This Tiny House is unlike anything you have seen

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Joe built this special Tiny Home all on his own. It started with one vision that he pursued step by step, until he manifested what he had in mind. “It’s pretty awesome!”, he says. Before he started on this project, he was finishing up a home in central Oregon. He was going to have it paid off through Bed and Breakfast, but eventually it was too little and too late, so he ended up losing the place. A friend sold him an old RV for only 350$ that had been through the mill, but it ran and hence started a new project.

He got the RV stay on a friend’s property and started tearing it apart while living in it and working on it section by section. It took him about one year to get the main part done – three years, 5K in materials and a lot of time and work to have it all finished. He now has it stationed in Southern Oregon and lives in it with his bird Herman.

To be able to realize this project, Joe had to change a lot of things to satisfy the rules. He used some materials in a way he had never seen them used before, which was a little nerve wracking at first. The roof construction is covered by aluminium, which makes a great skin as it is very strong and durable and not that expensive. He made a pointed front end so that in case of a collision on the road, the V-shape would veer off one another. Unlike the rest of the home, the front end has a steel frame, anchored on top on what was the old bumper. Most of the windows of the home were the ones that were already in the vehicle and that Joe saved and reused. He especially loves the round windows that make it feel very cozy inside. He salvaged the frame around it – an old one he had kept since 1980, having it rusting underneath some dirt and keeping it all these years, thinking that he would use it one day. “There it is!”

All the wood in the interior – floor, kitchen, cupboards – are salvaged by Joe himself. He got it from mills and leftovers from homes he had built and did a lot of milling and fussing. The new refrigerator is a piece he says to currently be in love with: “It’s probably the most important thing that modern technology has come up with!”. There is no air conditioning in the home and he heats it solely with a wood stove. The porcelain RV toilet flushes with a regular hose that is connected to a water tank holding 30 gallons of water, below the sink. The kitchen stove was camp stove which’s steel legs he cut off, fitting it in a cabinet. A perfectly good stove for only 100 bucks.

His home’s talisman: a human sized Frankenstein figure. After one Halloween, he got it from a home depot for 75$. Even after so much time being there, the sounds the monster makes still make Joe flinch. Another gem he is proud of is his old piano, built in 1912 by the company that today is Yamaha. He took piano lessons at the age of 40 for ten years and claims that it is never too late to learn anything!
To get up to his bed, Joe uses a bit of a scary ladder. “Some people would have a handle or something”, he says, “but I’m just really disciplined. I know the tricks and just grab the right spots!”. It's a really nice spacious bed and at night he can see all the stars though the window. 

If you imagine the tempered glass in the same color that the inside walls are painted with, you can see post and beam construction. It is basically a basic construction that just doesn’t look like one. What Joe would advise people: “No matter what you're building, do something, at least one thing, that is unusual. It increases the imagination and the intimacy of having something that is unusual, not just another standard throw-together-house.”