7 Steps To Start Building Your Luxury Tiny Home
It seems as if it was just yesterday that we drove up to Pennsylvania from Central Florida to pick up our custom tiny home trailer. It was October of 2022 to be exact. If I only knew then what I know now about tiny home building! We knew that the road ahead would be rough, but we had no idea how many ups and downs we would have. And I’m not talking about the ride in our Ford F150 pulling a 2500 pound trailer taking I-95 back south to Florida. That’s a story to share over a glass of rosé another time.
I wish I knew these seven tips I’m about to share with you. You can get started building your own tiny home dream with some of these tips in your back pocket.
We’re going to discuss:
1) Getting your family to agree or making sure a tiny home is the right fit for you
2) The importance of making a budget
3) Figuring out financing
4) Knowing where you’re going to build
5) Planning how long your build will take
6) Doing your research
7) Being ready to work your bum off, but give yourself grace
So let’s get into it!
First, you have to get your family to agree.
Jason and I with our Beagleman Bessy heading out of our
New England apartment
The first time I heard about tiny homes was from my friend Syringa in 2014. I thought there was no way we could do that! No way my 6’ hubby would agree to live in something that small. I didn’t even think about it again until about 2018 when I started watching tiny home videos on YouTube and Tiny House Nation on TV. I started to dream of how cool it would be to live in a moveable tiny house. I would watch the shows with my husband, Jason, and although he was against the idea in the beginning, he started to like the idea of getting out of the rent trap. We always strived to live small and simply. In my single days, I lived in the mountains of Peru in a small apartment with a bunch of other girls. Then, when we got married, our first apartment was a 400 sq foot studio. We had no trouble living in a tiny footprint. The problem, we thought, was how my tall husband would be able to get up and sleep in a loft of a tiny house that was only 8.5’ wide and 13’ tall.
I finally got Jason on the tiny house bandwagon (or should I say “trailer”?) in 2022. At the time of starting our tiny home journey, we were living in a 600’ sq apartment in Western Massachusetts. After 8 years of living in New England, our family situation down in Florida was changing for the worse. We knew we needed to make the move back down to support our family. The best way to get a stable living situation within our circumstances was to DIY our own tiny home. Of course, we estimated that we would be able to do it for about the same amount of money and time as our friends who had done their DIY build. We were dead wrong. It took us three times as long and cost us about twice as much.
The second step is to make a budget.
In a nutshell, our friends Char & Tony of TinyHomiez.com, who are professional builders, built their gorgeous tiny home in 2017 for around $35,000.
Check out their tiny home pictures here.
In 2022, we purchased their plans and made a budget we thought was generous of $50,000.
We knew the trailer would be the biggest chunk of our budget. After a lot of research, we decided that the best thing to do is to get a brand new, well made, professionally built trailer, since that is the foundation of the home. We didn’t want to skimp and get a used trailer that was not made to hold the weight of the home we wanted to build.
We tried the best we could to budget the rest of the necessary materials for our DIY tiny home. Find out more about the true cost of a tiny house in my other post:
How Much Does It Cost To Build Your Own Tiny Home?
You can learn how to build your own tiny home for less than $100,000 by signing up with Tiny House University. If you click here, you will be able to sign up for the course coming soon to a device near you! The Tiny House University is the #1 online educational platform for all those who aspire to live in a tiny house. Whether you want to DIY, hire a builder, or buy a tiny home, their courses and digital resources are designed to guide you throughout the process.
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The third step is to figure out how you’re going to finance it.
We had saved up about $10,000 to get our trailer to begin our build. The sad reality is that finding tiny home loans is very difficult. There might be some more lending options today, but just two years ago it was almost nonexistent. So we planned on borrowing the rest of the funds through bank loans, credit cards, or from family.
It would be an understatement to say that we have very generous family and friends. Thanks to their help financially along with working as much as we could along the way, we’ve been able to complete our tiny home build. We can definitely say that paying off our tiny house build loans will be much easier than had we gone with a traditional build.
The fourth tip is to find a build site for your tiny home.
We went back and forth on the idea of building it in the backyard of Jason’s parents’ house. It didn’t seem like the best plan for a lot of reasons, one being, the distance between their house and the neighbor’s fence. How would we get it out of the backyard once it was built? When we got back to Florida, we actually went outside and measured the distance of the fence and the height of the tree that would be in the way. Our home is 28 feet long by 8.5 feet wide by 13 feet high. We knew we didn’t want to mess with navigating a house that could weigh about 20,000 pounds through his parent’s house and trees.
More pictures and stories on farm life coming soon!
Thankfully, we found a connection with a friend on a huge property who generously offered us a place to build. Not only did they have the space on their 10 acre property, but they also provided access to water, power and an air compressor. Also, these fabulous friends allowed us the use of their skid steer to level the land where we would be putting our trailer. They said the only thing in our way on that piece of land would be some cows, a donkey, and a couple of goats. They even made sure we were under trees during construction. A true blessing in Florida during the summer months. We couldn’t have asked for a better place for our tiny construction project!
The fifth step is to plan how long the build will take.
After purchasing build plans in May of 2022, we planned on starting our build once we got to Florida. I thought we could build our home in 3-6 months since we had the TinyHomiez’ plans and friends with building experience willing to help. Jason and I had never built anything of this scale before. Jason has a background in horticulture, concrete pumping, window cleaning, painting and a lot of other things, but building a home from the “trailer” up was not one of them. I grew up helping my dad build and install kitchen and bathroom cabinets. I spent time around construction projects, but also had never done a project of this size before.
We were being very optimistic when we thought we could complete it in 6 months!
With the generous help of our friends and family, we were able to get the walls up and the house completely framed in three months! We didn’t work every day either. We have a full time volunteer work that we do each week which keeps us super busy as it is. We thought the build would be smooth sailing once the walls were up. We were wrong again. Optimism has gotten us through this entire building process, so it hasn’t been terrible. Our friends do say that it would be better to have realistic expectations. #Realisticexpectations. That hasn’t always been our forte though.
Once we got our house, Lil’ Bitty, framed, there was a lot more learning and executing needed. Every single step was new for us. Every single step took time to learn before we could actually continue to build. Every single step was not easy. Nothing was easy. But it was absolutely worth it!
The sixth tip I have is to do research and find other people that have been done it before.
Another important step was navigating all of the information out on the Internet to see what would pertain to our tiny home build. We found a ton of helpful YouTube creators and videos, along with some not so helpful. We read books, watched workshops, listened to podcasts and learned so much! I wish I could have had a concise guide on which videos to watch to find exactly what I was looking for. It would have saved me dozens and dozens of hours! That’s why I’m so excited to give you a FREE Resource Guide with my top 7 favorite videos and resources that we used to complete our luxury tiny home build.
All you have to do is subscribe to our newsletter and you’ll be directed to this very special FREE Resource Reference Guide with links to get started on your build planning now! Click Join Now to subscribe!
The last step is to be ready to work your bum off, but give yourself grace!
The final tip I’ll give you today is a really important one, if not the most important. Remember that you’re not perfect, and you’re going to make mistakes. Any DIYer knows that there are constant ups and downs in creating. The same holds true for building your own moveable tiny house. We knew that building our tiny home dream would be a struggle. But no one could have told us exactly how much work it was going to take. Many professional home builders will agree that building a tiny home is even more difficult than a regular or large sized home. There are so many special and custom designs that have to be included in the build. This makes it incredibly challenging to work around. The tiny space may be liveable, but working in it while building is not exactly a piece of cake. So be ready to work your bum off! Have fun while building though. Make sure you bring your sense of humor, because you’ll need it to laugh off all of those mistakes you’ll make. When you’re sitting down in your beautiful DIY tiny home, nothing beats the satisfaction of knowing that you built that!
