Design That Flows A 12k Tiny Home That Actually Works

When I got my code violation, my kiddos were babies. It's like a phase of life. You don't want a notice like that to be posted on your door. People should be allowed to live legally in tiny houses on wheels and not worry about somebody coming and knocking at their door and telling them to move on. I had $12,000 to make a house. That's why I use mostly reclaimed materials. I've got our living expenses down to almost $0 per month. For the past 13 years, I've lived tiny and advocated for their legal placement across the country. Come take a tour, and I'll give you an update on that. So this is our 8 1⁄2-by-29-foot tiny home. So you walk into the space, and it's our main living space. We keep our clothes up here. We've got our homeschool supplies, TV, media wall here. Behind the media wall is where my partner and I sleep. And then I wanted a functional kitchen. I cook most of our meals. On this side, we have all our storage, so pantry, refrigerator. And then tucked around the corner there behind the barn door is our bathroom. In the back, originally, that was just a patio. I built this before I had kids. And that was, I wanted a reading nook, so it was a nice covered patio that you could sit out in the rain and read a book. When I had babies, they became more important, and so we built them a bedroom. I think it's really important that you're able to modify a space, especially like a tiny house, to suit you at whatever phase of life you're in. Two years ago, we were finally able to build the deck we wanted to build, which is a 30 foot by 10 foot wide outdoor space. We've got a great little valley out here. We like sitting out and watching the deer play on the mountain. We love having that space. It's changed the game for us, for sure. If you come inside the front door to the left of the living room is our kitchen area. Back when I designed this, I was basing it off of all of the apartments that I hated. So I wanted a functional space. Really, I wanted two areas of counter space so I could prep my meals. Another interesting part of my tiny house is that it's built almost entirely of reclaimed materials. So this stove came out of a camper that's older than me, which is surprising because it works really well. It doesn't look pretty, but it functions really well. And I like using cast iron, so I've got all my cast iron up there. We also sometimes need pots and pans. I use these pots less than those ones, so they kind of stay close, but everything is just right here for us. We have four people, so we have four bowls. We actually, we're high rollers now. We have six plates now. And then basically everybody has one utensil. We've got four knives, four spoons. Then it helps us keep an eye on dishes. We don't let them linger in the sink because we use them. I guess in a well-designed space, you don't think of the building, right? You think of the activity. And so cooking in this kitchen, it's built to my movements. You know, if you do this, that's how big I am, you know? And it can be just absolutely customized because you really shouldn't be thinking about the space you're in when you're using the space. The space should just flow. And for me, that's what this kitchen is like. Another part I really like about this is a lot of times I'll be cooking and my partner will be doing dishes and there's room for two of us to do two separate activities because he doesn't necessarily need to get into the fridge while, you know, he's over here doing his thing. This is our water machine. We put our rainwater collector in here and this is where we get our drinking water from and our cooking water. We also have a split washer dryer unit. We don't use this very much anymore. In fact, we're thinking about taking it out and putting a cabinet in here. With a family of four, these do such a small load at a time that it's impossible to catch up. It was great for when it was just me or just me and James, but now we prefer just going and having a laundromat day because you can just knock it all out at once. I opted to keep nice open shelving and actually it used to be more open than this. When I started baking more during the pandemic, we added this baking shelf with our flour and sugar and everything. But I like the open shelving. It just keeps it a little more airy in here. And when it's a really tight space like this, it makes a big difference in not making me feel claustrophobic. I don't like drawers. I have one drawer in the kitchen and it's full of junk. And that's why they just fill up with junk and then it's hard to find everything that you need. So I like to keep what we need out. I like them to be really accessible. Pots and pans are right there. Pretty much just stand right here and get to everything that you need. I wanted a decent size refrigerator. This size has worked really well for us. It's got a decent size freezer and a decent amount of space for a fridge. Above it is the microwave. We hardly ever use a microwave, but when you need one, they're handy. Our pantry is right here, chocked full of stuff because, you know, four people in a tiny house. This seems to be enough storage for us during the pandemic. Since we harvest all our rainwater, we built a shed next door to keep rain in over winter and there's extra space in there for extra canned goods and what have you. I love the question, is there anything you would change about your space? The answer is no, because if there was, I would have changed it. This space has morphed over time. It's been 13 years. That's a lot of modifications, but when you live in a small space, it's easy to make those modifications as you need to do them. And so at this point, there's nothing I would change about this because it works perfectly well for us. So when I built this place, I designed this little barn door. It worked well for me. It doesn't seal very well, so now that there's four people, we just have an understanding of each other. But this door leads into our bathroom. So across from our kitchen sink is our bathroom, which is intentional because that's where our plumbing is in the structure. So our plumbing runs in one bay of the chassis. That happened because at the time I built my tiny house, I was trying to match RV standard, which is driver's side, rear end is where your utilities are, so that's where our water hookup is. And our water hookup is actually underneath this sink while I like having the sink in the bathroom, I get questions about it because the kitchen sinks like three feet that way. But this is actually covering our inlet and it's got our filter and everything underneath it, our whole house filter in it. We used a compost toilet for almost 10 years. I prefer a compost toilet, but once we moved where we're at now and I got legal placement, they made us put in a septic system. We do still collect all our own rainwater, so it's still a low flow toilet. I still prefer the compost toilet. There's four people in this house and so it's not the cleanest space, there's a lot going on. We do have this great big window, which is not ideal in a bathroom and so I put this kind of film on it and then turned it into shelves for our deodorant and toothbrushes. So this mirror, we changed it. Originally before we built the kid's room, this was a window as well that we could open. And when we took that out, I just found a mirror the right size, put it there and then there's shelves in there for daily stuff. When I started designing and building my tiny house, I kind of made a top 10 list of things that were important to me. Like number two on the list behind my Great Dane was to have an oversized shower with endless hot water. And so I have an on-demand EcoTemp water heater, which has worked great for us. EcoTemp has kind of some mixed reviews over time, but they've been really good for us and they've had really good customer service and there hasn't been any real problems with it. But it is on-demand, hot water and an oversized shower. So check. What led me to tiny houses, really my life imploded and I needed a solution. That's essentially where it came from. Previously I had, you know, a 2,700 square foot track home. I was over my head financially. I graduated from college and life just took over. I made all the next right choices and it overwhelmed me until it all fell apart in the 2008 kind of recession. And then one night I went to sleep and I literally had a dream and it was at a phase of my life where I had heard like, just keep a notepad by your bed, you know? And I did and I woke up and I drew this floor plan that I had this dream of this really small space that had everything that I needed in it. So then I told my family that I think I might do this thing. And there was a little bit like, you're, I don't know if that's a good choice. And then just before I could, you know, talk myself out of it, I went and I bought a trailer. So then I was in it. But there was a couple other reasons I did it. I was studying for my architectural exams and I needed some real life experience. It made it easier to justify this giant expense I was putting forward, which when I say a giant expense, my goal there was one year's worth of rent payments. And rent was about a thousand dollars a month at that point for my own place. So I had $12,000 to make a house. And with that, it made me explore a lot of different options. That's why I use mostly reclaimed materials. So when you start with a project like this and you make your main decision maker, your budget, it pushes you down some different avenues. And I'm lucky because I worked in construction before this. And so I knew a lot of the jobs that were going on around town. And I like to share this secret about the building industry that anyone kind of inside of it knows, but it's available to everybody. When you're doing a big project, like say apartment complexes, you order about 10% more of the materials than you need because sometimes they come in warped or they come in twisted or whatever. And it takes a lot of time if you have to stop everything and reorder something and get it in. So they keep the stockpile of extra stuff. And then at the end of every job, they have to send that stuff back, right? And they get a refund, but it comes with a restocking fee. And if you can catch them at just the right time and ask, hey, can I buy that from you? I got every piece of lumber I needed to build this house for $300. And so that's available. Every single commercial project has that sitting in the wind when it's done and anyone can ask for it. And the way you find it, every job site has a project board. What's coming here? Here's the contractor. Here's their phone number and their email. Write them. Like it's so easy. And the worst thing that they can do is say no. My partner and I, once our son was born, we kind of came to the conclusion that the town that we were living in wasn't really our town. We just took it on the road because what better test is there to see if you can drive around the country while still working. We were on the road for like 18 months. The entire point was to find a new home base for us. We were at the end of our trip and we hadn't found anything that was like screaming at us. And then we drove through this town and we were like, this is it. This is our town. Then we found a piece of property that we thought we might like. And we had the money for it. So we bought it. It's been a giant experiment. It's new for us. And so we don't know if our roof is big enough to collect enough water with the rain that it gets here. And so the last five years, we've spent kind of exploring if we can make this work. And then our eventual goal will be to build a house up the hill from where we're at currently. But in the meantime, we're using the tiny house to kind of figure it out because there's no need to jump right into something. I'd much rather figure out if it could work. Fortunately, it's gonna work, guys. We figured it out. So we bought the property in 2019 for $58,000. It's six acres. And then I built a barn and I paid $50,000 to build a barn. And then the tiny house rolled up here. It cost $1,200 to move the tiny house up here from Boise. It's very worth it because I didn't have to pull it because I drive a Prius and I can't pull it. Our water is free. It's from this guy. Our power is free. It's from this guy. The septic costs $10,000. We put it in. We did all the labor. So it would have been a lot more to hire somebody. You have to do trash. So I pay $80 every three months for a trash pickup. And that's a requirement of our county. We don't need it, but we're required to have it. So our entire living expenses with insurance, taxes, and our trash bill, it's less than a $2,000 a year. And that's our housing costs. Everything has been paid for in cash otherwise. So when I was designing this place, it was very form follows function. And I thought, you know, half the time I'm in the kitchen, half the time I'm in the living room. It's about half of the house is the living room. It was really important to me that I didn't have built-ins. I didn't want stuff you had to set up just to use. At first I had kind of this flip up desk, which was fine for a desk because you can flip it up and then put it away. But I didn't want my couch being something I had to set up. Like if it was a partially it's a bed and partially it's a couch. I also like to rearrange a lot and I like to change up the style. I've probably had a few different couches in here at least. Not having built-ins was important to me for that reason. A couple of years ago when it was mostly my daughter wanted to learn how to play the piano, we had to kind of problem solve that together and how to make that happen. And it was fun because the kids and I got to design this space together. I mentioned before I don't like convertible spaces, but this was my exception. And then since we had the piano table, we decided we could do better than that and we have it open up and then we can have our dinner table for the four of us, which was new. We didn't have a dinner table for like 10 years. But we do eat dinner here most nights of the week. The kids sit on the couch and we'll pull those chairs up and we'll eat together. And since we didn't have all the space needed to be covered, we added another cabinet in here and we have the VR set so we can do homeschool field trips in the pandemic. That's what those came from. Initially, these were all of my drawers for clothes. Now James has these two and I have these two and then that's our seasonal like swimsuits and whatnot down below. This is for our winter coats and long dresses. And then when it was just me, this was my art cabinet. Now as the homeschool parent, this is our homeschool and then our art supplies go down below. This wall didn't used to exist. It was once I had kids, I did co-sleeping with them when they were younger. And when they were up there, I needed a way to kind of not let them fall out of the bed because that seems to be important. And then I kind of just like it being kind of a separate place. It gave me this extra wall where I could put our media and our TV. We store our laptops. We store our cats up here. This is the cat hammock. They come in, they like being right next to the heater. And so they'll both go up there and just chill out. The stairs have had many different lives. That's our like washcloths and kitchen towels. And we've got board games in the bottom ones. You have to use kind of every little bit of space that you can. Up these steps is our bedroom. It's just a short, it's not even four feet tall off the ground. We have a queen-size bed. That top 10 list I had, I had a king-size bed previously and here I did have a king-size bed. When we co-slept with our kids, we minimized that down to a queen-size bed. But then we have our printer up there for what we need and that's pretty much it. So if I was to rebuild this again, this isn't a problem for us at all. I think we've even had a broken foot in here and it was fine, it was workable. Ideal, not necessarily, but I bought a gooseneck trailer. I don't know what else to do with this space. So that's what it would probably be again. Now that we're off grid, we can monitor our solar right here as far as conditioning this space. So when I built it all those years ago, I was studying to take my architectural exams. I really wanted a testing facility and I wanted to have a place that was passively heated and cooled. When I had kids, that was not so much the priority. So we've added this mini split, which gives us AC in the summertime, but then it's redundancy also for heat. This is a propane heater, which is our main source of heat. And then the kids in their room, they have an NV heater, which is great for back there because it doesn't get too hot on their hands. My main goal was to be able to do like night flush cooling. So I've got this window that opens, that window that opens. There is actually a window behind that map. I could open both of those windows and we can get some airflow through this way. And then I have a window up there and an opening in the back that we can get it when it flows this way too. And the whole point of that is at nighttime, open it up, cool the house down, lock it up in the morning and it can stay cool in here all day. That's primarily how we handle cooling in the summertime, which works great until it's a hundred degrees. And we get about a week every year that we're hovering around a hundred degrees and then we can flip that sucker on. Then across the house on the other end is where our children sleep. Just past the kitchen, we have my sister and I's bedroom. We have our beds, they're both twin size beds. We have bunk beds to save room, but also lets us talk to each other a little bit when we're falling asleep and we can just like finish a conversation. We start and then we had to go to bed. Over down there, we have where we keep our clothes and here we keep coats, bags, all these things that we can just hang up that we can't really put in the drawers. Behind here, we have some shelves and we can put whatever we want on there. I have random stuff and toys. Over to my right, we have even more storage. There's some shelves and here we could put books. I like living in these tiny like areas. There's still enough room for me to grow and like stretch out in bed sometimes. It also gives us room to read a little with our books. So we have reading light and a little fan there in case it gets too hot. So welcome to the outside of our tiny home. It is 29 by eight and a half foot wide. This deck is 30 by 10. This was built with reclaimed materials. So this is all shipping pallets. It's not the prettiest looking stuff. It's been 13 years. It's held up all right. It's not our water barrier. The water barrier is underneath that. So it's just aesthetic. We built this two years ago to help keep the sun out of our living room and it's turned into our favorite place. We have a seasonal, you know, table out here that we eat on and barbecue all summer long. We enjoy our view. We've got a family of deer that live on this hillside. So we're out here a lot watching the deer. For the last five years, we've been entirely off grid. We do have a septic system, which was required by the county but we generate all of our own power from solar. We dabble with wind, but we just don't have enough wind here to make that make sense. And then we collect all of our rainwater and then filter it for our use, of course. Okay, so I have a giant ask, which is that people support the latest code effort that I've been working on. And before I get to what that is, I'm gonna reel it way back to where this came from. Back in 2011, when I started building my tiny house, I've only ever tried to be legal about it and there was no legal path. And so I talked to jurisdictions. I kind of got the town I built in on board with it, but then I got a piece of ground that I could live on, which was in a different town. And so then I had to start the conversation over again. I worked with them for a really long time and they've peacefully ignored me. And what I was doing, I was above board, but under the radar, I was not legally placed. But I lived in my tiny house for four years where I lived the first time before the pressure just kind of got too big for the city and they had to serve a code violation. And so when you get a code violation, living in a tiny house, they give you a notice that says you have 10 days or 30 days or however many days to rectify the situation. Of course, there's no way to rectify a situation. So what that means for most people is that they have to move. When I got my code violation, my kiddos were babies. It's like a phase of life. You don't want a notice like that to be posted on your door, but I got it and I expected it and it was fine. And the way that I view this is, you know, it's a living experiment and it's a way to shift housing options for our country because this makes sense, right? Even though I didn't think it might initially, once I was in it, it made sense. And so it became important that I advocated for a person's right to choose a house that looked like this. When I got my code violation, I was actually excited. I let myself be sad for a day, but then I was excited because that meant now I get to talk to the city. We get to figure out what does this look like? How can I rectify this and still live in my house? I tried to be prompt. I didn't wait until like the last day of the notice. I tried to be proactive and go talk to them. And much to my surprise, they were willing to work with me. I think they appreciated the approach, but I think they also saw the need for the housing type. But jurisdictions, they don't have tools to call on for this. So tiny houses historically have been kind of pushed into an RV category because it's the only category that makes sense. There's actually four different categories that they could be under though. RVs are regulated as vehicles. And then you have a manufactured home category, which is HUD regulations. Then you have the IBC, which is the International Building Code. And then you have the RC, which is the International Residential Code. Manufactured housing HUD code requires that the structure be built by a licensed manufacturer in a licensed manufacturing facility. So that option is a non-starter. Also, they have a minimum square footage size of like 320 square feet. So it has to be at least that big. And it used to be 500 square feet, but the HUD path is a non-starter. The IBC regulates much larger housing units and commercial buildings. So it's not the correct category either. ANSI regulates vehicles. And so it could be the ANSI category, except the vehicle category does not regulate life safety. And to be a dwelling, you have to have life safety regulated. And so the only logical category for a tiny house to be regulated under is the International Residential Code, because that's the one that regulates full-time dwellings. Tiny houses are tricky because they're also a vehicle. And so it's the first instance of a dwelling type that isn't for recreational or temporary use that spans two regulating agencies. So you've got the IRC and then you've got transportation department. It has to be able to meet both of those standards simultaneously. These regulating bodies, they don't work together. They have their lane and they stay in their lane. And so this has been the challenge to get tiny houses legalized is you have to be able to span them. And what does that look like to collaborate, right? Back in 2016, when I got my notice that I had to rectify the situation and become a legal housing type, but there wasn't a legal housing type, I had already been working with some other tiny house folks, namely Andrew Morrison and Gabriella Morrison, who were writing a building code for tiny houses specifically for the IRC. And so I joined in that effort. We made tons of progress, but at that point we were not allowed to talk about the chassis of these. We were able to make exceptions for tiny houses, but only if they were on a foundation. So we made exceptions for all the parts that are different. A tiny house kitchen, if they had a loft above, right? Regular building code, that would have to be seven foot six high. We got it decreased so that you could have a loft above a kitchen. They approved that. Sleeping lofts were not permitted in building codes anywhere at that point. And we got sleeping lofts permitted. There's a number of different exceptions to the code that we were granted exceptions for, for tiny houses, but they refused to look at the chassis at that point. So it's only works for tiny houses on foundations, which is kind of a way to say it skirts the problem, right? And so we've been kind of sitting in wait, waiting for the industry to kind of catch up. And this summer we had our opportunity. I've been involved in some other code writing processes and it came up that we could propose another comment. And so I got back in touch with all of the original proponents of that code change. And I said, I think this is the chance. I think this is where we get to finish what we did with Appendix Q. And I think that they're ready to talk about the wheels. So that's where we are right now. I have spent over 150 hours with some code experts, writing language, collaborating, making sure that this covers actual movable tiny house folks in a way that's achievable for somebody to build their own house, not in a licensed manufacturing facility. And if this is incorporated into the International Residential Code, this code cycle, it will be ready to be adopted by jurisdictions all across the country. This is important to me for a lot of reasons, but namely, I think the same reason it's important to probably everyone watching this channel is that people should be allowed to live legally in tiny houses on wheels, and not worry about somebody coming and knocking at their door and tell them to move on. I think that we've finally proved that they're safe. They're affordable, which is what the world really needs right now. But what's missing is the tools for jurisdictions to be able to say, okay. And so this code language we've crafted is a set of tools for jurisdictions to start incorporating these. So that's what we have written the code for. That's what we need to pass. October 22nd is our timeline. That's when we know if it passed or not. And in the meantime, we need to be able to show a lot of public support that this is necessary and wanted. Thank you for giving me space to talk about building codes. I think it's a really important issue for the tiny house movement to continue forward. If you agree, there is a link to the petition down below in the description. I would really appreciate your signature and finding a person or two that can sign as well. Thank you.