Our Time in the Tiny House has Finally Come to an End.
Aimee and I have lived in the tiny house for two full years now and it has served us well. When we built the tiny house, we never intended to live in it long term, the plan was always to use the house as a stepping stone to the bigger picture. Finding out that we were expecting twins sort of threw a wrench into our strategy. We thought that we could manage one baby in the tiny house, and I think we could have, but two babies is hard no matter what your living situation looks like.
Rent in the Edmonton area is outrageous, the top floor of a house or a half duplex can easily fetch $1500 to $1700 a month and that doesn't even include utilities. With a cost of living this high is there any wonder why we were having trouble saving for our dream property?
We reasoned that, if we lived in the tiny house for at least two years we would have paid for the cost of building it which was around $30,000 CAD. Having met this goal, we now basically own a tiny house that paid for itself but it is time to move on.
We Moved in with Aimee's Parents
The main motivation was to get some extra help with child care. Aimee's Dad works seasonally and her mom cut her hours back to part time when the twins arrived so she could help out the first year. Their availability means Aimee has an extra set or two of hands when I am at work during the day which goes a long way towards reducing her stress level. She has even been able to start taking on a few graphic design projects again which will help us have a bit more funds for the house build this summer.
The extra room is nice too. Our space was just getting a little too tight in the tiny house, especially when we're confined by snow and cold weather. Originally, we had the babies sharing one bassinet in the bedroom loft with us. They were so tiny! When they outgrew that we had each one in their own separate bassinet.
Once they started moving around more though we didn't feel safe with them up in the loft with us. We rearranged the layout of the living area to incorporate a full size crib for them to share. The crib taking up so much floor space had the effect of turning the house design into one long, narrow hallway which was something we tried to avoid when we built the house.
One idea that crossed our minds was to use the second loft as a baby jail. I would enclose the space with lattice and a gate so the babies would be contained and out of the way. However, the thought of accidently leaving the gate unlatched while in an overtired and distracted state and having a baby fall five feet onto a hard wooden floor nixed that idea pretty quickly for me.
The babies have also been crawling for over a month now, well it started as an army crawl but anyway... That extra mobility has meant we had to make some modifications to the tiny house. I installed pull out gates at each end of the main living area so they wouldn't be able to get to the stairs. While the gates made the tiny house baby safe again, it was getting tiresome to constantly have to step over them.
So, What is the Plan Now?
We are going to stay with Aimee's parents until the new house is ready to move into. The house doesn't necessarily need to be completely finished, just far enough along that we can comfortably stay in it. We may use a fifth wheel to stay out on the property during parts of the build.
Once the large house is quite a ways along, we will also move the tiny house out to the property. For those of you who are wondering why we haven't moved the tiny house to the property yet, the main reason is because I don't want to attract unwanted attention. A tiny house on a completely undeveloped piece of land is a great way to attract the attention of a county bylaw enforcement officer.
The county has limits on how long you can "camp" on your own land. Ridiculous, I know, but that is the world we live in these days. Once we have a regular house up we can always tell them we aren't using the tiny house or we are using it only occasionally for guests which would fall under camping use.
As I mentioned earlier in this post, the tiny house has basically paid for itself. We will have to decide what we want to do with it. We can keep it as a guest house, use it as a cabin on a future recreational property or sell it and recoup our investment.
Life is about learning and tiny house living has taught us a lot about ourselves, our relationship with each other and how we want to live in the future. It certainly taught us that we don't need as many physical possessions as we thought we did. We've also learned that we can live comfortably in 200sqft. Just maybe not with twins!
