I wanted to take a minute to introduce the players in this crazy life we have embarked on. To start, my name is John and in 2019 I pitched the idea to my wife, Angel, that we should build a tiny house. In an incredible lapse in judgement she took me seriously and let me show her all of the cool things that we could do with a tiny house. After a couple of months of watching YouTube videos and using her birthday as an excuse to take her to a tiny house on Airbnb, she said YES!!
So that is a quick backstory but that isn’t why we are here. As I said, my name is John. I am a full time data specialist and audit liaison for a regional bank in the Midwest. When we bought our house in 2011 I decided that I wanted to build bookshelves in our house so I started watching YouTube to learn some basics and a few years later I built those bookshelves and converted our lowest floor into a library.
I worked on enhancing my woodworking skills over the next few years and in 2018 I started a raised planted bed business. I made cedar flower beds in my garage and sold them in the spring to the Columbus area. I made those planter beds in 2018 and 2019 at a reasonable rate but 2020 changed the game. Everyone and their brother wanted a planter so I went into manufacturing mode.
By the end of the season (July-ish) I had made over 1,000 planters, bought every cedar board at 4 local Home Depots, hired part time help, and (most importantly) made enough to pay off all of our debts and buy a trailer. The COVID pandemic was detrimental to almost everyone in the world but we managed to be in the right place at the right time and really made lemonade from the lemons.
With that major change in financial situation we decided that it was time to actually do this and make the jump into tiny living. I signed up for a tiny house building class with Dan of TinyHomeBuilders.com and ventured down to an adventurous weekend outside Atlanta where I got to see the trailers in person and meet with some like minded people.
When I came back up we decided what trailer we were going to order and I went to talk to the city about building it in my driveway. We lived in a small town with neighbors that we frequently had issues with so I wanted to get all my ducks in a row before I spent 10k on a trailer for our house.
What was to follow that simple request was an insane series of small town employee gaffs, legal battles, and really angry neighbors. I will write about that at another time but it took us about 6 months of fighting with the city before we got the OK to start building.
On May 20th, our trailer finally arrived and I couldn’t wait to get started with the build. There were a SIGNIFICANT amount of snags and learning opportunities but I will be writing about some of the things that I learned on the build here as I am able to. We also plan to do some write ups of where we are traveling to and what we are doing so if you are interested in that then be sure to check back often.
Thanks so much for reading and I hope to see you all soon!!