They went from vanlife to a lovely DIY Tiny House

Anna and Bryn are the makers and creators of the gorgeous Vanisle Tiny House. Very early into their relationship the couple started living in a van - both being fans of alternative living, outdoors and camping. And what's the key to spending more time outdoors? Living tiny!
After taking the decision of transitioning from Vanlife into Tiny House life, their mission was to find a spot to build their new home on. They posted their request on Facebook and - bing - within half an hour the owners of their current property, good friends, reached out to them.

It took an entire summer planning, saving money and designing the whole house on Vancouver Island. Bryn invested more time into having their future home properly sealed, Vancouver Island being a very wet spot. Eventually, and with a lot of help from people around, the built went smooth and got finalized after a whole winter of working on it. The aim of the cost was at $24K but it ended up being around $30K.
There was just one person on the island that the couple could find a trailer from, which is why they ended up buying a new and not an old one. Bryn didn't have a lot of experience in building before, but a couple of years before he built out a bus with a friend of his and found the built of the Tiny House to be much smoother, working with squared surfaces instead of curved and awkward shapes as in a van.

The couple's Tiny House is 20 feet long and 13,4 foot high by 8,5 wide. The pitch roof sheds snow decently well and costed $700. A must for the region they live in was a water and ice shield underlayment, thanks to which no water has ever leaked through. Wanting to use as much of local wood as possible in their built, Anna and Bryn used light red cedar shakes and in addition, the metal siding has been recycled from a building that was torn down in town. The whole house probably contains 10 to 15 percent of recycled materials, according to Bryn's guess.

The whole electricity of the house runs under 15 AMPs. The pump, lighting and composting toilet run on 12 VOLT and the plan is to eventually put some solar panels onto the house. Both their water heater and stove run on propane, using up approximately a 20 pound tank per month. The water gets into the house through a simple RV inlet on the outside of the house.

Inside, Bryn designed the whole space according to how they would move around, movement being mostly important in the kitchen and on the stairs up. He also built a lot of the cabinetry himself, with a nice burlap material which gives a good air flow to whatever is stored inside it. Their first source of heat comes from a small heater, which they got for $200. It lets you set the temperature but doesn't come with a thermostat, which is why Bryn installed an additional one. In winter, the heater keeps the temperature from going below 15 degrees and Anna and Bryn light up their Cubic Mini Grizzly stove whenever they are home.

A foldable desk from IKEA saves a lot of space but makes it possible for the couple to work properly on the laptop if needed. A tricky thing to find was a sofa that would fit exactly into their living room, which they ended up finding on sale at The Brick and also turns into a guest bed with some storage underneath. The tiny loft right above the sofa also serves as a storage for all of their camping gear. The whole back wall is made out of old fence boards which they ran through a planer and sealed. It all turned out as they wanted: a cozy wood cabin vibe with different wood colors.

There is a beautiful L-shaped kitchen and wooden countertop sets the barrier between living room and kitchen and serves as a eating table, too. Getting the sink from Amazon and the faucet from Facebook Marketplace, really everything in the house is collected from all sort of places. Underneath the sink they store about 120 liters of water, which sometimes gets used up in one single they. Eventually, Bryn wants to do a rainwater collection.
A nice custom barn door slides open and leads from the kitchen directly into the bathroom. It is only 3.5x4 feet big, has a simple shower setup with sheet metal siding and a plastic shower base from Amazon, plus their composting toilet from Nature's Head.

Each step that leads up to the loft aka. bedroom serves as a shelf. Upstairs, beside the bed, they installed a box fan from Amazon into the window which runs all the time and keeps the sleeping area cooler than the rest of the house. Because they put the main entrance door to the side and the loft right above it, they were only able to drop the floor to the height of the door, which is one thing that Bryn would have changed with a custom door if he could, to get more space above his head.

Bryns biggest tip for anyone nervous about trying to start a Tiny House built: "Building a house like this is learning a thousand little steps, more than learning some big mountainous objective of building a house. It's more about what technique to use today to get this certain part of the job done. If you break it down like that and just slowly tinker away at each problem, it'll all add up to a thousand new skills that you'll get, but if you just do it one at a time, it's actually pretty simple.

And that goes for life, you don't bite off something more than you can chew, you slowly work away at something and before you know it, you've made a long journey and you're a lot further away from where you've started. It's better to think like this than giving up on any kind of dream because you think it's too big for you or out of reach. Go for it and take your time, give yourself grace to make mistakes and slowly learn things."