Veteran s STUNNING 75k Tiny House Has No Loft

I would say, honestly, we're saving at least $2,000 a month. I swear, materialism is on the down and tiny living is on the up. Find out what makes you happy and surround yourself with it. Stop letting people tell you this is a crazy idea. It's not. You'll be glad you did it, I promise. And then if you're not glad you did it, find me and let me know and I'll apologize. Hey, I'm Justin. And hey, I'm Jessie. And welcome to our tiny house. Let's go take a look. When you get to the house, you start off by coming in through our screened-in front porch. It's 10 by 10 feet. It's 100 square feet. You come in. You're in the living room here, which shares kind of with the kitchen slash dining room. From there, you walk through and you've got your bathroom on the right. Come back out of the bathroom. That's where your laundry room is. You'll continue through the hallway and that's where the master bedroom is. The house was built by Lancaster Log Cabins. They're out of Gap, Pennsylvania. It's an English and Amish-owned building company. They make it all out of yellow and white timber pine. Its specific measurements are 43 feet by 12 feet wide. One of my favorite parts about this specific layout is the open concept. In our house in Austin, it was a 1,700 square foot house and the kitchen overlooked the living area and I fell in love with it. But I thought we wouldn't be able to keep that in a tiny home. But actually, you definitely do get to keep that. Our kitchen is a pretty standard one. We've got an apartment size fridge, which might be the only place that we're lacking. Honestly, it's pretty much the perfect size for us. I would say sometimes I would wish for a bigger freezer, but it's really not an issue for us. We've got a standard electric stove. In this model, it came standard with the electric stove, which was fine with us because this home is technically titled as an RV. So that means we can up and move it whenever we decide. So if we want to buy a property on the lake, take our house there, it's no big deal. So the fact that everything is electric really keeps everything smooth for us. My favorite thing is that there's plenty of cabinet space. We did travel in our van, so I was already used to having a small amount of space. But I will say that we're not missing anything in here. We've got the over the range microwave, a huge sink. I really just couldn't ask for any more except for maybe a dishwasher. I do feel like when you walk in here, you get a true reflection of our personalities. Not only do we wear it on our sleeve, but we wear it on our walls. But it's fun to not hide who you are. And even if it might not be someone else's cup of tea, it's what we love. So the dining room table comes standard in this model, and it's actually an Amish piece of furniture, and it's mounted in. And the best thing is we like where it's at. We could take it out, but it's actually our catch-all. It's our meeting spot for the day. It's where we have coffee. It's a nice central place. Behind me is kind of our treasure chest of random things that we've gotten on the road, different places that we've lived, Justin's military stuff. We like to keep that somewhere special that we can look at every day. So this is our little space of where we keep all of our keepsakes. But I would say most tiny homes seem to be full of storage. You can see where people have hidden all of their things. Maybe there'll be a loft up above where everything goes that you don't want out. But that was important to us when we chose this model. We didn't want to have somewhere where we hid everything. If you're living tiny, I really believe that you need to live tiny as well. There's no need to have all of that stuff. Find out what makes you happy and surround yourself with it. So when we walk in the living room, it's kind of, you take your shoes off, you drop your keys, put your sunglasses down. That's kind of our catch-all for our daily living. The way we use this room is very leisurely and casually. We have the TV set up here, and a lot of times we use it to pivot outside and we can watch from the porch. This is actually a pretty big couch for a tiny house. It fits with plenty of space. It seats three, no problem, and they both recline. There's plenty of space for more seating in a tiny house than you would imagine. Plus, we have this mini split up here on the wall. We have one here in the living room and one in the bedroom. They're what cool and heat the house. They're made by Mitsubishi and they are awesome. The fact the house is made out of wood, it's the best insulation. So with that mini split in the wood, everything contracts and expands and it works out perfect where this house stays the greatest temperature year-round. We don't have a lot out right now, but people want to know some secret storage compartments. So one thing we've got, for example, is this secret little moonshine jug. It stores some electrical cords and different types of knickknacks you use around the living room when you do. So you'll pass from the kitchen here into the laundry room. From Lancaster Log Cabins, there actually are bunk beds and shelving that is initially here, but when we made the purchase, I asked them to exclude it because I had intentions of turning this into a laundry room. Jesse and I were traveling the country in a camper van for a long time. So we thought if we were going to switch to a tiny home, we at least wanted to have our own laundry. So I had to make that a thing. For other people in the tiny home community, you might look into it. We've enjoyed it so far, but it's the Samsung Bespoke All-in-One. It does wash and dry and it's ductless and it plugs into 120. So it's perfect. You don't have to do anything. The only thing I had to do, which is not nothing, but I had to run the plumbing and the water lines over here. There's no water lines ran, but Lancaster Log Cabins has set up the water lines and all the plumbing to where it made it really easy to tie in. I use this area right now mainly to store tools and like excess stuff that I don't want to leave out in our shed for now. Made a butcher block top for it. Jesse might not love this, but if I put down a nice cloth or some type of surface layer, I do a lot of like maintenance work right here on this cabinet top too. So it's like a nice little workstation as well. So we are high school sweethearts, actually. Straight out of high school, we worked around our hometown area for a while before Justin decided to join the Army. That I did and it was the best decision of my life. I love the Army. After about eight years, they medically retired me. We did live in Austin for a while. We did the big city living. We worked in real estate and we just decided it was not for us. That's when we leaned towards the van life idea, sold everything and went super tiny. I think the van life actually set us up perfect for tiny home living because not only did we have to downsize tremendously, but it actually felt like a big house when we got in here. If you're starting the tiny home search process like we were, you're probably going to be hit with a lot of different ideas as far as biler barns, sheds, tiny homes that need a foundation, tiny homes that are on trailers. There's so many options. For us, we did a lot of online research. We landed at Lancaster Log Cabins. We decided to go up and take a look at their lot and all of their models are sitting out front for you to go in at your leisure and take a look. It's set up to where it's priced by the model. And this model here gets $72,000 for the base model. And then we did some upgrades like screening in the porch, adding a tub to the bathroom and like a larger amperage. And we brought it up to $75,000. And that $75,000 included $2,000 for shipping. One of the best things about this home is that it's technically an RV. So that means that it can be rolled around to where you want to put it. So if you are dealing with issues about, I don't know where I can put my tiny home, this might be the perfect place to start. All of the Lancaster model homes are built onto this trailer chassis. So every one of them is an RV. It's titled, it's ready to go, and it might help you skirt some of your local walls or things that might be holding you back. So where the tiny home is located is actually on our family farm. We're surrounded by our family. My brothers, my sister, my dad all live here on the same acreage as us. It was actually really nice for us to come back, be able to help with the farm, take care of my dad. And our family just loves us being around, honestly. And look, the fact that they're letting us put our tiny home on their property, it only means that we owe them even more. So anytime they ask for something, we got to do it. But we love them, so we don't mind. I know that not everyone will be lucky like us and have a family farm to look at to put their home. But I can say that just look for other tiny homes. If you see more in an area, that usually means that the zoning is pretty opened up. Our monthly expenses here are pretty awesome. I'm going to be honest. Our electric for this property runs about $40 to $50 a month. As far as water, we're on our own well here. We're lucky that the sale of our Austin house actually covered this home plus a lot more. So we're happy to not have a mortgage. We pay about, I would say, $150 to $180 a month to live here. I couldn't even tell you how that compares to Austin on top of mortgage, insurance, city water, city trash, electric premiums. I would say, honestly, we're saving at least $2,000 a month. Easily. Yeah, easily. There's enough space in here to be comfortable. I'm sure we could add some more storage and be even more comfortable. But what we're working with in here is all we need. It's not a lot, but there's plenty of storage under this vanity. Like the pipes don't take up space under there. So it's pretty simple. Nice pine vanity as well as a nice lumber mirror. Then you got your toilet. And one thing that was real nice that we also added in addition to is the base model comes with a shower. But we asked and Lancaster was willing to work with us and we were able to install a tub. So we not only have a shower, but we got the tub in this tiny house as well. A lot of people are amazed to hear that. There is an extractor fan right there. That's what helps keep all the humidity out of here. And with this window in here, it helps the room even feel open. You don't feel cramped into the smaller bathroom. And it's not even that small. Welcome to our bedroom. As you can see, we have a queen size bed. This model actually comes standard with a queen bed already built in. That's another piece of that Amish furniture. It even came with a mattress. So the night the house arrived, it was technically ready to go. We decided to keep the queen bed in here. We do have the option and the space to put a king. But honestly, it just really didn't feel like we needed it. We're living tiny. So do we really need a king size bed? On either side of the bed, we have room for our nightstands, plenty of room for our personal stuff and to charge our phones. This room really is the perfect size. There is space for a TV on the wall, but we decided we don't need that. We'd rather look at our art. In this room is where our second mini split lives. It keeps this area really cool in the summer and super warm in the winter. I honestly couldn't have picked anything better to cool and warm this house. One thing you might notice is that we do not have any closet space in this room, but we have plenty of room for all of our clothes in the furniture. It really hasn't been too big of an issue. We've got this big chest here that houses pretty much everything that we wear with some overflow over here in the cubes. We have this full length mirror, which helps open up the space. It's a great place to get ready in the morning and then some of our perfumes and things like that to get ready for the day. In our Austin house, we actually had a huge walk-in closet. If you would have looked at that space and compared it to this, you probably were wondering, what did we do with everything? I'm talking shoes line in the walls, bags everywhere, suits. But honestly, you don't need all of that stuff. Once we left the corporate world, there was a lot of things we were happy to say goodbye to. And the closet was actually one of them. I don't mind it at all. I don't miss it. We just fold it and tuck it away. And this just might be our favorite room in the whole house. Honestly, this right here is what sold us on this model. It's a 10 by 10 porch. Actually, it comes standard without the screen. But once we found out that that was an option, we added it immediately. I would say we spend 90% of our time at home when we're not sleeping right here on this patio. It's just a nice place to relax, to take in the scenery and be protected from all these bugs. One thing that we did add were these blinds that we can pull down. They will keep out the sun and rain when we get some bad rainstorms in the area. Those shades have made it so we can hang out in this space even when the sun is coming down on us pretty bad. The fact that they added fans to all the rooms, especially the patio, that's one that we use a lot. It helps keep this area really cool and keeps a breeze flowing at all times. This is a great place to entertain. Actually, there's more seating out here than we have in our living room. And that might just be on purpose. We do love it out here a lot. This is also a great place to watch Justin on his mini ramp. Maybe some fails, maybe some wins. This sign right here is one of our other favorite pieces of art. It came to us from a friend in Austin who made that. He usually gives it out to his clients who buy a new house, but that's what you get for being friends with realtors sometimes. A fun piece out here is this antler. We were actually kayaking the South River nearby and Justin stopped his boat immediately, hopped out, and fished out this huge antler. And we were like, this has to be incorporated into the house. So that's what holds this cool little lantern right here. Another one of my favorites out here is our Wu-Tang welcome sign. May look like your standard welcome sign from the E-Down, but you see that W. Your Wu-Tang fan, you already know. A lot of people will say, oh, how do you live beside each other in such a small area? People live in apartments every day. This is no different than an apartment with your own outside space. Stop letting people tell you this is a crazy idea. It's not. It's pretty awesome. That's right. We can save the world doing it. That's right. I swear, materialism is on the down and tiny living is on the up. And that's because people are finally realizing that it's all you really need. If you're scared of failing, getting into it and realizing you hate it. I mean, failure is part of life. You know, we're going to learn from our failures and we're going to get better. And you know that it's a chance to make you happy. So take that leap, you know, commit to it. You're going to love it. We love it. You'll be glad you did it. I promise. And then if you're not glad you did it, find me and let me know and I'll apologize. Well, thank you all for coming and touring the tiny house with us. We really appreciated you being here. If you guys would like to follow our travels, you can always follow us on YouTube, which is Floyd's Damn Van. We also have an Instagram where we put up daily life here on the farm, as well as our travels, our tiny house. And that's also Floyd's Damn Van on Instagram. If you guys want to look like us, we've also got merch. That's right. At FloydsDamnVan.com. That's right.