscientious of leaving things out when I'm done with them so I was actually surprised how spacious it does feel. Something that's a little bit unusual about our tiny house is that we do not have upper cabinets. That was an intentional choice. First we don't have that much kitchenware to put in it and we wanted to make sure that we kept to our essentials so instead of having upper cabinets we like to have the open vertical space to make the space feel larger and more bright but I do use a lot of spices for my cooking and I love the way that spices look so our friend Jack he milled this piece of wood from a tree that came from my parents home so we use that here for our shelf rack. So this is kind of my cooking corner and we have our electric stove that we use for baking and then we have our induction top and we hadn't ever used electric before for a stove top so it was our first time using an induction heater and it's worked really well. We cook with two cast irons and two stainless steel pots and that's what we use for our cooking so we keep it pretty simple but it works really well. It's allowed for our house to be 100% electric which was a goal of ours in case we ever chose to move to solar power the only downside to that is if we ever lose power we do lose our ability to cook so we do sometimes lose power out here and we're in a very windy valley and when we do lose power we're a bit outside of town and there's not that many people who live close by so it does take them a little while to get our power back up and running so we do want to be prepared for those sort of power outages and because of that we have the essential home backup system from Jackery who is sponsoring this video. Since we have a lot of fresh food in our fridge and we don't want it to go bad if we lose power we have our HP 3600 as our backup. This unit is great because it allows us to keep our fridge running, keep our stove running, keeps our lights going until they can get us back on the grid and get us back power in our area. One thing that's great about this unit is you can actually expand the battery so it can go up to 21 kilowatt hours so you can tailor it to fit whatever you want to power during an outage and with that capacity at 21 kilowatt hours we can actually run our refrigerator for 14 days during a power outage which keeps all of our food fresh and of course we can use the Jackery to power other items in our home such as our laptop, our phones, and then also our internet and since we use Starlink we can plug it into our Jackery. So being in a tiny home space is a premium for us so we love that our unit is really small and compact so we can actually keep it in our coat closet and store it away for when we're not using it and then when we need it we can just pull it out. This unit also has zero drain which means in a year of you just storing it after you've powered it up full it only has a five percent drain on the battery which is great because you can put it in the back of your closet forget about it and then when you need to use it it's ready to use and not empty. And for extended power outages you can actually attach the Jackery's Solar Saga solar panels which is a mouthful but it helps extend and the time that you don't have power and because you can hook them up and put them out in the sun and extend the battery life for you. If you're interested in exploring more of Jackery's essential home backup systems you can click the link below or use the QR code. Thanks Jackery for sponsoring this video. Now let's continue exploring our tiny house. We really wanted to make sure we had a large couch because the four of us spend a lot of time sitting on the couch together, talking, reading books. On family nights we'll actually pull out our projector and watch a movie. We put a sheet over the doors and we wanted to make sure that we had two full glass doors. One to make the space feel brighter and larger and also we live on five acres and it is a beautiful view. We already have this couch in our other house which was perfect because it pulls out into a futon so we can have guest stay on there. So we actually didn't change up the furniture and then we also installed a mini split into our home and that allows for heating and cooling. On days when it's really sunny we do get a lot of light so it can be quite warm in our house but because it's so well insulated when we do turn on the air conditioning it cools the house immediately and then it stays pretty cool without much energy which is really great. And then we also wanted to make sure that we added a large living room window so we get the sunrises in the morning and then the sunsets and we get all that beautiful light in our home. So we really wanted to make sure that we had a wood stove in our house because we live in Washington so we get a lot of cold evenings. So we installed one of these dwarf wood stoves. Since the tiny homes are so insulated it really does heat up our home so well which is really nice in the winter. Over here we have our bookshelf. One of the hardest things for me about downsizing was actually our books. My family are big readers and we are also big book collectors so I did have to downsize my books but I really wanted to make sure we had a space in our home that was able to keep our favorite books and books that we're reading and so we have our bookshelf here. We also have some of our little plants and pictures and things that just make it feel more at home and also a picture of my very first tiny house that I lived in that my sister painted for me. We used to live in a 1,300 square foot house in Bellingham and it cost us about $2,400 a month for our mortgage and then our utility bills were anywhere from three to four hundred dollars a month and now we spend about $700 a month on our land loan which is what we have to live here on our five acres and our utilities are minimal compared to our prior living so that's allowed so much more freedom with our finances and our time. Once the decision was made that we wanted to move away from town the reality was we couldn't afford land with a house on it and so we bought what we could afford which was raw land that we felt like we could develop and then we did what we could afford to do on that land which was build a tiny house. So we built it ourselves from our own design that we the initial drawing was on the napkin. The kids actually built the design several times out of popsicle sticks and hot glue that really helped them get excited about it and visualize the space. So we both have construction background so it was not a big deal for us to build our tiny house but we wanted to make sure that we were able to design in a way that would make it feel sustainable for all of us to live. At this point we had no intention on building tiny homes for a living we knew we wanted to live in one but that wasn't a plan for us to do this as a business but as we were building we realized how excited we were about like creating a space that was functional and that was beautiful and that was sustainable for not just a couple like a family could live in it. So yeah we've got a flatbed trailer and started building. Actually it took us a while to build not because the building took a while but we just had other life circumstances and so we would regularly we would come here for like an hour at a time or maybe two hours at a time. The amount of time that we worked on it I would say it was only like four or five months to build it. But we spread it out over a year and a half maybe is that right? That sounds right yeah. But now in our business it only takes us three or four months so that's been a yeah successful change. Our business is called Ocean Designs and we focus on tiny living spaces. We started our business and it's been just over a year that we've had the business and there is just no way that we could have done that full-time and taken that huge risk to start a business without being in our tiny house. And the reason is mostly financial like we just to start a business and have a mortgage and have monthly utility payments that are high we just wouldn't have been able to afford it and that wouldn't have been possible I don't think without being able to live in a tiny house on this property. Finding land to put your tiny home on is tricky for pretty much everyone. We were really fortunate that we have a great realtor but we were also able to find this piece of land in a beautiful valley and we had been kind of searching for a spot to invest in and to live in. This particular location allowed us to do all those things in one spot and so that's how we found our property is just continuous search. But we actually get this question all the time through our business and there are a number of people who own property who have RV pads or have other location to place a tiny home and so we're like trying to keep track of that in our local areas so if people have that question and they want to buy a tiny home or build a tiny home but don't know where to put it we can connect those two groups up because there's actually quite a few people that have room and should have a tiny house. The reason that we put the bathroom at the end of the tiny house is because our tiny house has two lofts one for each kid and so this side made sense since we had our first floor bedroom at one end we would have the bathroom at one end so that each end could have a loft over top of it. So Morgan's loft is actually right above us. Different from our bedroom this ceiling height is slightly higher than our bedroom and Morgan's ceiling is slightly lower and as you may have seen Merritt is quite tall so we wanted to make the bathroom easy access for him and his loft easier access for him. In the bathroom we also have a full-size laundry setup so a washer and a separate dryer. They're all electric so that just kept with our theme of wanting the entire home to be electric. Because we have a family of four here being able to do laundry on a daily basis is extremely important to us. We also live on five acres and we are regularly bringing in dirt and getting dirty. We mountain bike, dirt bike, climb, ski, all those things and those all require some sort of laundry to be done at the end of that activity. This tiny house has a full regular flush toilet and for us because we own our five acres we wanted to install a septic system to manage all of our waste and that is for future improvement as well but for our tiny house that worked out so well because we could just use a traditional flush toilet. We wanted a full-size shower in our tiny house and so this one is 48 inches wide by 34 inches deep and we use a low flow showerhead on it to help us manage water. Even though we're on a well we just feel like conserving water is important and we're able to do that partially because of that low flow showerhead. I would say though the bathroom is actually a little too big. If I was going to change anything in here I would probably shrink the bathroom down a little bit. It just didn't quite need to be as big as we thought it needed to be. Also in the corner here we have our electrical panel and some storage and that was all part of our original design but one of the things because we went all electric we needed a 100 amp panel and we're as a more typical tiny house would be 50 or 30 amps so ours is quite big. We are hardwired to the grid on that so we can supply that 100 amps without any problem but that allows us to do electric hot water heater as well as all the other electric appliances without having to choose one or the other. From the other side of the house to our bathroom is our bedroom. It is an 8x10 bedroom which we have put in a full-size bed. You can fit a queen but we had a full-size bed so that's what we used. In our bedroom we wanted to make sure that we each had our own closet space so on either side of the beds we have these two wardrobes and then under the bed we also have a couple of storage bins that we keep more of our photo albums and things like that in. Each of us has a bright window that we can look out and actually at night we can stargaze from our bed which we were really happy about when we found that out. And then over here I have my own personal book shelf where I have some photographs and some of my personal books and journals and some more of my personal items. And then we've also hung up crystals in our window because the light shines in here beautifully and it projects rainbows in our room and it's so lovely in here when the light comes in and we get to see rainbows on our walls. So one of the things that was really important for us since we are in a smaller space with our two teenagers we wanted to make sure that our bedroom felt like a little bit of a sanctuary and a space that we could close the door and just have some quiet time so we did keep it really bright so when we need that bit of privacy we can just come in here and shut the door and have some quiet time. This is my room. It's right above the bathroom and it's eight by ten feet. I have my bed over here and then my window right above my bed so I can look out and it opens for some airflow in my room. I do cheer and volleyball and I keep most of my volleyball and cheer stuff under my bed right here and then I have my backpacks behind my bed to keep my stuff for school and my sports backpacks. I have my dresser with all my clothes and stuff and then my mirrors to get ready in the morning and then all my jewelry hanging on the wall. I do have a pocket door to close off my room from noises downstairs and then I can have a space to get ready in the morning by myself. This is my room. It's on the opposite end of the tiny house is my sister's room. It's roughly eight by ten feet. One of the design features in my room is it is a little bit taller in my sister's room because I am taller. That means that my parents bedroom is a little shorter but they're both short so it's okay. My room also has a second window just because it was going to go above the door like due to structural integrity it could not be there so I got it. My bookshelf is also on the left. I'm really into World War II so it's full of World War II books and novels and then I have some other storage also. When I moved into here I didn't have to get rid of too much because I grew so much most of my clothes and all that I'd already grown out of so it wasn't too hard to get rid of everything that I'd had in my old room. This is our tiny home. It's 40 feet long and 10 feet wide so it's fairly large for a tiny house. In order to build that size we needed a 40 foot gooseneck trailer to hold the weight and the size of it. We travel a bit. We work a lot. We've got kids that demand a lot of our time and so easy maintenance was really important to us. So the siding we chose metal for most of it but we just couldn't help ourselves because we really love the look of cedar so we have a cedar around the front door. You'll notice on the rest of it we use a lot of windows to bring in that natural light. We also added a deck onto the front and we spend a lot of time out here whether it's cooking, eating with friends. We actually have a moving dining room table that we bring out here. We'll be out here quite a bit when the weather is nice enough which even in Washington it's nice a lot of the time. You'll notice that a lot of our design and for this house in particular is pretty utilitarian and that's because we're just so busy with the rest of life and owning our own business and our kids and travel which are all important to us. One of the things we love about the tiny house is that we don't spend a lot of time on maintenance and cleaning and it allows us to free up our time and our lives to do all those other important things. I think the most impactful part about living in a tiny house especially with kids I feel like the world right now is trying to disconnect us from our kids. They have phones, they're busy with sports, there's so much distraction and both parents are supposed to work and it's pulling you away from that core family unit and we've always been close like when the kids were young we're really close but now that they're becoming teenagers we've maintained that closeness as a family and I really do think a big part of that is that we just spend so much time in the same space and the kids are allowed to be outside and they're able to go express themselves throughout the outdoors and we've just raised some really awesome teenagers and I do think that their lifestyle that they have out here it helps with that and as parents too now I'm not spending hours cleaning the house and I get to spend time with them. Another thing that I think is important to both of us is that we really want people to experience what we have experienced and we happen to build tiny homes but whether we build one or someone else or you build your own like this lifestyle is actually very attainable and it allows a lifestyle that you may not be able to find in other areas while still living in a beautiful space having all the amenities that a traditional home has without all of the distractions and I would just encourage anybody to take that step go for it give it a try I mean it has really been great for us if you want us to help you we're happy to do that but if you want to do it yourself or find someone else just encourage you to go for it. Thank you so much for coming along this tour today with us in our tiny house. Yeah we really appreciate it you can find out more information about us and our business at OceanDesigns.com it's o-s-h-n-designs.com because we actually just merged businesses with Big Freedom Tiny Homes so Ocean Designs and Big Freedom are all the same business now and we also have BigFreedomTinyHomes.com website and also Instagram at Ocean Designs. Thanks for joining us today.