SINGLE MOTHER Builds TINY HOUSE to Create RETIREMENT PLAN
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According to Michelle, her life has been a series of unfortunate events. She has been married twice and divorced twice, she has built two houses and she lost both of them in the carnage of her divorces. So she’s been a single mom for 13 years and basically living paycheck to paycheck. Her kids were getting older and they're getting ready to go off to college and do their thing, so she’s looking forward to retirement, but she didn’t have any retirement money or a retirement plan. So she had to really start looking at and thinking about her life in the future from an entirely different perspective.
She got involved in the tiny house movement originally just to build a tiny house that no one could take away. She figured doing it the same way she did the first two times wasn't working out really well, so she wanted to do something entirely different. So she built her first house, this house, basically using cash and sponsorships to make sure that she has a paid-for nice comfortable house when she retires. Now she’s building a few more tiny houses that she looks forward to renting them out on Airbnb, Try It Tiny or other VRBO kind of platforms to create some income, so that's next.
Her house is 8.5 feet wide by 24 feet long and she built it with some help from a few contractors and friends, but mostly herself in the driveway of her rental. By far her favorite room in the tiny house is her kitchen. She thinks that most people sacrifice their kitchen when they go tiny and she wants to show everybody that you can have a really cool and stylish kitchen. All of her appliances are vintage, from a time period ranging the 1940s to the 1950s. It took her two years to collect and refurbish the collection, It truly was a labor of love. Her design theme is modern nostalgia and she thinks she really accomplished it. She does a ton of cooking and a ton of entertaining for a number of guests. Her tile wall, if you follow her blog, you'll remember that it actually sent her to therapy, and there's a little tile up there right on the wall that is a little skew, so she named it ’Little Bastard’.
One of the things she would do differently would be these stairs. Although she loved these stairs, as they were really designed from the perspective that she wanted them to be minimally invasive to the space while at the same time remaining architecturally striking. Underneath of the stairs is the cat box which is a really nice place to hide it as well. But, one of the biggest critiques she gets from most people is how narrow they are. So, out of all the mistakes she actually made, she thinks that her stairs would probably count because if she had to do it over again she might make them a little more wide, but she loves them anyway.
One of the things that she did really differently from most people is she actually adjusted the ceiling height of the loft according to where she'd be spending the most time. Her kitchen has a pretty high ceiling because the guest loft is over the kitchen, and so she doesn't spend a lot of time in the guest loft so she wanted the actual space to be in the kitchen. Conversely she spends way more time in her bedroom than she actually does in the bathroom. Because of this, the main loft actually has about four more inches of head room than the guests loft does. Her quilt is really really a special memory for her. Her grandmother died just prior to planning the tiny house build and she inherited the entire contents of her entire sewing room. This quilt is actually made from all the fabrics that her grandmother had given her when she died.
When you live in a tiny space, utilization of vertical space is actually way more important than utilization of horizontal space. People that fill horizontal space actually creates clutter, but when you create intentional storage in a vertical space you create architectural interest. One of the things that she doesn't like about most tiny houses is they don't have real furniture. People take boxes and they put cushions on top of them and they call them couches. And so one of the things she wanted to create when she created the living room was a proper living room. Living room chairs and an ottoman and a bedside table and an entertainment center. She’s very proud of the space, It's very comfortable and it's also very functional.
Another myth in the tiny house movement is that you have to sacrifice and downsize like a ton, but the truth is you can do some really cool stuff when it comes to built-in cabinets and other normally unutilized space. She's very much a girl. She has like 200 pairs of earrings and necklaces. She has tons of clothes, tons of shoes. So there's only certain things that she was willing to sacrifice, and being a girl was definitely not one of them.
Like a lot of tiny housers, in order to stay off grid and in order to live a more sustainable life they embrace composting toilets and her favorite by far is Nature's Head. The toilet separates the liquid wastes from the solids. Out back of the tiny house she has a 25 gallon garbage can. In the bottom of the garbage can she has little teeny tiny holes that are drilled all the way around. She fills the garbage can up with 24 gallons of water, which she uses to dilute 1 gallon of the liquid waste produced by the toilet. This diluted solution leaks down through the holes down through the gravel and actually returns to the ground water itself. The solid is handled by local garbage removal, since her land host wasn’t comfortable with letting it compost on site.
She had to finance her tiny house in a way that actually did not consume any of her paycheck to paycheck existence. She had to create really really creative ways to finance her tiny house. First thing she did was she actually got an old vintage RV from a neighbor for free. she put about $700 into it and she turned around and she sold it for $3,700. She made an ombre dresser that she got for free on Craigslist and she sold it for $325. Just all kinds of separate little things that would help. And then she ventured on the whole sponsorship thing. Her advice however for sponsorships is you don't have to get twenty two corporate sponsors. You can get a very very simple sponsorship for a sink or for a toilet or for flooring or for siding. Whatever it is that you really feel either passionate about or you feel comfortable advocating and promoting.
She really feels like she found her people. She really feels like she found a group of people that get her and that's really rare. She has never really had a sense of home. She grew up in foster care, her birth parents were divorced when she was four years old. She went into foster care as a toddler. She was adopted as a teen and then left that house when she was 18 and she’s now estranged from her adoptive family. But now with the tiny house, she feels like she’s a little more rooted and can’t me more thrilled to have a space that has been designed just for her.
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