She Built a €33K Tiny House and Finally Found a Place to Call Home

There are times in life when the path ahead isn't always clear. We might know that we're ready for something to change without knowing exactly what comes next. And sometimes creating a life that truly feels like our own simply means having the courage to begin and learning as we go. This week in the beautiful west coast of France, we discover just how far that first step can take you. Bonjour! My name is Aimée, Aimée in English. This is my sweet, lovely, tiny house. It's located in the southwest of France, in the middle of the forest of Blancs, 25 minutes from the ocean. Welcome here! I decided to live in a tiny house because I was working as a seasonal worker for the past 15 years now, working in the ocean and on the ski station. I traveled a lot between these two seasons. So for a few years, I was a nomad person living on my van or rental, moving a lot, traveling, backpacking. And I find the need of settling down and look for what kind of home will be nice for me. And tiny house was a good compromise because I had the possibility to move it if I need or just to be able to access to a home as an owner because the land here are really expensive because of the proximity of the ocean. Settling down was also an opportunity for me to be able to develop professional activity at the same place. So now I'm a surf teacher most of the summer and I also develop my activity of aqua therapist. So I do aqua massage on a swimming pool 15 minutes from here. When I made my choice of living on a tiny house, I also made the choice of building it. So it was a double challenge for me, settling down and build it. A few years before that, I started living on my van. So I decided to convert it and it was really nice project. I really liked it. I didn't have any experience of building, so it was completely new skills. I like to learn new skills to build as I want exactly to draw every blueprint. It was really nice experience. My dad also helped me. He showed me that everything was possible if I was with energy and enthusiasm. So the tiny was like okay, I can be really organized and I can do it myself. It's okay. Yes, it was not an option to not build my tiny house. After four years looking for inspiration, I finally had my almost final blueprints and after that it was quite natural. Friends told me, hey, you can come in my place. I have a big workshop with a carpenter. So I rent this place for eight months and I also find a guy that helped me to build the tiny house. Every day he came one hour or two hours and he helped me, tell me what to do. It was really a nice deal because I had to do it all myself, but he guided me a lot and I also had the help of all the carpenters of the workshop. Every day they came and advised me for a few stuff. They were like, ah, you should do it like this or you should do it like that and this tool is better. So it was really nice also to have them around. It was like a bubble of family construction. It was really a nice moment. There are a lot of people that are scared to find a parking spot. I really understand that. I think it's part of the challenge of building a tiny house. For me, I don't know how to explain that, but I have a faith inside me that the place will come and a friend told me, oh, my owner could be interested to welcome you. So I called him and he was really amazed by the project and really happy and it was super, super quick. So I will advise many people to start building the tiny house even if they don't have the parking spots yet. I'm legally parked here. I did all the paperwork with the mayor. They accept that I can live here. I'm pretty lucky about that. I'm still on a fairy tale period, waking up every day like, ah, it's my tiny house. I made it and it's made for me, by me. It's exactly like I wanted and I feel really lucky. So the tiny house is 4.1 meter high, 7 meter long and 2.5 meter wide and it's good connected. I really wanted to fight against the box shape of the tiny house. So I made all my doors round. I wanted also to maximize the space inside. So I did a bow window and also to make it more round inside. And also I had on the cladding a wave shape. It's really a part of me, of the tiny house. It's also like a wink to my job as a surf teacher and it saved us actually 400 kilos to choose plywood. But it actually gets damaged really quick with the storm of the winter. Even if I did many layers of wood stain, I was really annoyed by this. So the next step will be to sand everything and to paint with the Norwegian paint. It will be the same color than the doors behind. So soon it will be better again. I think it's not a bad choice to use plywood as cladding, but I will advise to look more for a solution to protect against the humidity and the wind. I really like my roof. It's an artistic roof. I chose this shape because I wanted to maximize the volume inside. It's almost the only part I didn't do, but I'm really proud of it. That's it for outside and now let's go inside. Welcome inside. So the particularity of this tiny house is the entrance through the bathroom. I made this choice because I wanted to have an airlock between outside and inside. A place where I can undress, put all my dirty shoes, my wetsuits completely wet, my socks from outside, from the work. It was really important for me to not have the entrance inside the living room. So this is a multifunctional room divided in few different spaces. First the entrance so I can sit on the bench that is hiding the composting toilet. It's really convenient to take off my shoes and also I have a mirror so if I want to brush my hair and stuff like this. After there is the dressing part. I have quite a lot of clothes so I needed a lot of storage to put them all. Because of the window I have quite a really big shower so it's really nice for a tiny house and convenient to dry all my clothes. Because of my job I wanted this space completely waterproof so I put resin on the wall everywhere actually. Like this I can put water everywhere and when I come back from a surf station with my wetsuit on I can undress here directly going on the shower, get out all the salt and make everything dry inside the shower. And like this everything that is wet stay here and after I can go to the main room. Next is the kitchen. During the period I was living on the van I was quite frustrated to not be able to cook a lot. It was really restraining. So when I designed the blueprint of the tiny house I decided I wanted a big kitchen. I also wanted that we can be more than one person cooking at the same time. So I have a lot of space to cook. I have oven, four kitchen burner, the fridge. I have a double sink because I don't have any sink on the bathroom. So one sink for the bathroom and one sink for the kitchen. Above this sink I have a dish drainer that allows me to have more space on the kitchen counter. Also I have a high counter where I can sit with the two high chairs and a lot of storage. So that allows me really to enjoy the cooking and I love the window also. Like this when I cook I can see outside and it's good for the smell also. To save some weight I put vinyl backsplash and all the shelves are made with the leftover from the tiny house construction. I made all the handles of the cupboard and drawers with driftwood. I like the aesthetic and it's also a really cheap way to decorate your home. Finally it's actually a really simple kitchen but it's exactly what I needed. I separated all the space from the house with different color or material in the wall. So all the kitchen is blue with red window and after when we move to the living room we change our color of the room. This is the main room. It's really spacious because of all the windows and it allows me to have like a view in 180 degrees. So it's really nice. I really feel outside inside. I really like the aesthetic to have exposed beams. It's really beautiful. It makes the tiny house more like a traditional home. This main room is divided in four areas. We can see them by different color of the wall or material. So first the white wall. For me it's the living room. It's the part where I welcome people. They always sit on the high counter and near the window and it's also my favorite place to sit. So I like to see this part as a welcoming part. The second area is where the table is and it's a table that was inspired by another tiny house makers and they're called La Petite Grene. There is an episode of living big in a tiny house about them. It's a modular table. It can be high or low table and I use it for different functions. To eat, to work as a desk and also to welcome people as a low table near the couch. It was the last furniture I made and I made it with all the tiny pieces of wood left over from the construction. So it looked like a mosaic. After that I drew like mandalas and put resin again. Like this is easy to wash it. The third area of the living room is the part where there is the couch. I wanted a really cozy place. It's also a part where on the cupboard there are all my creative stuff. So I can sew, I can crochet, I can draw and all this part is built for creativity, chilling, be really relaxed. The couch is convertible in a double bed and there's a lot of storage under it. To make the tiny house bigger, lighter and more round I designed a bow window. I didn't know how to choose the color of the window so there's two colors and it was really a nightmare to build. It was a whim clearly but I assume it because I really like these parts and it's a game changer for all the design of the tiny. It's really spacious and there is a lot of light. I don't regret at all this whim. And where is the fourth part? The fourth area is the foldable platform. It was really important for me so I didn't want to choose between living room and an area to do yoga or just an area where there is nothing. So I designed a foldable platform above the couch and it's allowed me to do my Qigong practice or sewing or just chilling. In my daily activities I do Qigong every morning so it was really important for me to be able to have a space to move my arm, a really free space. Also I love to create stuff. This platform also helped me to have this space where I can create. The platform leans on the outside storage on the back and on the creativity cupboards on the side. It's really convenient because it adds four square meters and it's quite huge for a tiny house. It's possible for the people to sleep on the platform. We can accommodate two persons above the platform and two persons under the platform on the couch. So in total the tiny house can accommodate six persons at the same time. That's it for the living room and now we can go upstairs to the bedroom. It's really a cozy warming place. I made it with pine wood paneling like a mountain cabin a little bit. And I designed this area to be also spacious so I can sit on my bed and still have a lot above my head. So it's comfortable to be here. I don't feel like in an enclosed space. It's a space where there is a lot of storage. I have a lot of clothes because of my work, a wetsuit, rain jacket and I occasionally go work on construction sites. So I have also a lot of clothes for this so it was important for me to have a storage separate from my dressing room downstairs that it's more for work. I also have a part to separate the main room from the bedroom. It can be also a desk so I can sit on my bed and being on my computer. And when we live at more than one person it's also good to have different area. One can work at this desk and one can be working on the table downstairs. The shelf of the mezzanine it's only for decorating but it's also a plan that I have to hide a screen to watch movie from the couch. So the tiny house cost me a little bit more than 33 000 euro. I have been living in here since more than one year now and I really feel super happy about it. Waking up every morning really happy to be in my cocoon, to be in my home that I built myself. It's really a big change for me to settle down. I like the routine I create. I feel I'm growing a lot with this step of life. It's the first time in my life that I'm rooting somewhere and it feels really nice to be able to create long-term friendship, commit to NGO, have a weekly routine and develop professional activities. It was a big challenge to do all this building with no knowledge in eight months. One thing I didn't expect was really the mental load. The technical skills I learned it really fast but after every day on the workshop I had at least two, three, four hours per day ordering materials, optimizing the planning. Everything was unknown so I had to plan every day for the next day. All the mental load was really really hard and after eight months I was quite exhausted about that. I think I would have loved that someone told me about that before. I really want to share that you don't need any expertise to build a tiny house. You need a really strong determination for sure but all the rest you can learn it by doing it and making mistakes. It's okay. It changed a lot of my life because now when I want to fix stuff I don't tell myself you cannot do it because you don't know how to do it. I just try and if I feel I need help I can ask for help and I realized in the workshop sometimes the guys I was asking they didn't know either and they were still trying. That was the big difference and a big knowledge that I learned to try even if you don't know. I would really encourage you to build your own place. It's such a fantastic challenge and I've got so many memories from this time of my life and I felt I grew so much during this experience and there are many people who would love to help you. It's a really nice family of self-builders. I watch a lot of videos from one of the self-builders it's called La Cavanne Mini in fact there is a really nice episode about him and his tiny house because I asked him a lot of questions and after this we became really good friends so I think the challenge of building a tiny it's also a good way to meet really nice people and it's really nice also to live inside. The minimalism, the convenient part of not maintaining, not so much responsibility, the price and the fact that it's made by you for you. I would advise everybody to live like that. I'm in love with everything that Amy has accomplished here. After so many years on the move she's created a home that's finally allowed her to put down roots and enjoy a completely different rhythm of life and I love the fact that she built it herself despite starting with absolutely no experience. It's a great reminder that you don't always need to have all the answers before you begin. Sometimes you just need the determination to start, the willingness to learn and to know when to ask for a little bit of help along the way.