Tiny House With Land For Sale Vermont – Colby and Aria used to be vanlifters, but now own over 14 acres of woodland in Vermont, plus their own DIY tiny house off the grid (they even get water from their own streams).
Their 360 square foot home is heated with wood they cut themselves and has an amazing solar energy system that powers their home. THOW’s interior feels like a cozy log cabin, and they dedicated 15 feet of the house to their living quarters.
Tiny House With Land For Sale Vermont
Aria teaches and Colby is a wedding photographer (@anamericanroadstory) and they also rent space on their property to campers through Hipcamp. We got to interview Colby about the build, his land buying choices, and what he loves about living small. Check it out at the end of the post!
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We live in rural Vernon, Vermont, about 15 minutes from Brattleboro, a relatively large state city.
Aria is a preschool teacher and I am a wedding videographer. We are also entrepreneurs with Hipcamp, we launched Home Elsewhere this summer. For those who don’t know, Hipcamp is basically an Airbnb for camping, opening up more private places for people around the world to go camping. Link to our Hipcamp site https://www.hipcamp.com/discover/vermont/elsewhere-homestead
I opened vanlife in 2014 before we downsized. Inspired by the possibilities of true adventure and traveling like Jack Kerouac, I bought a battered 1975 VW bus, named it Dharma, fixed it up, built it up, and hit the road.
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I’ve vanlifed twice, once with my friend Anthony and his Sedona van, and the second time in 2017 with my partner, Aria, for six months. It was on that last trip that Aria and I started talking about what we wanted to do when we got back home to New England. A big motivating factor was the financial aspect of ‘small living’, rent was always a drain on our income, we wanted to beat the debt system in this country and really own our time!
That’s a good question. I think it was because of the time I spent in the Vanlife community that I paved the way for alternative homes in 2014. At a certain point, when you look at “homes on wheels,” the two communities begin to blend. But I do know for a fact that I went to the Brattleboro Tiny House Festival in 2015 (long before I moved here) and that was probably the first time I ever set foot in a tiny house on wheels.
How did you get your tiny house? Can you share how much it costs? Have you done any repairs?
Our tiny house is completely DIY. I started construction in May 2018 with the purchase of our trailer, and in September 2019 we officially moved it to where we bought it in Vermont! It’s still a work in progress, but I’m slowly but surely working on it. In fact, I would like to say that 95 percent of the construction was done by me. Since I’m a freelance wedding videographer, when I’m not editing, I have Monday-Thursday off, so I can spend it at home three to five days a week. My stepfather would help me from time to time, especially when I got stuck on something, which was very important. But he is a big believer in learning and even inventing by doing things on his own. And on weekends, when I wasn’t at work, Aria would sometimes help for an hour or two after work. He even used a week off to work with me for seven days.
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What’s important to our story is that my mom and stepdad let us build a house on their driveway, and we rented a small apartment 40 minutes away in Keene, so we started commuting to and from home. However, without this parking lot, I don’t know how we would do it.
In the end, the house and solar rig cost us $47,000. Our house is paid for by four years of rent.
Our rent was $775/month, which included about $60/month for heat/electricity, and then $300/month for parking for a year, making $10,320/year for our apartment.
Our utilities are pretty low right now, about $150 a year for propane. We cut wood for the stove ourselves, and we bring most of our water from the spring. Sometimes we fill our jugs at a local co-op for $2 per 5 gallons, so we might spend $200 a year on water. Needless to say, we have an off-grid solar power system for electricity and a composting toilet for our waste. Buying solar energy is expensive, but it supports our values of going green and it is worth the investment. In total, we save about 10 thousand tenge per year on rent, which makes us happy!
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At first we thought we would find a tiny house community or a progressive minded farmer who would let us work instead of a place to put it. But, to be honest, the thought of not having a place of my own started to annoy me. When you live the vanlife, a lot of time is spent looking for a place to park, and many times it’s not legal. The more we thought about it, the more it seemed that buying our own land would fit our needs and be a good financial investment in the long run. We hated the idea of paying rent to put the house up because the goal of the downsizing was to keep the rent down!
We knew we wanted to live in Vermont, a state with lots of liberal people and progressive politics, including a long history of “back-to-the-land” hippies and longtime farmers, a duality we really appreciated. Windham County in Southeast VT was where Aria worked and is still very close to the New England areas where I shoot most of my weddings. From there it was about finding an affordable lot with zoning codes that would allow for our tiny house. Vernon had a piece of wooded land in the hills on the outskirts of town that was priced at $65,000 for 14½ acres. We loved the small mountainous area it is located in and the unique landscape. After about ten visits, we learned its value and price. We negotiated the deal down to $55k with the sellers.
Interesting! As I said before, I traveled a lot, I had to live in different places. I lived in Los Angeles after high school and I hated it. Moved to Portland Maine, did vanlife a few times. There was an explosion in the field. I visited my parents’ house three times. I did a lot of searching before I got back on my feet, but I feel like I’m a better person for it. To be honest, I think this is just part of the cushioning journey of having to pay off about 75k of college loans after graduation. I’m done with it, and a lot of it has to do with being at home or even on the bus and cutting my expenses down to a very thin margin and spending almost every paycheck on credit or after spending. house construction.
Somehow I miss Vanlife, but that door can always be opened for me again. I know Aria misses it too, so I think we’ll be on the road again one day. It would be nice to know we have a home to come back to, and I think it’s a common sentiment among rubber vagabonds: “One day I want my little house, where I can spend all my time.” I rest from traveling, but where I can rest without ever thinking about the road.’
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The financial benefits are enormous. It also opened the door for us to start a camping business as well as many more self-sustaining projects that we had in mind. When covid hit, Aria took up beekeeping, we started a big garden together, and when we’re ready to plant our roots a little deeper, I’m slowly moving into a barn to keep chickens and a few dairy goats. A larger space opens up. We could not do all this if we lived as renters in the city. I love walking out my front door and walking into the woods within twenty seconds. our land