Their Tiny Home Layout Feels Like a Full Size House

We knew we didn't want to live in an apartment forever. There was a minute there where we were like stuck, like we were not moving forward. I think we just gained confidence in ourselves over the course of it too. Hi everybody, I'm Drew. And I'm Maddie. Do you want to see a DIY tiny home? Come check this out. Welcome to the inside of our tiny home. As soon as you walk in the front door you've got kind of our dining area with the kitchen, bathrooms in the back. Up the stairs here you have our bedroom loft. Behind you is the living room and right up there is our storage loft. The dimensions of the house from the outside are 8 feet wide by 28 feet long and 14.5 feet from the ground to the top. Inside we have about 7.5 feet by 26 feet and 12.5 feet from the floor to the ceiling. Welcome to the kitchen. When designing our kitchen it was a really quick decision to keep it long lengthwise on this side of the house because we wanted to have the bathroom towards the back and we wanted to have a lot of space in the living room for our couch and our tv area. So it was easy choice to keep the kitchen right here where it is. We went with all these open windows so we could see outside. It's a small space. I really like to feel like we're not crammed into a little tiny area. So looking outside all the time is a really nice feature of our house with all the windows. One of our custom designs here was having these ledges made for the windows. You don't see that a lot in tiny homes. We thought it was pretty cool because we have a ton of knickknacks. Plants, candles and whatnot. So that was something we really liked. Went with butcher's block for the countertop here. Just something we really loved and we always kind of saw in the kitchen from very beginning. We went with this tongue and groove all over but really nice kind of change here with the beautiful spanish tile to kind of break up the monotony of the same color of wood everywhere. At first we thought it might be too bold but we're really happy with how it turned out. All the colors really pop. It matches our rug here in the kitchen and some of the tapestries we have hanging in the house. The color of the tile along with the butcher's block really inspired a lot of the other colors around the house. Right here we've got our large sink. We went with that because we don't have a dishwasher in this tiny house. So we wanted as much space as we could get in the sink to pile up our dishes, to wash the dishes, to dry the dishes. Let's talk about storage in our kitchen. We didn't want to do box cabinets on the wall. It felt kind of like claustrophobic. So a big feature for us were these shelves here. We found this wood at a friend's house in the barn. We left the raw edge here. So this is kind of what the wood looked like when we found it. We really like these little imperfections. They bring out the character in the shelves. We planed it, sanded it, stained it and put them up and we really like how they turned out. They're really sturdy. They can hold a lot of weight. Down here we have the standard size cabinets. Plenty of room for a tiny house, pots, pans. Just about everything you need to cook some good meals for your friends and family. All of our dry goods can fit down here, including the cat food cans, which is great. Junk drawer. My wife's favorite feature, the spice rack here. And then our stove to match the cabinets. We call this retro mint. I think we made that up. But anyway, we really like this color. It's nice, soft, looks good. Propane for the tiny home. So the propane stove and range really works really nice. We only have to fill up our propane tank about once every four months. And it's a lot cheaper than natural gas right now. So we really like going with the propane. Food prep in a tiny house can be challenging sometimes. One of the reasons we decided to donate so much space to our kitchen was because of that. So this section right here, already more space than our tiny apartment. We can do just about any kind of cutting and mixing right here in this area. Love the large sink though for overflow. And when you're done with something, get it in the sink. It really opens up the space in here. As far as appliances go, we tried to keep this thing really minimal. The first thing you'll never find in here is a microwave for a couple reasons. It was kind of boxy for us, took up space. Visually, we didn't like where it would go, how much countertop it would take up, or how much wall space it would take up. Number two, they do draw a lot of electricity. And a huge reason for moving into a tiny house was to limit our carbon footprint. We recycle, we're all into that. So using the least amount of electricity as possible was huge on our list. So you won't find many appliances. No big blender, no toaster oven, no air fryer. We do have miniature items that we'll pull out every once in a while. We have a tiny little blender, but that doesn't draw a lot of energy. And it still gives us this feeling like we're not sacrificing everything just to live in this tiny house. But we do love not using the big appliances. And the more you do it, the more you realize you don't really need them. So without a microwave or an air fryer, our primary methods of cooking meals are just our stove and our oven. And just having these suits our lifestyle really well. Having an oven is amazing because we can have fresh baked breads and pastries from Wild Grain, who is the sponsor of this video. Wild Grain delivers part-baked sourdough, ready-to-bake pastries, pastas, pizzas, desserts, and more. Everything arrives frozen and bakes in 25 minutes or less. Making a loaf of fresh sourdough is as easy as taking it out of the freezer and putting it in the oven. Wild Grain has a ton of options to choose from. So it's great that you can customize each order. Customizing our box allows us to try new things regularly and double or triple, quadruple up on the pizzas if we're having a pizza party for the friends. We try to maintain a healthy lifestyle and diet. So we love that their products don't have any preservatives or artificial colors or flavors. Unlike, say, a loaf of bread you might pick up at the supermarket. We also appreciate that Wild Grain works with small bakeries. So not only is there care put into each item, we also know we're supporting small businesses. And for each box you get, they donate two meals to the Greater Boston Food Bank and other organizations that help fight hunger. If you want to try out Wild Grain for yourself, click the link in the description and use the code TINYHOME30 for $30 off your first box and get free croissants for life. Now let me show you our fridge. When designing the kitchen space, big thing for us, the refrigerator. A lot of people go with mini fridges or this size or even I've seen bigger fridges in tiny homes. This was perfect for us. It kind of has this old retro look that we're just obsessed with. It holds everything we need for a two-person house. Little freezer underneath. And to top it off, it's that retro mint that matches the cabinet and the stove. We got our stove and our refrigerator together. Actually, and this is probably different in regular homes, we started with our appliance size. So we picked the stove and we drew it out on the floor plan and we said, okay, this is how much room we have for our counter. So we had to kind of start with our appliances and then design from there. Our closet space here for everything we hang up, just covered by one of our favorite tapestries. Just enough space for a couple people who don't have too many clothes to hang up. When we're designing kind of our hallway here, we said, okay, what's most important for us? One of those was being able to have someone walk behind or in front and not bumping into each other all the time. Another thing was having doors open and not hitting each other. So it's really just playing with the pencil and figuring out how much space feels good. Two people easily fit through here. Very easy to go back and forth and switch places with whoever you're in here with. On the other side of the stove here, towards the end of our kitchen space, we've got our little breakfast nook or dining room table. Call it whatever you want. Main thing about this choice was to have a little more space on the other side of the stove in case we have something we need to put over here on the right hand side. But also we have this window here. We wanted to be able to look outside while we're drinking coffee. We've got our little catio door here. This allows him to have something to jump onto to get in and out of the house. But one of my favorite things about this table is that it's floating off the wall. We didn't want to be banging our knees into a steel pole or anything. And we wanted to be able to tuck our chairs all the way underneath. We wanted to match the butcher's block. It looks really good. And then we picked this length of table specifically because it was the exact same length as both of our chairs tucked in together. And we wanted to keep this space as open as we could. Still maximizing the eating space. Sometimes we bring this chair around to this side and we get a lot more dining room space, which is awesome. Another thing about living in the tiny home is maybe getting outside a little more. We've got a picnic table right outside here. When the weather's nice, we like to eat outside. We like to entertain our friends outside. So a lot of times this area, it's not as important to us. We still want to have it. We still want to have coffee here and talk about our days together here. But in the grand scheme of things, eating at a table, kind of in your traditional sense, wasn't as important to us. So welcome to the living room. We are big movie people. So the living room is an important space to us. The couch was also an important consideration in this space. We got this couch off of Pottery Barn and all the cushions have the storage underneath. So we can put stuff there. We also kind of modified it. It was a create your own sectional. And instead of getting like an end piece and a middle piece that has like the arm at the end, we just got two middle pieces to kind of maximize the space here and not crowd it up. The TV was also an important consideration. We mounted it to the wall, made it so it's adjustable so we can put it away or we can, you know, bring it further out. Whatever, you know, we need to do. The living room window is the biggest window in the house. It actually looks really cool when we're like sitting on the couch in the evening. You can just see like the sun setting sky outside the window. It's very, a very nice vibe. And then, of course, we have our, our cat's little bed in the corner that we incorporated into the design. He uses these little landings to get up there. He really likes it. It's really funny when we're sitting in here and he's up there and we're all watching a movie. It feels like genuinely like family time in here. And then we have this rolling ladder that we can move kind of wherever we need it, depending on whatever's going on in here. So it doesn't feel so closed off. We wanted it to feel kind of like its own room. So we got the area rug in here, which gives it kind of like a carpety feeling without putting in carpet. So the dimensions of the living room are eight feet across the width of the trailer and then four feet this way. And then this loft, we actually raised a little bit higher than the bedroom loft because we didn't need as much headspace in this loft as we did in the other one. So the height comes to about seven feet high in here. All right. So this is the second loft that we have in the house. I like to call it either the reading loft or the poet's loft because I write poetry. At first, we were just going to kind of make this like a storage loft for just like whatever we couldn't fit. But then we were kind of thinking that maybe we could make it into more of like a functional space. And that's when we kind of got the idea that like, we can maybe put all our books up here because we both are like big readers and getting rid of books was one of the hardest things to like go through and get rid of. And then I kind of came up with the idea of it kind of becoming like a writing space, like a creative space. So it was like a forethought in the design, but what it actually ended up like manifesting into, it kind of did that organically. It also kind of just offers another place to go in the house besides the living room or the bedroom. So a lot of times, you know, if Drew's downstairs watching golf or some other sports game that I'm not super interested in, I'll climb up here and read something or write something or just kind of like hang out. The cat likes to come up here too. So we hang out up here and it's a little tighter up here, but it's nice and cozy. And I love being up here. When I first met her, her dream was to live in a van or a tree house. And all those sound cool to me together. I thought, man, that'll be tight. Maybe I can maybe push her into something a little bit bigger. And so brought up the idea of a tiny home. And so when we kind of came together on the tiny home idea, it kind of met all of checked all our boxes. We moved in together like after a year of dating and we were in our first apartment. It was not a big one. It was a very small space. So we already knew we live in a small space comfortably together. It was like the testing ground. We knew we didn't want to live in an apartment forever. We really had this idea to get out of the apartment living and we just didn't have anything pushing us to actually make the leap to do it. COVID hit. We both were laid off from our serving job. Once we lost our jobs, we decided that we were going to take the jump and try to do the tiny house build. We just all kind of looked around and like, why not? Like we've got the time. We've got a little bit of savings to get started. We heard about Trailer Maid. We got a trailer from them, got it to our location here and started drawing, started buying lumber and started building just slowly. Life was still happening, but having it spaced out over three years, it allowed us to pay for everything pretty comfortably as we went along. We kept like records of everything. I think like going into it, we thought we were going to be able to like stay close to $30,000. We haven't like added it all up exactly, but I think it ranged more into the $35,000, maybe $40,000. I don't think we went over $40,000. I don't think we did either, but that was still a lot cheaper than just buying one outright. And in this scenario, we got exactly what we wanted, exactly how we wanted it to look, a lot cheaper than we would have had to pay if we just bought it outright. It was honestly like a learning journey for all of us in a way. And I think that's where like Noah came in so handy. All of the tiny house villages, communities that we were looking into, they had to have some kind of certification that your house was to code. Yeah. Some kind of code. Safe. For DIYers, where do you go to get your house checked up and feel like you're safe and feel like you will be allowed into these other places when you bring your tiny home up their driveway? There was a minute there where we were like stuck. Like we were not moving forward because it was important to us that we get this place inspected in some fashion so that we knew that like everything was, you know, going to work properly and there were no dangers because yeah, we were building it to live in it, you know, for long term. She found Noah. I found them on a whim. Like truly, like it just like came up on like an internet search one day. Throughout the inspection process, there were some things that we like wouldn't, we would fail and we'd have to like go back and redo it and be inspected again. And they had like a really cool feature where you could like have a consultation before your inspection and kind of ask all your questions and just like make sure you were going to pass, you know. So we took advantage of that. All the people were like so helpful. We had a great inspector. It was truly like the thing that got us rolling again because suddenly like they gave us kind of like a blueprint for how to move forward when we were all kind of stuck. Yeah. So and it also just provided that peace of mind that like to have other eyes on it, you know, and saying like, yeah, okay, yes, this looks good. We definitely recommend Noah to anybody who's doing like a DIY build because they were instrumental to our build for sure. So these are the stairs leading up to our bedroom loft. We weren't originally going to have a handrail or kind of like this cable guard rail here, but it was required by the Noah inspection. And we're actually so glad that we put it in because coming down the stairs at night is way less of a dangerous game with it installed. We went with the cable look that we'd seen in other houses because it keeps it kind of open. It doesn't like block it off. And yeah, and then we put these little carpet treads on here so that the stairs aren't slippery. So this is our bedroom loft. It's a little under five feet tall and 10 feet long. So we can easily fit our queen size bed up here and have a little space to move around on each side to kind of make the bed. Both of the windows on either side are three foot by three foot, which allows for egress. So if we ever had to bail out out the window, we could do that without really any problem. Behind us, we have our mini split. So it does heating and air conditioning, and it's mounted above our bed so that we stay super warm in the winter and super cool in the summer. We also keep our extra shoes up here on our little shoe rack. We don't keep any of our clothes up here. We keep all of our clothes downstairs in the closet area that we put in under the stairs. We do have a little bit of storage under the bed here. We made it so that we had a frame that came up just enough so we can slide like extra blankets and things underneath there if we need to. Over here, I have a little hammock. These are the stuffed animals I couldn't throw away when we were moving in here because they're all sentimental to me because Drew got them for me. And so I incorporated them into the design with a little corner hammock. And I think it looks really nice, actually. Similar to the kitchen, when designing the bathroom, we started with all of our appliances. We started with our washer dryer. We started with our corner sink. We started with the toilet. And then we said, okay, we need to have these things in here. We don't have any other place to put them. Let's design around that. So it went through many different looks. Eventually, this is the design we came up with. Very happy with it. It's got a lot of space to just walk in here. Two people can be in here. We're not bumping into each other too much. The corner sink does everything we need. It still has storage underneath. And it's kind of not in the way. We don't have corners to bump into. Nice and rounded. Perfect sink for us. We went with the compost toilet. Again, with being kind of a low carbon footprint. We're really happy with our nature's head toilet. Super quiet. Super clean. Comfortable as any compost toilet can be. And we don't have to really change out our solid waste very often. When we do, it goes into a container outside. Continues its composting process. And I promise you, by the end of it all, it smells and looks like the most top quality soil you can buy from any nursery. Swear. We do have it plumbed for septic if we ever need it. Just underneath there, we got a big hole. Ready to go if we want to ever put in a regular toilet. Which is probably a good idea. Anybody doing a bathroom that's going compost. While you're at it, putting in the floor. Just set yourself up with the proper plumbing that you need for a regular toilet. If that day ever comes. This little shelf here was just leftover butcher's block from the kitchen counter that we didn't use. Thought it would look good as a little shelf in here. We have our exhaust fan. We've got just some random things on the shelf. We went again with no cabinets up high for the same reason as the kitchen. We didn't want to feel claustrophobic. So instead, we went with these hanging baskets. Which we've seen before in our experience in other houses. Love the look. Love the idea. So we just went with that. When designing this window here, we wanted something that we could leave open for natural light. Not to use electricity all the time. But also something high enough that we didn't have to be worried about people looking in here. When we're in the shower. From down there below, even a six foot person's head just comes to right about here. So you really can't see inside the bathroom. For the shower, there's really no exact reason we went with this shape, style, size. Other than it just organically fit in the space that we had left for the toilet. For the washer dryer. This size just felt very comfortable. Didn't feel crammed in. We've been in some tiny houses before where the shower just felt a little tight for us. We love the look of the tile. It feels kind of like a spa vibe. It really is nice with the wood up top. We left this open up here as to not accumulate steam and moisture. It dries out really fast with the windows open or with our exhaust fan on. We wanted this portal. I don't know. It was just the look we had. We could have left this open. But again, in the tiny home, sometimes you want to put, you know, shampoo bottles or throw towels over this to dry them out. There's a lot of uses we use with this design. Having this on top. We got everything placed really high up on these kind of floating shelves. So there's absolutely nothing you can whack your arm on inside the shower. We went again with the Spanish tile for the floor, just to incorporate that with the kitchen design. Really, really couldn't be happier with this style. Love the design. Plenty of space. The most I've ever seen in a tiny home for a shower. Really happy with how it turned out. This is our awesome, and I really mean it, awesome washer dryer unit. We went with this guy because it had really good reviews and it fit in the space. Can't do huge loads, but you can do medium to small loads in pretty much the same amount of time it takes to do a normal washer and dryer cycle. We got a little space heater here. If it ever gets super cold in the winter, you know, the bathroom all the way on this end of the house can get a little chilly when the door's closed. So I have a little space heater here that can kick on if it's ever a little too cold in the bathroom. In the design of the house, my wife said, number one, one of the things she wanted to have in this house was this antique mirror that she's had since she was very young. Really early in the design options, we said it was going to become a door at some point for this bathroom. We wanted to do a pocket door in the wall, but because of the plumbing, that wasn't possible. So we just attached a glide rail on top, put this cute little vine handle on here, back to the mirror with some wood that we found. Stained it, and we have ourself a nice little bathroom door. Designing this house from the bottom up, you know, we started with our trailer. We wanted to be able to move ours around if we ever wanted to. So we went straight out to Trailer Maid, talked to these guys who are known for their tiny home trailers. They're the best out there. They can do everything from a trailer to a full framed house. We went with the three axle trailer, which is rated for 21,000 pounds. That let us kind of have freedom in our design choice as far as materials and not being worried about maybe putting too many things inside the house. We really wanted to go with wood. Wood's kind of heavy, so it was a pretty easy choice for us to go with the maximum capacity for the size trailer we have. When estimating the amount of weight for the house, you kind of have to go step by step. So, you know, we'd get our metal, we'd have a roundabout weight for how much all the steel was weighing on the house, how much all the wood was weighing on the house, the framing, the windows, eventually the furniture, the tile, everything that goes inside, you kind of have to take into account. Ours is running roughly about 15,000 to 16,000 pounds estimated, give or take, you know, maybe even 1,000 pounds. But again, that's why we went with the 21,000 trailer, so we didn't really have to worry about anything like that. We went with this look because we really are kind of obsessed with a mountain-y cabin look. Metal from the bottom up to about, you know, chest high, and then the cedar on the siding. We did some custom work on the windows. You can see the top of the trim. They all have these nice little found wood dial hats and tops. We like the green. It looks good with the cedar and the rusty metal. That's only going to get a little more red over time, so I like the contrast there. We decided to put our mini split here on the back, and we've got the overhang to kind of protect it. That's something to think about. Also, it's not in the way if we're driving somewhere down the road. We don't have to worry about it being, you know, bumped out on the side. And then our little shed here in the back to contain our water heater and a few things that we use out here when we're taking care of the grass. And the tall grass over here on the front of the house is the tongue and hitch. We've only moved the trailer twice, and the house fully constructed once since we were finished building. We did use a dually big truck. It was like a 2500. I've got a smaller truck. I would never try to move this thing around with that. Smaller houses, maybe you can get away with it, but if we were ever going to move this thing quite a distance, I probably would hire a moving company just because we love this thing so much. They're professionals, and we know that they could handle the weight that this thing has. But if you have a smaller tiny home and you've got a big size truck, I'm pretty sure you can move it anywhere you want it. Out back here on the back side of the tiny home, we've got a little bit of space to play with. First of all, we've got our little fire pit here. This area, we just kind of tilled up into a circle, got rid of the vegetation to make it a little safer, got a fire pit, got some chairs. We like to hang out there, especially at night. It's awesome. We've got a little picnic table here. Like I said, we don't like to try to cram our friends and our family inside the house when we're eating, so we definitely take advantage of eating outside, especially in the beautiful weather. We have a catio here on the back side of the house where our cat likes to hang out and chill. Beautiful view of the woods. We like to keep the grass nice and high with just our little trails and walkways here. So really comfortable space to just relax, hang out outside of the tiny home, which is one of the reasons we started with tiny home life in the first place. You have all these doubts come up in your head. You're spending a lot of money. You're putting it towards something that you're not even sure in the end if you're really going to like. You let it, yeah, it gets in your head. You almost believe it for a minute. Each for sure believe it. But we held tight to the vision that we had. I think we just gained confidence in ourselves over the course of it, too. And feeling like, yeah, we do know what we're doing. Our life was devoted to this project, too. So our emotional health was devoted to it. Yes, we were ready. We were ready for it to be done, but it was definitely worth it, I would say. 100 percent. So if you have any questions or comments for us, you can leave them in the comments below, or you can follow us on social media, which will be linked in the description. Thanks for watching. Thank you.