Build My Own Tiny Home

By | January 18, 2025

Build My Own Tiny Home – It was in the winter of 2017 that I started getting excited about tiny houses and shelters. The thought of building my own house on wheels kept me up at night. I spent my days dreaming up ideas and sketching class drawings on the back of my notebooks. As a full-time student at Western Washington University while working to pay my rent, the home dream felt impossible to achieve.

It wasn’t until I found a small trailer for sale on Craigslist that I realized my dream had come true. With the affordable price of a used 12×7 trailer, I told myself I would come up with the ultimate style to build out a tiny house.

Build My Own Tiny Home

After a lot of research on Craiglist, I found a place to put my trailer and started bringing my dream home. Countless hours were spent puzzling over how I could afford the materials needed to build my house. I spent most of my free time driving around the alleys looking for pallets and scraps of wood and going to the dump to admire the huge pile of wood. Every time I would end up with a piece of meat.

Tumbleweed Construction Video: The Complete Resource To Building Your Tiny House

A friend suggested that I go to the Re store to find things I like and when I did it was like I hit the jackpot! Most of the items I used for the final build were found at the RE store, except for the siding and roof. The RE store became a place where I could use my creativity to imagine different uses for things that would otherwise go to the landfill. My little house began to take shape like a saved beauty.

After about six months of construction, I finished my little house. Without the RE store, I would never have been able to build my dream home much less. As a student who understands the burden of high rents in the Bellingham area, it is my goal to help empower and inspire others to take the initiative to build a lifeline!

We make it easy to stay up to date with the latest DIY tips, how-tos, stories, workshops, events, sales and great items from the RE Store!

Get an overview of our latest products, stay up to date with store news and receive free resources. Sign up for our monthly e-newsletter below. Building a small house in Australia is not easy, but it is possible. My name is Benjamin Bailey-Webb, and I build a small house. This is my story, and the lessons I’ve learned along the way.

Tiny House Listings: Tiny Houses For Sale And Rent

My partner and I have been “living small” for about 4 years now. Our room is known as the Nook. The Nook is located on a one hectare site on the eastern edge of Gariwerd (Grampians National Park) and approximately 9 km from the tourist town of Hall Gap, Victoria.

I grew up on a large lot, on top of a hill that surrounded our current block. I was brought up in a very humble way – Mother was an art / art teacher and father was a retired farmer. Mom and dad built 4 individual houses made of recycled materials on the site. Each hut was unique and only one type of material was used to create the structure – redgum logs, red bricks, mud and stone. We used an old dairy shed as our workshop, which I used during the construction of the Nook. I was always working in the big shed doing things with my father for the nurses, or myself doing anything I could dream of, or in my mother’s painting and design studio. It was an education that really encouraged my imagination and freedom of creative expression. We didn’t have much money, but we were very rich in production, something I was always very grateful for.

Having an open and creative mind is one of your greatest tools for small house design and construction.

When my parents separated, they also divided the building in half and lived as neighbors, leaving our small 2 acre block covering the rest of the house. After high school I moved to Geelong for university. I tried architecture and art, but I think I was caught in the wild that was Jon Hamm in Mad Men, I had this idea that the advertising industry was for me and so I started working in an agency in Melbourne.

Stunning Tiny Homes That Will Inspirere You To Downsize

In a few years though I had two goals: 1) travel the world and 2) build a house, both before I became 30. Therefore, I quit my job, and in a week I stopped living. from my office on South Melbourne, looking out across the red sands of the Pilbara landscape, working on a power plant. This is when everything changed for me, when I started emailing with my father – the relationship became the key to building our little house.

After a few years as a FIFO worker, I spent 19 months traveling in Asia, Europe and North America, finally arriving in the UK. With a second goal that seemed unattainable but bursting with inspiration to build, I began to design a small living room on the block of the house. I would email dad the latest ideas for his ideas and then jump into my free version of Sketchup, simplifying the design process. It wasn’t until sometime during this routine repeated every day, the YouTube algorithm spit out a recommendation my way – small house.

At first, my design ideas were limited to small structures due to budget constraints, however, after playing small videos at home my perspective on small living spaces changed, and I embraced the opportunities that came with it. What I needed now was a way to pay for this idea – I knew that $30K in my savings was enough to get me through the planning stage and then put the plate, I just needed more money and a job that was flexible at a different pay level. on everything that moves on the concrete.

The father sent me an email the other day with a proposal – he would lend me a significant part of his retirement savings to buy a block and also to help with the payment of the construction of a house. My mother has been patiently holding a block of land for me for a few years now. At the end of 2017, my partner and I returned to Australia. I spent the next six months working on the permit documents which included the owner’s building license and signature, the final location and drawings of the residence, the electrical compliance document, the signed engineering report for the slab and truss, the wildfire . management report, comprehensive soil testing and reporting, waste management plan and implementation.

This Modern Tiny House Comes With Electricity, Heat, And Water

In the early summer of 2018, a friend of mine went out with me to do a full digital overhaul of ours. During this writing period, a friend of mine, Pricey, a designer, drew up the final pieces of art to go along with some of the printed designs and reports that were now more than my usual desk capacity could handle.

I did the engineering and got the permit application pushed through the council – it was approved on time and without any amendments. I have already hired a handyman and a plumber to help make the concrete slab. We quickly cut the area of ​​the mountain and began the work. The construction supervisor checked everything, gave the go ahead and we installed the slab.

The next step was to lay the bricks. My first builder fell just months before it was needed. While thinking about how my first mistake happened at the beginning of the project, Dad called and found someone to call. Scared, I picked up the phone and called Tim. To my surprise, he was willing and able to start right away.

Tim came out, inspected the work, looked at the 120-year-old bricks with an air of concern and said the standard rate. The next month we worked in cold weather. At the end of the month, Tim and I created three walls in an amazing, very deep and completely different way, from a group of handmade bricks, where no brick was ever the same. The brick walls were now finished.

If I Could Provide You An Opportunity To Thrive; To Lift Your Life, Family, Or Town Up From Hard Times To Grow In Unity…

One of the first times I demonstrated this power was when I used it to create a wooden list in my 3D plans. Before I started building, I built a house from scratch six times in Sketchup, each time going down and down the level of detail. When I was ready to build the beams for the upper house, I created the whole frame structure in CAD and so I could come up with a perfect cut plan to line up the beams.

While the demand for wood was