We Escaped Rising Housing Costs With a Tiny House On Our Own Land

Welcome to our tiny house in the Pacific Northwest. My partner Nate is on a wild land deployment for a couple of weeks. So I'm taking over showing his creation that he built with one of his best friends, Luis Carrillo down in Dallas, Texas. He custom built this tiny home with South Paw Trading Co, got a lot of different design inspiration while coming up with this. And then I came into his life and then it ended up being a tiny house for two. Two and a half with our dog. We're living room focused and we have our kitchen bathroom on the first floor. And then we have a lofted bedroom up the stairs where we have custom drawers up there as well for our clothes. This is our kitchen. We both cook a lot. So it was important to us to have a full range stove and oven as well as a deep dish sink. We make a lot of meals from our garden. So we wanted to maximize our kitchen space as much as possible. Before I moved in with my partner, I lived in a studio in Seattle and it was pretty tiny as well. I think it was 300 square feet, but it didn't have a lot of kitchen amenities like we do here. I think I had like a two burner top stove. I didn't have an oven, which is insane as a dietician and just an avid foodie. It was really hard to make meals. I made it work. So it's definitely nice to be back in a full kitchen setup. This is my favorite nook area. We have a four burner gas stove as well as convection and conduction oven. Love our Breville set up too. This is actually the Bambino Breville and then our grinder here. So I'm here multiple times a day to stay fueled. Found some really fun tile as backsplash that complements the green earth tones in here as well. We have a lot of great storage in here. Everything is kind of within here. We have like spices in here. We have like our cookware up here. Everything is just super easy and convenient, very intentional. So this is our fridge. I think it's definitely on the smaller side. It's probably the same size fridge that I had in my 300 square foot studio apartment in Seattle as a foodie and a gardener. I definitely wish I had, you know, more storage, but it just makes us more intentional for when we harvest from the garden, just cause we're a little limited on space there, but that just means our meals are more fresh. This is our kitchen sink area. It's East facing. So we get really nice Eastern morning sun in here. We have a deep dish sink. So really easy to clean up all the dishes that we make and a drying rack here. We are the dishwashers, our hands here. So it's definitely, you know, a quick turnover. I definitely miss the dishwasher in my studio apartment. That was one thing thankfully I had was a tiny dishwasher. I always joke with Nate that I'm the cook. He's the dishwasher. He is a very good sous chef, but he definitely gets to dishes quicker than I do. I do it in the same day, but he's kind of like cook as you clean, but he definitely takes gold star in the dishwasher compartment. So yeah, definitely a little bit of an adjustment, but I think it makes sense size wise. Like I'd rather have like a full size oven and stove top than a dishwasher. And we also have storage here for like our most frequently used ingredients. This one wasn't originally involved with the design plan, but we realized we needed more storage for some of like our dry food goods. So Nate actually built this custom. These are live wood slabs that he sanded down from a friend's house and had them installed a couple of years ago. We have trash and recycling down here. Nate also just built a three tier compost bin that's going to be used for our garden beds next year for the soil. And so we compost as much as we can. And then yeah, we have trash and recycling services down at the end of our road. Nate definitely wanted to have a focus on having like a countertop as kind of like a multifunctional space where he could do, you know, some work, but also have a meal and sit down. It's been probably like our second most utilized space besides like the kitchen area. I sometimes do work from here. Great for the two of us, definitely plenty of room to prep our food, but also as well as eating, dining with friends. Sometimes that can be a little bit challenging, but usually we have friends over when the weather's nice. We have outdoor seating, so just getting creative with it. So we definitely made use of every single space in here. Each drawer is extremely utilized. We have our coats, believe it or not. In here, we have a pullout pantry in here, which is super nice. This is three tiered. My best friend's dad helped us with that. He is a retired carpenter, so he helped us maximize that before it was just open and it was really hard to get everything in there. So definitely maximizing space there. This is kind of like our work drawer here. This is Stowe's drawer down here and some more food. He thinks he's going to get a cookie. This is our living room. When my partner Nate was designing this space, he definitely wanted a comfortable living room area. So that's why this is a living room focused layout. We have a perfectly sized couch in here. I think it's an eight and a half foot trailer in this couch is I think a little over eight feet. So right up against the walls. We actually took this from my studio apartment. It's an article couch that was my favorite piece I ever invested. And it's so nice for a shoddy dog too. You just vacuum up the hair and it disappears. But we spend a lot of time here in the mornings having coffee, watching movies from here. Even when we have kind of like an overflow of guests staying with us, you can take off these cushions and it kind of doubles as a twin size bed. This is Stowe's bed that he's showing you, which fits perfectly right underneath our stove. This is our cute little tiny stove and yes, it works. We have little tiny six or eight inch pieces of wood that have to be like custom cut to fit in this stove. But this is a really essential piece living in the Pacific Northwest. Power can go out here pretty often in the winter, especially with our wind storms up to 50 miles per hour. So we definitely get a lot of short circuits with electricity up here being in the woods too with tall trees. So having a backup heat source is really important. This puts out a lot of heat. We don't need to really use our side heaters, which are electric based as much when this guy's going. One of the ways we store wood for the winter is in here. It's empty right now just because it can grow molds with the moisture of the wood. But this is a super helpful storage. This is on our last step of the stairs and definitely super convenient for the winter just to pop a couple logs out there and put them into the fire here. I thought it was really cool that he was building this. I thought it was a very intentional way to invest in something he had shared with me. You know, he was trying to buy a home, but it was just a very competitive market. So this was a way for him to kind of step out of the renting arena out of apartments and live in something that he built for himself. So I thought that was pretty cool. He was already in the process of building everything when we first started talking, dating. So I wasn't a factor in how he designed it, but we always joke that, you know, he built the bones to the place and I put makeup on it. I solidified it as he likes to say. So it's definitely ended up being a blend of both of us. Hi babe. I hope your shift went well. I wanted to get your side of the story on initial tiny house building and plans. What was your long-term goal with tiny house building? Hey, darling. Well, back in 2020, I was getting frustrated. I got beat out on putting some offers in on some land. So I needed some sort of bridge to go from land to a fully functioning working house. So that's where the tiny house idea started from. And then I started talking to a friend who had room on his property for a tiny house, beautiful location, right on the Lake. And I designed the tiny house with that property in mind. How has living in a tiny house changed since I arrived? I definitely built the tiny house just for one person, myself in mind. I think it's taken a little getting used to having two people in it. It definitely needed your design artistic touch. It's a lot more homely now. What do you envision our property looking like in five years from now? Lots of projects. We still have a lot of projects to go. Hopefully build some equity and save more money so we can build a house one day. So that's the long-term plan. I think in the next five years, we'll be living in a house on the property, unknown really what the future is going to be for the tiny house itself, whether it stays on the property or goes. But I think we'll always be able to look back on it as a fun chapter of our life. So just beyond the kitchen, we have our bathroom and our washroom laundry room. We have a combo washer dryer. So it's kind of like a two in one. We don't have to switch over the clothes manually to dry mode. It just does it all by itself. I think for us, we're very active people. I probably use this every other day, especially with the dog too. He definitely gets his beds quite dirty. So having something on site was definitely important to us and having the two-in-one dryer is one way to maximize space here. So I think it's the perfect fit for us or sink here, more storage underneath the sink. We have a flushable toilet. Nate knew he didn't want to do the incinerating toilet or the compost toilet. He just kind of knew that where his setup was going to be, it was going to have septic. And thankfully it's worked out in those places. We have more storage up here and then we have a walk-in shower with a glass door. I'm not a big bath person. So I think it works for us. Obviously a bigger shower one day would be nice, but it definitely is big enough for the space that we have. Upstairs we have our lofted bedroom. We have a queen size mattress up there and Nate got custom drawers. So each of us have four drawers on each side. So eight total. We also have lights up there too for reading. They're controlled through Google home nest. So they're all voice activated, which is nice. The head space is a little compromised, but you know, our focus again was having more of a comfortable living space. I don't think I would change the layout. I think it makes the most sense for where we spend our time. And that's definitely down here. We've definitely utilized all of our nooks and crannies. One of them being this shoe rack that Nate actually built. Right now, I'm taking up the majority of it since he's on a wild land deployment in Montana. So I call dibs on it, but I definitely find creative ways to stash my shoes around here. This is the exterior of our tiny home. At the back of the tiny house, we have a mechanical room. We have two propane gas tanks in there, which is mainly for our hot water. And those last us about a month. And then on the other end of the house, we have our water catchment system. So kind of keeping with the two-toned theme, our gutters are black and then it empties into a black barrel. And then it has a hose that goes off into our wildflower beds. This is our she shed, he shed, they shed. It's our multi-purpose shed. I have a home office in there. We have a lot of gear storage in there, bikes or skis or camping gear. And yeah, just a really functional space. We also have our hot water heater in there. So definitely necessary to have a second structure for us. So across from our tiny house and the garden, we have our chicken coop and to go along with the Cedar aesthetic, we have Cedar shingles and two-tone black accent. We have three chickens, bread, butter, and Thor. They give us just enough eggs for about a week's worth. So they're tri-color. So we have green, blue, brown eggs, which is super fun. Nate has always had a dream to have kind of like a homestead or just be more reliable, sustainable off of things he's making and growing. So I definitely took on the green thumb in the garden and he definitely loves a chickens a little bit more. That was definitely his idea. I wanted another dog, but we got chickens instead. Welcome to our garden. This is my Haven. We have 12 beds here. We grow everything from tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, corn, you name it. Basically all of whole foods in our garden here, which is super fun. Nate actually made all the garden beds in here, which is really cool. So these black Cedar boards here are actually Shishugi bond. So it's a traditional, I think Japanese way of preserving the wood where you actually burn it. And that is supposed to help prevent any kind of like long-term decaying or breakdown of the wood too, without using some of those harsh materials to kind of seal traditional Cedar boards. And keeping with our two-toned black and natural Cedar, the whole fence here for the deer, I think it's about seven feet tall. Again, natural Cedar too. And we just planted Wisteria this year. So we're always adding new things year after year. We're hoping that Wisteria will start to grow along the trellises here, maybe plant some Jasmine and grapes later down the line. But our goal is to have a greenhouse in the center of our garden. Spring so we can stop buying a $500 garden from seedlings and start from our own seeds. But it's just so fun to be able to use all of this in our meals and dinners and share with friends and family. So as we're thinking about building our dream home in the future on our property, we just want to be really intentional with a layout of the kitchen things, just having function over aesthetics, but still just keeping that minimalistic feel. And it's kind of fun to live a little bit more intentionally and, you know, not get lost in like a 5,000 square foot house. But I think everybody has like different stories too, right? Like we're not planning to have kids. It's just going to be us and the dogs and the chickens and whoever knows how many farm animals Nate's going to end up with. So we don't need something that big, but I personally never grew up in a home like a big house. I was, you know, in a ski condo growing up my whole life. And then, you know, college dorm rooms, apartments, studio apartments, now a tiny home. So it's just been something like close to my heart and a dream for me to live in an actual house one day. So I'm really excited to be getting closer to that. Thanks for visiting our tiny home in Bellingham, Washington. If you're looking for design inspo, feel free to give our friends at Southpaw Trading Co a follow on Instagram, but thanks so much for tuning in.