Tiny Living After “We’re Not Having Kids”

We decided we weren't having kids and suddenly four bedrooms felt like a ton of wasted space. Now we have everything that we need and nothing we don't. Come take a tour and check out our tiny house. Welcome inside our tiny house, Fern. She's eight feet by 28 feet, 224 square feet. At the very end, you have the bathroom leading into the kitchen area, which then leads into the living room area. And at the very end, it's the bed area with storage underneath for our cat. This is our kitchen. It is a split kitchen. We've got a cooking on the one side and the cleaning on the other. It is a good flow because we can both be in the kitchen at the same time. I can be over here cooking, he can be cleaning or doing some other type of prep over here. So it's a really great space for us to have where we both can be in the kitchen easily, especially in such a small space. On this side of the kitchen, we have the cooking area. So you have the two burner stove and the toaster oven, which has been awesome since we were able to bake, fry, reheat our food. Since we don't have a microwave, we just thought microwave was too big to waste in a space this size. So this has been absolutely amazing. We have a couple cabinets in here. This one, we decided to leave open face. We have our pots and pans hanging and the lids hanging on the side of the cabinet. When you live tiny, you have to get really creative with storage space. So if you have limited cabinets, you use the wall space or any other type of shelving that you can do. And below the butcher block, which this butcher block has been amazing, but does require a little bit more care than we realized. So if anyone is new to butcher block, water spots and water damage can happen. So I do have plan to re-sand and seal it. Just keep that in mind if you're, if you're buying tiny. This large cabinet has been absolutely great for all of our mini appliances. All of our extra stuff goes down there. This actually used to be a washer dryer combo and we chose to get rid of it just because our tiny house community does have a laundry facility on site. So we just felt like that was a waste of space, especially in a tiny house. You have to get creative with where things that you don't really think about like plates and bowls and things like that, but garbage and recycling. So under here we have just our garbage and recycling bins. They're very small, eight gallon, I believe. And we just kind of cover it with a little bit of curtain just to make it look a little prettier. But this is pretty much where I'm at a good amount of the time because I'm constantly in here chopping, cooking, doing something. And comparison to our house back in Buffalo, there is some things that we do really love and some things that have been a little bit more challenging that you've had to work along with. We had a very large stove and oven, so downsizing to a two burner, which is really more of a one burner with pan size. And a toaster oven has been a little bit of a challenge, but honestly has made cooking a lot simpler. Less mess, less dishes. So we really do enjoy that. On this side of the kitchen, we have the refrigerator and the sink. The tiny house sink is much smaller than the one back in Buffalo. So that has been a little bit of a learning curve, but honestly it just makes us do dishes more often. So that's been really great. We do typically lay down a drying mat that we have over here when we do dishes, just to kind of keep things as dry as possible. Now knowing about the water damage. And then this cabinet up here, this is strictly just for pantry items and any additional pantry stuff we put up here in mason jars. You do have to get a little crafty when you are living tiny. In addition to the floating shelves and the cabinets, we also have storage loft above the bathroom, which is actually quite large. I think we have about six or seven totes up there in addition to tool bags and Christmas decorations and things like that. So we do actually have a lot of storage space, but it just gets a lot easier when you have additional things like floating shelves and spice jars and things like that. Our fridge has been absolutely amazing for how big it is. We weren't sure we were going to be able to get a tiny house with such a large fridge. I do believe it is bigger than an apartment size, but smaller than a typical large fridge that you'd get in a large house. So we really love this. I don't think we would be able to do it without a size this big. As spacious as this tiny house is with the kitchen, it is a lot smaller than most people are comfortable with, usually in a regular house. Our kitchen wasn't pretty massive back in Buffalo. So downsizing has been a little bit of a challenge. But the benefits that you get from living tiny completely outweigh any type of con that you might have having to deal with a slightly smaller kitchen. And I know a lot of people do struggle with that when we talk about the fact that we live tiny. Oh, I could never have a kitchen that small. But trust me, you can. You have the necessities and you just make everything work. As we make our way out of the kitchen and onto the living room, I do want to talk about a couple of things here. I want to talk about this propane heater here. Actually, we never use it in the summer. Most of the spring, but late fall, winter, that's where the propane comes from there. And this is a great heating source and it heats up the whole tiny house really fast. We have a dehumidifier here. One thing I will say about the dehumidifier is, is in a tiny house space, moisture can definitely build up quicker than in a large home. So we have this large dehumidifier, probably one of the biggest things in this tiny house, but it does a great job. And we also have an air purifier as well. And this table here, at one point, my wife was using this as a workspace. She feels more comfortable on the couch with the pull-out table, which we'll talk about soon. Eventually, probably do something else here. But right now, this is good for another place to put things. As we move into the living room, first off, I do want to talk about the photo that comes in as you go into the living room. This picture was actually taken by Marissa just around the corner with an elk actually staring into the mountains while the mistiness and the fogginess was happening. Why it's called the Smoky Mountains. But as we go in here, this is, you know, your typical living room. I mean, this is where we relax, watch TV, we read. It's a pretty good-sized couch. It's not your typical large couch in a house, but this fits two people and two animals perfectly. So we really make use of that tiny house space. So living in a tiny house, you got to make best of the space you have. So you can see here, we're hanging the plants because there's not a lot of room to put plants down. So we're hanging the plants here. And for the yoga mats in the back, or this actually storage space, you can pop it in, pop it out, and it hangs on the wall there. So utilizing as much wall space as you possibly can is one thing we try to do here in this tiny house. And like I said, wall space by having the vinyls here instead of in a crate somewhere, because we don't have a lot of room. We already have multiple storage bins. Where are we going to put a crate of vinyls? And here on the other side of the living room, you see here where we have a place where we can hang keys. There's a pet bowl, flashlights, which you need out here in the forest. We also then have these hooks too that are made out of trees, which is really cool, but umbrellas and coats. In this just little living room space, we have so many plants because we utilize hanging them on the ceiling there and just have our wall decorations up there. We're originally from Buffalo, so having a little piece of our original home here as well. And I talk about storage here too. So we have these shelves, which you've seen in the kitchen. We have one here and it holds a PlayStation and controllers and all that, where sometimes that takes up a lot of space. We have the TV here, which if you would ask me before we move tiny, I would have the small of a TV. I don't know if I would agree with you, but it works perfect and it can move out too and get closer and we can even watch it from the bed. They can move it on the side there. And then this is our coffee table and actually it folds out. That's where my wife works, but also in that space where it folds out, we have board games and games and stuff like that. And before Marissa shows you the bedroom, I do just want to explain utilizing the space up here. As you can see, we have a wine box, some statues. So like I said, using every little nook and cranny that you have in a tiny house is important, but you can see we can decorate it. It looks stylish. It looks cozy. It looks comfy. This is our bedroom area. It's pretty compact, which can be troublesome at times. So we have a queen size bed. We ended up deciding to stick with the size that fit directly into here instead of going a little bit smaller, just because having two people and a dog and a cat in a bed can be a little challenging at times, especially when you're right against the wall and there's no room for any kind of space outside of that. So it can be real nice and cozy having everything against the walls, the mattress against the walls. It does restrict airflow. So that can be challenging at times, especially with moisture that can accumulate in a tiny house. We do have a coconut core layer underneath the mattress to kind of add a little bit of that airflow. You can't have a traditional spring box or anything like that underneath it. And making the bed can be a little challenging too. You can't just walk around like in a typical house and make it. You do have to climb up on top and push the sheets down and everything. So it can be a little challenging, but it's definitely worth it, especially having the platform bed. We really appreciate not having to climb any stairs or ladders. So this is really nice. We really appreciate that. We've brought in some more floating shelves and floating end tables to add a little bit more storage to store some of our wedding stuff. And you know, having the end tables has been really great being able to store any kind of electronics and just miscellaneous things. And we also have a little cubby, which is really helpful too over here in the corner. We do also have a mini split up here, which during the summer months has been great because it lets us be really cool, especially being so tightly snug. And this does heat and cool. The heat we do put on sometimes in winter, but we often use the propane heater just because it heats a lot quicker and it's a lot warmer. It has a dry setting. So it works as like a dehumidifier in a sense too. So which is really important not being able to have airflow around the sides of the mattress. So that's great as well. When we bought the house, it was completely white, white walls, and I don't particularly like white. So we definitely wanted to add a little bit of a rustic, cozy cabin feel to the house. So we painted all of the walls green and it definitely makes it much cozier at nighttime sleeping in it, especially having a salt lamp and the string lights at night. It just really sets the ambiance for it and it just makes it a really cozy space. So as an extension of our bedroom area, we do have these built-in closet spaces and it does appear that there used to be some sort of a barn door or something sliding glass or a sliding type of door here, but we actually don't mind the privacy aspect. So it's really nice opening up the space and not having it kind of closed off, but having these built-in storage cabinets have been absolutely amazing. We both have an area like this for myself where we have these little storage containers to keep our clothes similar to a dresser or dresser drawers. And we each also have hanging storage, which is awesome because we have a little closet built in. And we also have so much space underneath here that we're able to keep a bunch of totes for emergency supplies. We also have the side over here for our cat. She gets the most space in the area right here. We transitioned from a house in Buffalo that was four bedroom, 1200 square foot. We realized after buying it that, you know, we didn't want kids and we just wanted a life just the two of us, much more simple. So we realized that the four bedroom, very large house was too much for us. So we decided to downsize and see what other options that we had and ended up here in North Carolina. I was really attracted to the idea of a tiny house, but I still was really worried about it being too small. And then we stayed for a weekend in a tiny house rental and I was comfortable and I saw where all the storage can go. And I felt comfortable even those few days in a tiny house. I'm like, yeah, I could definitely do this. So when we officially decided to go tiny, uh, you know, we put our house for sale in Buffalo and even with all the work that had to be done in the house, we were actually able to sell the house for about double what we, what we paid for it, which, uh, you know, what the market, we took advantage of and it was great because that let us actually be able to buy a tiny house and pay off all our credit card debt and put some debt into student loans and pay off our cars and just give us some more financial freedom that we weren't able to get maintaining a four bedroom house. So we bought the house for 34,000. The upgrades on the house, we actually replaced a few things when we first moved in, like the fridge, the toilet, which was a composting toilet. We upgraded it to a regular toilet, a tankless hot water tank, the mini split behind us, uh, the propane, you know, we bought furniture for the house because we did downsize a lot when we moved. So altogether, we probably spent about 60,000 with all of the upgrades and furnishing the house. When we compare our house to Buffalo, to the tiny house here, the rent or the mortgage, I would say was pretty cheap. It was only about $650, but you add in the amount of money that we spent on electric, electricity, water, gas, garbage, taxes, things like that. We're talking probably somewhere around $1,100. We're here, it's much more affordable. Our rent is $550, which includes the water and the internet, which is really great, especially for working from home. The only thing that we have to pay for is electric and propane for our instant hot water tank type of thing. But altogether, I would say we probably pay about $600 to $700 a month compared to almost $1,100 back in Buffalo, which is very low in comparison to other people that live in the Western New York area. Taxes and mortgages are much more expensive for friends and family. So we were pretty lucky, but we also are much luckier here because you're saving a lot more money per month. And now here we are in the bathroom. And I know when people talk about living tiny, they're concerned about the bathroom. People like a big bathroom and all that. The biggest thing is utilizing the space the most you can. And you'll see here, we use a lot of wall storage. And even on the side here, all the stuff for teeth brushing, because we don't have a lot of space to put a bunch of like cupboards and stuff like that. And we still do have some space in here with this vanity where we can put stuff like a hairdryer and cleaning supplies as well. We have a lot of stuff in this bathroom, probably more than people that live in normal houses. We utilize that wall space. Living tiny does not hurt us as far as places to put stuff in the bathroom. Not a huge sink, but not a small sink. We actually do have plans of replacing this. We want to go to more of like a wood style and all that, but it does get the job done here. Can't have a huge mirror. I know some people like a large mirror in a tiny house, but this mirror, you could see everything you need to. We actually had a composting toilet that came with the house. It was much smaller than this. It just didn't work for us. If it works for you, that's great. So we put in, this is a standard regular toilet. So you can have a standard toilet in a tiny house. This is a pretty spacious shower. I mean, this might be the same size, if not bigger than the shower we had in houses and apartments. So we didn't really downsize in space when it comes to the actual shower. We do have the low flow detachable shower head as far as in the shower head up here. One thing I did forget to mention too, is that the toilet is low flush as well. Trying to find ways that we can be sustainable in the tiny house. And you can see, I can move around in this pretty comfortably. So if you think going tiny, you're going to have to get a very tiny shower. That is not the case. And when it comes to hot water, we actually have a tankless water heater outside. So as soon as you utilize the heat, it fires up and the water pressure and the warmth or cold levels, wherever, how you like it are perfect. So you do not downgrade there at all. When we moved tiny, a big thing for us was for it to push us outside, experience the outdoors, experience nature more. And it starts on our patio here. We got a lot of patio space. We're blessed with that. The community did provide that for us. And on this patio, I'm able to have a blackstone as well as a prep cart. And you saw the kitchen is tiny. It is functional for us. We can work with it. But if I can, I come out here and I grill and I can prep stuff out here and use this as a cutting board as well. So really utilizing the outdoor space for a kitchen as well. We sit out here and we can have dinner, we can have coffee and we can just take it all in, enjoy the nature, enjoy the space we have out here. But while being grateful for the space that we have inside. Now, here we are in the garden. You know, we don't have a lot of land or everything. We're in a tiny house community, but we definitely make the most out of it with container gardening. So really utilizing the space. We still haven't done it. We plan to grow some wildflowers to bring some more pollinators over here, like hummingbirds, as well as butterflies and honeybees. Another great thing about living tiny that was pretty unexpected. I had seen videos about how people really developed a good support system and really got to know a lot of people that were living different type of lifestyles, but still with the tiny house life. And it was something I never really considered so much, but when we moved here, it really became prevalent how important that was to have a great support system and a great community that you live in, because you are starting a new adventure and a new space that you're not used to when you're used to a house. And living in a really intimate community with 10 houses really gets to know your neighbors, which is not something in South Buffalo you are familiar with. So that has been a real joy, getting to know the neighbors. And you know, that's something you really appreciate living tiny, because you want people that are like-minded, who understand the struggles of what it might be to live tiny, but also so much joy of it. And it's people you get to experience new things in life with, whether it's tubing or going to explore new restaurants and things like that. You can do that with your neighbors because you get to know them so well. Thank you so much for taking the time to tour our tiny house today. We really appreciate it. And if you want to hear more about a comedian living in a tiny house, check me out, Chris Gullo, on all social media platforms. And if you have any questions or comments for either of us, please leave in the comments and we'll be happy to reach back out.