Tiny Home Living (small home living) - Part 2

In this post, I'll talk about the floor plan.

We bought a shell from Graceland. (See their website here: http://www.gracelandportablebuildings.com/)

We liked Graceland because of the quality of the traditional 2x4 construction. The shell we bought was already on their lot. It had been ordered and the purchaser's deal fell through. So, we got a good price. However, this meant we had to accept the external walls as is. That meant that I had to work with the position of the 3 front windows, the one on the end wall to the left of the front door and the front door itself. We added the window in the bedroom and the back door ourselves. The back window shown in the floor plan never materialized. That is our West wall and - in Texas - not a wall to be messed with.

The internal walls were our design (and our handiwork).

There are some furniture pieces missing from the drawing. My cute farm-style breakfast table is located just to the left of the front door. My adjustable stand-up computer desk is located straight back from the front door in the corner created by the bathroom wall. My granny's antique buffet is in the corner to the right of the back door (instead of the aforementioned window that never materialized). My mother's antique steamer trunk is beside the entertainment center in the living room. My husband's grandfather's cedar chest is behind the couch instead of the buffet (as shown).

The bathroom is spacious and one of the things I'd do differently is try to save space by making it smaller - somehow.

The vision for the bedroom is a bunch of built-ins and his-and-hers closets opposite one another as shown. To date, the cabinets and one closet (hers) are finished - with drawers and the second closet still to come. Currently, we just use the cabinets like shelves without drawers.

The kitchen isn't finished as shown. It is currently missing the cabinets on the interior wall. We also didn't do the corner on the interior wall. We simply stopped the counter at that wall. So, we have more of an L-shaped kitchen rather than a U-shape. But it is HUGE, so there is still plenty of room and time to add the cabinets to make it a U-shape.

Tiny home living (small home living), Part 1

The homestead in February.

I've been asked four times this week (twice on Facebook, twice in real life) to share about the "tiny home" my husband and I built. I'm up to the task, excited about sharing even. I love our little slice of paradise. But, I feel the need to preface everything I'm about to say with several very serious disclaimers:

• Ours is just a small home, it's not really a "tiny home". Ours is 600 square feet. And, we have a large-ish travel trailer that we're able to hook up at the drop of a hat for visitors. We also have a nice garage/shop.
• Building a tiny home yourself is not easy. My husband worked on the project full-time for more than 3 months - from site preparation through to certificate of occupancy. And, he's an extremely resourceful guy with many, many years of hands-on work experience.
• Building ANY home yourself is not easy. The home is never "finished". You'll always have a project to complete. You'll always have a part of the house that you want to forget. You'll always have a "failure" of some sort staring you in the face every day. (Most of the failures staring me in the face are my own contributions to the project. For example, I had the bright idea of using paneling instead of painting walls - big mistake. I had the bright idea of using drawers instead of base cabinets in the kitchen - drawers are REALLY hard to get right.)
• Building a tiny home IS really cheap. But you should only try it if you meet the following criteria:
• You have some land
• The municipality/county in which your land is located allows tiny homes. Otherwise, you'll waste a lot of time filing paperwork and getting variances without any guarantee you'll be successful.
• You have a lot of cash
• OR, you have good credit and VERY low credit card balances.
• You have a lot of patience (and emotional resilience) dealing with setbacks and weather delays.
• You have a huge desire for spending your evenings reading a bunch of instructions, construction code and how-to information. Because, let me tell ya', all that previous, hands-on work experience only gets you so far. The second you begin working on an unfamiliar installation such as electrical feeds or on-demand water heaters, all your hands-on work experience goes out the window and it's time to hit the books.
• You have a huge desire to do NOTHING EXCEPT work on your house during your spare time for about a year or more.

Now that I have the disclaimers out of the way, continue to the next post.