It was 2007 when we bought 15 acres in Western North Carolina. We knew we wanted to build something sustainable at the time, but we hadn’t yet envisioned how. Over the next year, we researched several options. Then a friend showed us tiny houses, and we knew exactly what we needed to do.
Except…we didn’t.
Aside from home improvement projects, neither Matt nor I had ever built anything on our own. But starting with a 120-square-foot house seemed doable.
Building a tiny house isn’t easy, but anyone can do it if they put their mind to it. We came up in the heart of the DIY tiny home movement, and at that time, we had a lot of virtual support from others around the country doing the same thing.
While it’s been 10 years since we finished building our tiny home, here are some things we learned along the way.
Buy The Right Tools
The first step was knowing how to buy the right tools. You’ll need tools you’d typically have around the house, like a drill, and more specialized tools like table saws. We were attempting to build our tiny house on a budget, but tools aren’t things for cutting corners. And our build had the added challenge of being off-grid, so we needed to use primarily rechargeable battery-powered tools. We invested in a Honda generator for tools that required more power.
In the end, we chose mostly Ryobi products for the smaller tools. We did buy a compound miter saw, and a table saw from Harbor Freight which makes good stuff but isn’t overly expensive.
Take Some Practice Swings
The best advice I was given before we started building was to practice on something other than the house itself. Before our tiny home construction, we built a shower platform on our land. It’s still there, and we’ve made some improvements over the years, but that first attempt was pretty terrible. Nothing was square, and our measurements didn’t always line up.
I’m glad we tried something smaller first because we could learn from our mistakes and only repeated a few of them in the house itself.
Tap Into Community
Sometimes I wish the current tiny house movement was as connected as it was in the mid-2000s when we started. At that time, dozens of people around the country and the world were doing DIY tiny home construction and blogging about it. There were entire communities online dedicated to connecting us. Some enterprising folks organized tiny house conferences, workshops, and festivals which would often act as a reunion for many of us who came up at the same time in the tiny home community.
Though the landscape has changed over the last ten years, it is good to find others doing the same thing as you.
Share the Journey
I mentioned blogging, and there’s a good reason for that. While Matt wanted the experience of building a tiny home with his own hands, my motivation was to give myself a reason to leave my corporate job and write full-time. So I started our tiny house blog to create a portfolio. But blogging helped us connect with others and keep up with our build progress.
Not every tiny home builder is a writer, and that’s okay. But while we blogged our journey, we also read a lot of blogs about other people’s journeys which motivated us and gave us ideas for the building process.
Learn from Mistakes
When you build a tiny house on your own without professional guidance, there are bound to be mistakes. The key is to learn from them rather than throw in the towel. We noticed every time we learned to do something new for the build that we wouldn’t get good at it until we were done and ready to move on to something else.
Mistakes will happen. Sometimes you’ll have to take a deep breath, pull out all the nails you just pounded in, and start over.
The moral of the story is if we can do it, so can you. It’ll take some elbow grease, and you’ll make plenty of mistakes along the way, but those aren’t good reasons to tell yourself not to start.
Written By: Laura M. LaVoie for Tiny House Magazine Issue 117
