Designer s 3 Bedroom Tiny House w Main Floor Bedroom

I am the most content when I am sitting in this living room, as big or small as you may think it is, and I'm having a meal with my family. That, to me, is what living tiny is. Whenever you're thinking about going tiny, a pantry is a must. If you're gonna live in it full-time, do not. And I mean do not buy one unless you can have this type of storage. We found the property, and it was a jungle. Thorn trees everywhere. You can barely make your way down to the lake. He was like, you're gonna do what with our land, are you crazy? I have been living tiny for three years with a husband and two teenagers, and so today, I'm here to show you how we've made all that work. This particular tiny home is 11'2 wide by about 34'7. A lot of people think that when you go tiny that you have to buy tiny furniture. This is a full sofa, a sleeper sofa, actually. Large ottoman in front, normal size end tables. But I'm gonna be honest with you, we've gone through about five different size of dining tables in this space. Different chairs, different locations. We just have been in this constant battle to figure out what is absolutely the best arrangement to maximize the views and not feel cluttered, but give us function. We just found this table, and I think we have finally found the right one. So this is a 36 by 42, yes. And it's a dining table cut in half. So when I saw it, I was like, I had to have it, because it is perfect for the space. And the best part about it is I got to put my dad's favorite chairs from his office at the table, so it very much feels like home to me. Going tiny is truly an adjustment, and it took me about a year to really find my rhythm in it. I was a little bit shell-shocked. I think the family was shell-shocked, but I don't regret it, and I could never see myself going into a house now. Living at this level, the simplicity of it, it is a gift. It's just you have to go through the process of figuring it out. We've been here for three years. As we've lived here and we've figured out, hey, we need to figure out storage for these items, because everything has to have a place. Once you figure out that, living here becomes way easier than you can imagine. So when it comes to storage in a tiny home, this particular home started off as just a secondary home for us, and then we loved it so much that we sold our home, and we decided to leave her full-time. So since it was designed for a secondary home, full-time storage was not designed into it, so we had to make some accommodations in how we live. So instead of really beautiful little end tables by my sofa, I have filing cabinets. This little bench here, we store extra pillows and blankets to chill out as a family, to watch movie time together. This bench just moves up, and then we have this beautiful table of four. So by day, we're homeschooling with the kids at this table, and then in the evening, we're enjoying a lovely dinner as a family, looking at the lake. And that's my favorite part of the day, is just us around the table. If you're gonna go tiny, my biggest focus is making it feel like home. And so as I look around this room, a tiny home, yes, you need a TV and you need all that, but for me, I needed it to feel like home. I needed special art in place. I needed pretty things in place. So one of the things I love to do in decorating tiny homes is I love to pick pieces that are from estate sales, to mix the new with the old, because that way it feels like it's been a cabin that feels like it has legacy to it, that it has heritage to it. And so that's what I'm trying to accomplish here. Estate sale table, dad's chairs, estate sale art, and I hope you love our living room. We have a T-shaped kitchen. We opted to put the oven range and microwave right here, and not a lot of people like that because they don't want that to be a focal point of the living room. So what it enabled us to do is it enabled us to make more room for laundry and having a functioning spot down the hall, which you'll see in a minute. So you don't have to design this to where you have this here. This can go back to being a beautiful hutch, or this can go back to having no storage at all because you want a larger dining table right here. You can't get locked into when you see things that it just has to be that way. Don't get upset if this isn't your jam. We did it for a reason and we love it. In a tiny home, people always wonder, do you have enough space to cook meals and all of that? We use this as our prep space here. We have to have our air fryer. With two teenagers, that's an essential part of how we live in this home. We chose the one basin sink and it works well for us. We have great storage here. We have a dishwasher. We opted for that. I mean, every home should have a coffee bar, so this is kind of my little part of the kitchen. And then we have this great pantry here. Whenever you're thinking about going tiny, a pantry is a must. If you're gonna live in it full-time, do not. And I mean, do not buy one unless you can have this type of storage. We hold a lot of food and it works beautifully for us. I'm pretty sure that we store more groceries here than we even did at our normal house just because we had to figure it out, right? And so then we have our fridge. We took out the other fridge that we had. We didn't like the design of it. I'm a big fan of the big door, so we did that. And then the bottom freezer. So overall, we love the function. The cooking portion here, the prep station here, the coffee station here, vital, vital, and the storage. So overall, it works really great for us. I love this space. So we were able to do a side-by-side. You don't get to see that a lot in tiny homes. And then I added this countertop. We have, of course, our Sonic ice machine. Who doesn't love that? And our Berkey. We added these beams just for character, and then we added the little perbles right there. And don't judge me. I get that I have what looks like Christmas lights up, but I like my house to feel a little enchanting. And in the middle of the night, when my kids come down from the stairs, this is a really soft nightlight from just for the whole house in the evening. So I leave this up year-round. I love it, and I think that's the point. I think that when you have a tiny home, you need to have things in it that you love. So that's what I've done. I hope you like it. A lot of you have seen the bathrooms where it's like the half wall with the glass, and it's really pretty. Well, that's what this one used to look like. We had a problem. It had some cracks in the grout. I didn't pay attention to it soon enough. And next thing you know, I saw some mold. Unfortunately, we had to gut this whole bathroom about two years ago after living in it for about a year. But the beautiful thing about that is that we did get to gut it, and I did get to make it feel more like home. For example, we opted for the tile on the floor that matched the shower base. We have built-in niches with Schluter edging. All the things. We have a handicap bar, and primarily we do that just from the standpoint of we hang our towels at the end of the shower. It just makes a great aging-in-place option, but with a function for towels as well. And then the other thing in the bathroom is that we have figured out how to store our stuff and still make it look pretty. So over on the cabinet wall, we have a two-shelf thing. Got it from Hobby Lobby. We keep all of our functional stuff on the shelves, and I just like to live clutter-free, and I might look a little staged, but this is truly just how I'm wired, so this is how I live. It does get a little challenging with two teenagers to keep it looking like this, but that is the goal, at least for my personal happiness. And then the other thing, this is a functioning medicine cabinet. I highly recommend, if you're gonna go tiny, that you do the medicine cabinet option. I realize it's not that pretty, but it holds a lot of the things that all four of us need on a daily basis to get ready. And so this is my bathroom. I hope you like it. Kind of an interesting story about how we even landed here. My husband and I are both realtors, so we knew that we wanted a piece of land nearby that had water access, so that way when the crap hit the fan in the world, we had a place to kind of go and bug out, per se, and we wanted it to be within an hour and a half of Dallas-Fort Worth. My husband put us on a search in the real estate system, and every time a new piece of property with a lake view would come up, we would get it. And we would go all over. Every time someone, we'd drive it, and we'd find something we liked, and we couldn't afford it, so we couldn't get it, or all of those things. We found the property, and it was a jungle. Thorn trees everywhere. You can barely make your way down to the lakes. We just thought, okay, well, this is just gonna be our land until we need it, and we're just gonna put a little bitty house on it and be done. But we opened up the dealership, Cowtown Cottages. We opened right in the middle of COVID, so in the middle of that, there was all the material shortages. Remember all of that talk? And so I looked at my husband, and I said, hey, I don't know if they're gonna be able to get the materials to keep building these houses. We should take our models from the dealership and move them to the lake and diversify and Airbnb them. And he was not happy. He was like, you're gonna do what with our land? Are you crazy? And I said, just trust me. You just need to trust me. I didn't know how we were gonna make it happen. And my mother and my stepfather at the time came forward, and they said, we really feel like this is a good idea for y'all. And they invested into helping us develop this land. And then we just started bringing houses. That's how we landed here. And I just feel very fortunate that I get to live here among it and wake up to this view. But we almost had to live here, because we had to manage it. I really don't know what I thought that I could manage this place from Arlington. So us living here has been a blessing in more ways than one. So when it comes to the cost of a tiny home, you're gonna wanna add some things to make it home. You're gonna wanna add the special touches, maybe extra insulation. Every home I build, I build as if I'm gonna live in it. The builder will say to me, Kelly, you would sell more homes if you didn't put so many options in your homes. And I'd be like, but why would I sell a home to someone who's just gonna live in it and be just fighting mad every day because it didn't have what it needed? Put you at your base price of about 100,000. Some people really do some crazy, amazing things with me, and they've gone up into the 120s. But in today's market, I mean, where can you live like this for 120? So I'll have people come in and they'll be like, 120 for a tiny home? And I'm like, shall I pull up the real estate system and show you what 120 can buy you in the real estate market right now? It's just all perspective, right? It's perspective. And so when you weigh out what your options are, living at this level for 100,000, it's an amazingly beautiful life. We do like to specialize in providing tiny homes for aging in place. So even if you're at the 60, the 65, we really love that because we can design around so that you can age in place and you don't ever have to leave. So a lot of people will say, I just want to put the house on my family's property or my daughter's property or whatever. And those I think are the most meaningful to me just because I was my dad's caregiver and he was a builder. So we started this right as he was on the end of his journey here. And I just always feel very passionate about helping people in that season of life because I know the value of what that would have brought my dad if he would have lived to carry out this journey with us. This is not your typical loft. Remember I told you that this was a secondary home that we made full-time living. And so I wasn't able to think about designing in full-time storage for my kids. So we've had to adjust. My daughter is 15. This is very much a 15-year-old's bedroom. I tried to make it special for her. What I did is I just put a little twin bed, added the little detail there for privacy. She loves it. She's an avid reader. So this is where she hangs out a lot. And then we just added a clothes rod. In a normal model home situation, I wouldn't see exposed clothes, but it's functional for her. There's a whole wall of cubbies, a total of 16 cubbies that she is able to organize all of her things, her clothes, her books, everything. And so it gives her the most storage of any of us actually. And it gives just a really clean look so she doesn't lose any of what she had at home. She has all of her things here and it's functioned nicely for her. This is my son's room. He's 17. I have a love-hate relationship with this room. First of all, way too much furniture. But when you go tiny, like when I talk to my kids about that decision, I had to really try to make it feel like home for them. And he really wanted to take his mattress with him. So we put this big honking bed in this loft space. I wouldn't do it normally. And so just know that this is part of going tiny. If you're gonna have your kids live tiny in a four-foot space, you need to give them the leeway and the flexibility to kind of make it however they want so that they can have their own personal happiness in this decision. It is definitely very much my son. He has his art materials over there. He has art on the walls. He has a little space over here that has his clothes hanging that came with the floor plan. And then he has a little nightstand and two dressers for storage. Overall, for him, it functions perfectly. Overall, for me, as his mom, as a designer and a designer of tiny homes, it gives me a little bit of a rash just because it's not what I would want. But if my son is happy, really, that's all I really want. So welcome to my son's room. We're finally entering into my favorite part of the house. This is recently redone as of about six months ago. As I've mentioned, when we moved into this house, it was not set up for full-time living. So we literally just had like this little bitty closet because it was just a getaway house. We had a little chest and there's actually a window behind this closet. But as we struggled and struggled with how to live here and store all of our clothes as a family, I was laying in bed and one night it hit me. I was like, wait a second, I have to close up the window. And it was a bit challenging because we did it ourselves. And so we framed it in with wood beams from Lowe's, stained them, got some doors from the builder and just made the beams work for the doors. So now we have truly two rods, five foot long. So 10 total feet of rod space, right? And the whole family kind of shares this. So it works well. And then I found this great dresser. I love it. We do share it as a family. We have a community sock drawer. So everybody's socks goes here. We have the TV here. That wasn't its original place, but with the full-time living, we rearranged the bed in where its placement was. And so we took it out of the niche and we put it here and it is perfect to lay in bed and watch TV from there. I want to talk to you about a built-in bed. It is very dreamy and kind of magical to have this built-in bed. It's pretty hard to like keep on a regular basis because it's not fun to have to make the bed in the cubby, but it was a purposeful choice for us because as a family in a tiny home, when there's only like one living area to lounge in as a family, I did the built-in bed option so that we all could just put pillows along the wall and we could all just pile into bed for family movie night. We used to have three great built-in drawers under the bed that we stored all of our shoes in, but with the decision to make that a closet, we had to add the beams. I added beams on both sides just for architectural cohesiveness. And so it took away our shoe drawers. So at the end of the bed, we now have these wicker baskets where that's where we house all of our shoes. So overall, I love my room. And so I hope you do too. Welcome to my patio. In a tiny home park model, you can only go 12 feet deep. So this is the max you can go, 12 feet deep. But what we did is we decided to add sides. We wanted a fully functioning homestead, I guess you wanna say, so my dogs can enter from this side into the backyard. And then there's also another gate. So they have full guardianship of our property to protect it. One crazy thing that we did is we built this wall and it can be just popped out and popped in. It's basically a framed wall that we designed. And you may think, why would you do that when your view is the lake? Well, we live in the community of our Airbnbs. And so this provides an extra measure of privacy for the people at the fire pit. And it also protects us in inclement weather. So when it rains, it comes right off the lake, right under the covered patio. So this blocks us when we're getting in the house from snow, sleet, rain. And then even this winter when it was like 16 degrees and the wind was blowing fiercely, this really provided a lot of extra warmth for our house because it wasn't blowing directly into our glass-butting door. So we kind of love it. We tried to make it architectural the best we could, but then it also afforded us to put this table right here so that we can use this to pot and plant the herb garden or we can drop our groceries and get in the house or if our hands are full, we have a place to set it down while we open the door. And so that's been a really functional thing that we love. We really just love this space because this is where we truly get to sit and enjoy the lake. You have two different seating options. We have the little gas fire pit in between the two chairs. And so the sunset is directly right here. We have a front row view. This is a really beautiful space in the evenings to kind of watch that sunset evolve into all that it does. And that's one of our favorite things about living here. If I could wrap up living tiny in just one word, I would say it would be contentment. It's not easy. It is frustrating at times, but this contentment thing, it's a pursuit, right? It's not something that comes easy because we live in a world that demands us to crave more and more and more. And when you live tiny, you don't get the luxury of that craving. You are constantly in the process of purging to a level of contentment to where you are just focusing on what matters most. So when I say contentment, I mean, I am the most content when I am sitting in this living room, as big or small as you may think it is, and I'm having a meal with my family. That to me is what living tiny is. It's honing in on those moments that you're never gonna get back until you prioritize them. Okay, I just wanna thank y'all so much for watching and touring my tiny home with me. If you are curious about designing a tiny home with us, we are Cowtown Cottages in Waxahachie, Texas. But if you just wanna experience a tiny home in general by staying in one, you can come to the Crestos Cottages on the Cove. This is where we live. This is where we rent tiny homes on Richland Chambers Lake, just outside of Corsicana, Texas. My name is Kelly Walker. I can't thank you enough for joining me today and live big, go tiny.