How He Owner-Financed Land For His Tiny Home

Hey, my name's Caleb. And today in this video, I'm going to be showing you how I found this land and also how I afforded to build these structures. This is my 24 foot roundhouse. Over here, we've got our living room. I got a bedroom over here and then a deck out looking over the garden. And then out behind, we have a 16 foot roundhouse guest bedroom and then the kitchen and the shower. And then I have a composting toilet building out back. Come on in. So right here, I actually had a 20 foot roundhouse and it was kind of a prototype. So I lived in that for a year and tested out how the panels came together and kind of how all the roofing panels worked. And then about five months, I built this 24 foot roundhouse. For a while, I was just living in my 16 foot guest bedroom. While I kind of built this, I got a whole unit of this clear fur from one of my wood distributors. And he had it for a couple of years and gave me a great price on this big unit of these. These were nominal two by fours. And I had a local company put a tongue and groove in it and it's kind of built this loft. This spot here, I think it's been kind of this orientation for a couple of months now. It was funny actually, when I first moved into here, I was so used to living in a 16 foot yard that I just kind of set up the bedroom and this was kind of open for a while. Now that we've been here for a bit longer, we're starting to spread out and start using this space out here quite a bit more. This is the largest home I've lived in in my whole adult life. When I first moved to California, I lived in a van. As I was building the business, different yurts in different areas. And then, yeah, actually this is definitely the biggest yurt I've ever lived in. We build a lot larger yurts than this, but I've always lived in fairly small yurts. It's got this really cool bamboo flooring kit that we actually make in the wood shop. And it's a top nail flooring and I just love the patterns. I think the lines look really nice with the round shape. I love this rug. I got this from a local shop that was going out of business and the rug ties the room together. Right here is a table that I built out of the scrap material from building the doors. Actually, I built this little cabinet here out of the same wood as well. And yeah, it's nice that it just ties in with all the window casements and doors. I love this space. And the big step up on this one is dialing in our solar kit with a thousand watts of solar, being able to put halo lights in and have dimmers and plugs and switches throughout the whole property is huge. Because for the last couple of years, I've just been moving solar generators around and running everything off extension cords. This is our seating area for dinner. It's also a great spot where I like to have coffee in the morning, kind of looking out over the deck and over the garden. One of the best things about this space is the lofted ceilings. It's really great having this nice big open space. When my folks came out to visit from Maine, it was great. We, you know, went out in here and played board games and that was a lot of fun. So I do have the kitchen outside. And the way that kind of started was initially when I bought the property, like kind of pretty much the same day I closed, I put up a lattice wall yard and built an open outdoor kitchen. And then as time has progressed, I kind of put a front on it and kind of just like scabbed it, you know, made the structure larger and closed it in. And so when I put this up, I thought about putting the kitchen inside, but I already had that building over there. And it is nice too, to just keep this like clean of any, I like to cook a lot of steak and fish and that sort of stuff. And so to keep that kind of in that building is nice and keep this just nice and clean and open. So this is the bedroom here. And we thought about putting the bed up in the loft area, but going up and down the stairs, also our dog sleeps sometimes on the foot of the bed. And so he definitely couldn't get up there. The loft is really more of like a napping area or, you know, a storage area. But yeah, no, this layout's worked really nicely. And the way I kind of framed and designed it is all the lines and everything kind of just works with a round space. So all these joists come to kind of more or less a center piece. And so they all just kind of ray out. And with that, I was able to mirror kind of the same pattern that's on the floor up into the loft. So this is a queen size bed here. I really, I picked this location and actually framed this out so that this bed could slide right between these two four by four posts. I like this location because it's got ample walking room around the curve of the yurt. And then we've got the two windows here, you know, so we can look out at night. So I had more of that same fur that I used for all the paneling and the joists. And so I made this pocket door with that same shiplap. And this was my first, you know, attempt at making a pocket door. And it worked out really nicely. And I think for a space like this, a pocket door, and usually, you know, it's covered on both sides. I like to look at the door, so I left it exposed on this side. But it's a great way to save space because you don't have that radius where it's, you know, in-swinging or out-swinging. So that way it just kind of tucks away when we're not using it. You know, it's nice at night to be able to close that up, keep the heat in in the winter. So we have a his-and-hers dresser here. We both don't have a whole lot of clothes, so most of everything fits in here. And then I do have kind of like a small container up in the woods over here where I put all my winter clothes and my snowboard and that sort of stuff. And this has been a really comfortable spot. I actually heat with a diesel heater, and it's actually behind that chair there. And what's been super awesome is I can just sit on, you know, on my phone and control the heat from the bed, which is a huge, I mean, I've always, you know, traditionally heated with a wood stove, and so that's been a great improvement. It's built with modular curved panels on the inside. Then there's three inches of poly-iso insulation in the wall, and then there's sheathing, and then there's this exterior fabric. I will be doing cedar shakes on the outside of this in the future. The roof is 20-gauge galvanized metal, and then the top is an acrylic dome tinted skylight. The benefits of the galvanized roof is that's a 50, 60-year roof that's on there. It's much thicker than a traditional metal roof that you would put on a standard home. And the reason it's so much thicker is because we had them made custom for this size in this project, and I wanted to go thicker on that material. So they're a little heavy getting them up there, but once they're up there, you don't have to mess with them again. I built this deck out of the French doors in the front, and I actually built it so it arcs into this hill. You know, it's up pretty high in the middle there, so I wanted to do that so I could walk off the land or I could come out of my car and walk up onto the deck from here, and then it snakes around and I can go over to the kitchen from the back of it. I got all this cedar locally, and I built it with the wire railings so you could see underneath the railings. And it's cool because it looks down on my garden as well as my orchard that I planted last year. And then I also have a cedar hot tub that I built, and it's great in the wintertime. It's all off-grid so I can pump water from my well into it, and then it has a submersible stainless steel wood stove that lives inside the water, and so you can get that ripping. So I'll be clearing the land out here, and I can be kind of feeding that, and then end of the night, you know, I can hop in there and have a soak. I started building yurts 10 years ago and built the first one as a high school, like, senior graduating project. Me and my girlfriend lived in it in Maine, and then I didn't really wanna go to college, and I started building more yurts, and so I started renting them out to music festivals. And then I went to school. Everybody was like, you gotta go to college, you gotta go to college. So I went to college, and it wasn't a good fit for me, and so I ended up dropping out of college and moving out west. And then when I came out here, I moved out here in a van with some job site tools and started building yurts for primarily cannabis farmers to start. And I started the business out of a maker's space here in Grass Valley, and then eight years later, you know, we ship yurts all over the country. We produce about two yurts a week out of our factory here in Grass Valley. So then when I moved out here, the dream was always to buy the property, but it was just, land around here is quite a bit more expensive than where I'm from. So it took me, I don't know, I've looked for about two years in a serious way, and this property, which is about 10 minutes from where I work, popped up on Craigslist, and it was a cannabis farm that had gotten in trouble, and it sat here for several years vacant. And so I was able to negotiate with the seller and owner finance it over 10 years with a pretty small amount down. I think right now the best way to find a good deal on a piece of property is either gonna be on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. There's a lot of raw land out there, and generally that's an owner-seller deal, and you can work with a title company and set up whatever type of contract you want. You don't need a realtor, and that's where the title company's gonna come in, because they can do a title search, they can make sure everything's legit. You wanna be really careful buying land without having all of that knowledge prior, so that's where it's worth the money. And also you can set it up, so like for me, I'm paying the person who owned the land prior with this note, but it's set up through Placer Lender Services, and so it's a third party that takes a small fee, but they handle all of that accounting. And even though we're not necessarily using a big bank or anything to do that transaction, there's firms all over the place that can keep track and make sure that that's organized. I've done this just incrementally, and so I've just paid for things cash as I developed the property. As money came in, I was able to just attack new projects besides the note on the property. And so for monthly expenses, the property has a note, I could do a minimum payment of $500 a month. I prefer to pay more than that and try to pay off the note sooner, and there is a balloon payment of $3,000 a year that I have to come up with at the end of every year, but I generally pay about $1,000 a month towards that note. Propane, I would say probably like 60 bucks a month. Diesel in the winter, probably like $120 a month in diesel if we're running two of the diesel heaters all the time. And then the solar, I'm probably like $6,000 into my solar system here, and then I hired a friend to wire up all the structures here with me, and so that was an upfront cost. The solar is how I get all the electricity, so I don't have to pay anything for that anymore. The water is from the well, and we use the solar to pump that up to holding tanks, or with our garden, we just actually pump directly from the well and then irrigate the garden with that water. Overhead, besides build projects, is very low. I mean, just a few hundred dollars a month plus the thousands, so maybe $1,200, $1,300 a month in just living expenses to be out here on this land. So now we're over in the guest bedroom, and this is actually the first rigid wall yurt with an eave that we built, and the first one that has a metal roof. And so we actually lived in this while we were constructing the other one, and now this is just a great guest bedroom. What's cool about this, too, is this actually has our platform package, so whereas the other spot had that bamboo floor that was just top-nailed onto the subfloor, this actually is a prefabricated flooring kit that all bolts together that comes with a really easy to use leveling kit, and so the platform just comes together in a couple hours, and then you can build up from there. So this is how I power the primary house as well as the guest bedroom and the kitchen and the shower. So this is a 3,300-watt main head, and then these are 2,000-watt expansion batteries. And what's super nice is you just plug your solar panels all together and then plug that into an extension cord that just comes into the side here, and then you daisy-chain just the units together, and then you could then just plug right into this and use this. We've actually pulled power off the side that goes into a panel underneath this yurt, and then I did direct burial out to the different structures and that way all the switches and plugs all run off this stack. And what's cool about this is I have the five expansion batteries, but you can do up to seven of them if you need more power, and this has been just a killer unit. In the wintertime, sometimes we have to run the generator from time to time, but the whole stack charges in a couple hours but runs for about four to five days for our power needs. All right, and so right over to the left of the primary roundhouse and the guest bedroom is this kitchen here. And this actually started out as like a lean-to style outdoor kitchen. And this is a propane fridge here, and all the propane tanks that run the fridge as well as the Audubon hot water heater live behind the structure. So I built this and it was like a galley. It was about this big. Then I realized like, wow, I've got 10 acres here. Why is my kitchen so small? So I just kind of like scabbed and built on this front area. And with that, I built the French doors for the structure out of like old redwood tanks that my friend had some of that wood. So that's what those French doors in the front are. And yeah, it just runs off propane, propane for the stove top. And then yeah, just this is a pretty slick, especially if you're down on space, you can get these on Amazon, but it's like a dryer, like an organizer that lives above your sink. It's definitely worth the $20 to buy this kit. It's been awesome. And then yeah, over here, we've got storage as well. The countertop, I just had some pre-finished for plywood, cut in the top to put the sink in and then just kind of edge banded it with a piece of sapile here with a little bit of a radius to make it a little bit more counter-like. Same deal, I just kind of cut into this cabinet and to the top here and dropped in this propane top that also was like, it was like 80 or $90 on Amazon. I really love this propane top and I think it looks nice and matches the refrigerator. And then I have a switch that turns the water on and first it pumps it through the on-demand hot water heater and then comes out here and then goes into a gray water area. And yeah, ultimately like this, this is a really functional kitchen with more time. Like really, I've only can work on these some weekends, but I work a lot of weekends. So it's evenings and like some one, a half a day on a weekend. So some things are temporary and then it's like, well, all right, this is how it is, you know? So ultimately I'd love to build a different kitchen situation, but for now this works just fine. And then just to the right of the kitchen, I have an outdoor shower that I built. It was one of those projects, it's just for a while I had something a lot more basic and then one weekend I put this up. It's really nice at night because I have the lights that come in from the kitchen and we have an on-demand propane hot water heater and a water tank behind that it pumps from and it has really good pressure and it's really hot. And this is actually a great shower and for a long time I didn't have any curtain we're so out here that there's no one around at all. So that was nice. And then as I've started to have more guests staying with me, I put the curtain on, but this is actually, I love this shower. This is one of my favorites I've ever had. Right down below from the yurts and from the kitchen and shower, I've got my outhouse here. This was the second thing I built on the property. First, I built a lattice wall 16 foot yurt and then I built this like a few weeks later. I built the whole thing in four parts and assembled it in my wood shop first and then broke it down and just reassembled it out here. It was a really quick way to do it. It's worked well for me. It's definitely not the forever solution, but for the last two years I've had the land. This is, you know, it's worked well and it does exactly what it's supposed to do. Thanks for coming by. If you're interested in learning more about the round houses, you can find us at livingintentyurts.com. This new design here is fully to code. So if you're, you know, looking for something for your backyard, it could be a great option. And yeah, once again, thanks for popping over and checking out my house.