This Tiny Home Proves You Don't Need Much To Live Intentionally

I'm not a person who wants to live in the suburbs in a house that looks like everyone else's. I like things that have character. I hadn't specifically thought that I wanted to live in a tiny home. The tiny home wasn't the main thing, it was the community. We call it an agri-hood. It has 16 lots for tiny homes. This kitchen is actually pretty much as big as the last house that I lived in. There's more counter space than I had before. The handyman that I asked to put this up, I was telling him what I was going to do, and people thought I was crazy. This is my bedroom. Hi, I'm Vivian, and this is my tiny home. When I started looking for a home, I just came across the builders that I used through another family who lives here, and she told me about how they use recycled materials, reclaimed materials, and you have a lot of say in how your house is going to be. The first thing I did was meet with them and went to their workshop and just saw all the reclaimed stuff they have, and just very creative and nothing cookie cutter about it at all. It was so much fun to completely get everything I wanted in the house, so it was amazing. I'm not a person who wants to live in the suburbs in a house that looks like everyone else's. I like things that have character. My ceiling is bleachers from a high school that was torn down. I think I found a little gum on my ceiling upstairs, so very authentic. Also, the base here, it actually still has a little sign on it from when it was bleachers, and I just love that. You love to be reusing things and putting them to good use. The total cost was about $140,000. When I had the deck put on last summer, that was about $20,000. I would say that living in a tiny home has been a pretty big challenge for me because I'm just a naturally messy person. I was just, I was born that way. When I cook a meal, the kitchen is a disaster. When I'm working on an art project or a quilt, there's stuff everywhere. A couple weeks ago, I told my daughter that I was going to, you know, have this filming done of my house, and she's like, oh mom, I better come help you clean. I'm getting more organized as time goes by. I'm finding places for everything, but that's the biggest challenge is having a place for everything because there's not that much space. I have lived in this tiny home community for two years. I hadn't specifically thought that I wanted to live in a tiny home. The tiny home wasn't the main thing, it was the community. I've always felt like kind of an old hippie, and I've always wanted to live in a commune. I just love the idea of sharing space, sharing tools and food, and also this community is about 15 minutes from where my daughter and her family and my three grandkids live. So when I heard that this was going in, it was like, I got to do it. The tiny home community, it's called Tiny Timbers, and it's located in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin. We call it an agri-hood. It has 16 lots for tiny homes, and we also have a big community garden. We have chickens, we have a root cellar, an orchard. Everyone here has bought their own tiny home and brought it here, and each lot is $500 a month. Each person does pay their own electricity and gas. We have a water bill for the whole community that's divided up for everyone. We have good internet and pretty much anything you could want in this little place where we all pretend like we're living out in the country. Welcome to my tiny home. It was built in 2024. It's completely custom, and I pretty much was able to design every inch of it, which has been really fun and special. So the house is 10 feet by 40 feet. The trim on the outside is cedar, and you can see I have a stained glass window. That's my bedroom up there. I had the porch built last summer, and that has basically doubled my living space, which has just been amazing. It's about the size of my living room, and I also use it as an art studio, which you'll see when we get in there. We have to cover our air conditioner unit. That's kind of part of the rules of the community, and so I'm trying to grow some flowers up this trellis, but it's kind of early in the season, so they're not up there yet, but hopefully. Then I have this little deck area, which I just grow some flowers and herbs on. Here's my porch. During the winter, I started working on a big art project, and this kind of became my place where I keep all my crafts and do some of the cutting. I'm a mosaic artist. On the side, I'm a pediatrician for my real job. I do ceramic tile and also stained glass mosaics, and when I started this project, I had all of my ceramic tiles in bins all mixed up, and I could never find anything that I wanted. So I came up with this hanger system, and it's just been really fun to have everything color-coded, and when I need something, I can just come out right out here and find it. So I've been working on a mosaic that I'm doing on my walls, and you'll be able to see it when we go inside. I love to sit out here in the morning with my coffee and just look out back and pretend I'm 100 miles away just hanging out in the woods. I had the ceiling of the porch made with this corrugated plexiglass. I was going to have a regular roof, but then one morning it just hit me that this is my main source of light for most of the house, and I thought if I put a solid roof up there, it's going to cut out so much light. So I'm just really happy that that's what I did, and it sounds really cool out here when it rains. Another thing about the porch is I had plexiglass inserts made for the windows. So right now it's just screens, but in the winter with the plexiglass on, it kind of extends the season on a, you know, it might be 30 or 40 degrees, but if it's sunny, this porch gets really warm. It's kind of like a kind of like a greenhouse out here. And then I have some steps that go down to the shed, which is every home here comes with a 10 by 12 shed. So right now that's just kind of junk storage, but I hope to someday make it into an art studio so I can have my house back. We're probably gonna get a little visitor here. Hi, Lloyd. You want to come see us? Hi, baby. Yeah. Oh, what's going on? This is Lloyd. He's my three-month-old miniature Bernie Doodle, and I've had him for about a month, and he's just the sweetest thing. Come on in. First of all, I guess I'll show you the kitchen, which is one of my favorite areas. This kitchen is actually pretty much as big as the last house that I lived in. There's more counter space than I had before. Full-size refrigerator and stove. The mason jar storage really helps with food storage space. I really love to cook. I'm almost vegetarian, not 100%, but I really like to make things with lots of vegetables, like eggplant scallopini with mushrooms and tomatoes and peppers. I'm not so much a baker, but I love making big meals for my family. So I just love my coffee and tea bar. It's the first place I go every morning. I have my coffee stuff in here, all the teas. It's just great to have this extra little space for some appliances. Then I have a little bit of room down here for pots and pans. So that's some nice storage, and this is a mosaic that I made probably about, I don't know, five or six years ago. I've had this piece of furniture for many years, and we were actually able to plan for it when the house was being designed, and it turned it into actually a permanent piece here. It's sort of built into the wall, but I just love it because I have my fiesta ware visible, and I just, I love the color. Besides having a place to store my dishes and also display them, it also gives me a little desk here and a few junk drawers, because everybody needs lots of junk drawers. So I have this little nook here for a dining room table, which is mostly just an art table for me. Last summer, I was making a big quilt for my son who got married, and this whole thing was just covered with fabric the whole time. So it hasn't really been a place to eat. I just eat on the couch. So this is the mosaic that I'm working on right now. It's called Life and Light, and basically my idea is that it's a sunrise and then all the animals, and it's going to look basically like being here with the birch trees, and pretty much every animal that's in it is going to be one that we have around here. It'll be a little bit bigger. This is my bedroom door, so it'll be that big, and then it's going to come over here, and the sky will be like it's just starting to lighten up, like kind of a light bluish gray, and then as it goes further and further, it's going to turn into night, and there will be a black bear, which we have around here, and some raccoons, and just like bunnies, and a lot of the animals we have around here. So I'm basically going to recreate the outside in my living room. I started about three months ago. People thought I was crazy. The handyman that I asked to put this up, I was telling him what I was going to do, and I showed him the drawings and stuff, and he was like, I like your vision. It scares me, but I like it. So I said, yeah, that's pretty much why I'm single, because my vision always scares partners off, but that's okay. My fan, I just am in love with. Did a lot of research as I was planning the house, and I just love the way it fits in with all the wood here. It also works really well. Pretty much keep it going year round, because my source of heat is up here in the mini split, and you know, the heat comes out, and as heat rises, the heat tends to stay up there, so the fan helps to bring the heat down in the winter. So this is my living room. Everything was planned so that I could have a full-size couch, which also has a sofa bed inside, so I have a little more room for guests. Really love my shelving with pictures of my family, my rotating bookshelf. I had to get rid of probably 500 books to move here, so this is called down to what I can not live without. Above the living room with the catwalk, the railing is from a pre-civil war graveyard somewhere in the south. I could find out, but I can't remember exactly, but I just think it's so cool. The company No Boundaries, they do a lot of reclaimed materials, and I just think it's so cool. I just love it. And then going back toward my bathroom, super lucky to have a little area that's, right now it's kind of messy, kind of stays messy, but we have an area, I have two cats, and so this is an area that we have the kitty litter over here, a back door, some storage space, and the kitty litter area actually has a exhaust fan that blows to the outside. I really never think to use it, but I think it's a cool feature. And then going back to my bathroom, a lot of people here only have showers, and I really wanted to have a bath. In the winter when I come home and I'm freezing cold, I just really like to take a bath, so it's great to have a full bathtub. I have this little washing machine, which most of the time I just go to the laundromat. It's really close, but if I need to wash a few things, I just put this in the bathtub, and it'll wash about about 10 pieces of clothes, and then I just hang them up on a line outside. So very convenient to to have that for when I don't feel like making a full trip. And these are my crazy stairs. Some people call them ship stairs. Because the house is so tall, there's the only way they can figure out to get the stairs and not like have to come all the way to the other wall. Also, I was reading about them. I found that they used to also call them witch's stairs. If you can go up the stairs, you're not a witch. I think that's what it was. So you are in fact not a witch then? Well, we won't say. And I'm obviously very used to this now, but it's still tricky because I have to carry Lloyd up and down every morning and night because he sleeps with me, and he's not big enough to handle the witch's stairs yet. So it's a little more tricky with a 15 pound dog in my arms. So this is what we call the catwalk. This is my bedroom. Obviously a loft. It's five feet high, which isn't too bad because I mostly just sleep up here. But it's a nice cozy bedroom. The stained glass window is an antique from the 1880s. It's so fun because when the sun comes up, it kind of glows orange and it's so beautiful. And in the afternoon, the beveled glass makes little rainbows all over the room, which my granddaughters really like. It'd be nice to just have the wall with the stained glass window, but you also have to wear clothes. So this is what I've come up with, with the hanging clothes and then some baskets down there too instead of having like a dresser. So I do have another bedroom, which is a loft, just like my bedroom. It's my son's room, same dimensions, and we're just not going to go in there today. Looking forward, I think just more of the same. Just want to keep enjoying all the things I have here. You know, if it gets to the point that I can't get up and down the stairs, hopefully not in the near future, but I'm 66. And so I thought, you know, I mean, I could live down here. Everything I need is, you know, the bathroom, the kitchen, you know, put a bed here and I could have someone, maybe one of my grandkids live upstairs to help me out if needed. And so I feel like this is, I'm going to be here for a long time. If you liked this week's episode, please make sure to like share and subscribe and check back because we have new Unique Home Tours publishing all the time. And if you'd like to join our team and get access to members only content and unique perks, make sure you click on the join button below.