- My partner and I live in a tiny home and use our 400 square feet and outdoor space wisely.
- Daily life requires constant transformation, creative storage, and a willingness to live in motion.
- This photo tour shows how we've shaped the space so that every square foot earns its keep.
When people imagine tiny-house living, they often picture hyper-efficient design and perfectly optimized spaces from drawers in the stairs to ultra-slim, slide-out pantries.
Unfortunately, that level of thought didn't make it into this build. The house was produced by a mass-market company out of Texas, and in many ways, is poorly designed for full-time living.
Between awkward design choices, dead spaces with little storage potential, and rooms that have to constantly change function, it takes a lot of flexibility to make it work.
However, it's the space we have, and throughout the five-and-a-half years since buying it, we've learned how to creatively adapt the space to fit our lives, turning a less-than-ideal layout into a functional home — even if the end result isn't Pinterest-worthy.
When you first walk into our tiny house the first thing you'll see is our living room — or rather, our "everything" room.
When you first walk into our house through a massive sliding glass door I rue every winter when temperatures dip below zero, you step immediately into the heart of our home.
It's where we eat, work, make products for our business, and spend most of our waking hours.
This space is also where we work out.
It even doubles as our home gym, outfitted with a small wooden hangboard, detachable rings, and a set of weight plates and adjustable dumbbells.
We utilize as much vertical space as possible.
Vertical storage is essential in a tiny house, but with four windows and a sliding glass door in our living room, wall space is limited.
We make do with what we have: hooks mounted to the window cornices hold hats and jackets, while string lights wrapped around those same cornices add extra light without sacrificing floor or wall space for freestanding fixtures.
If a space can serve a functional purpose, it does.
I also rely on these same features to expand my art studio, placing in-progress oil paintings on top of the window cornices so they can safely dry between layers without being in the way.
Our dining table regularly converts into a crafting station.
Our kitchen table was the first piece of furniture we purchased for the house, and over five years later, it still works perfectly for our needs.
In one moment it's a place for meals, in another, it's a workspace.
It's lightweight plastic and resin, making it easy to move, and has two pop-up leaves that allow it to convert into our primary crafting station for the business we run together, transforming retired climbing ropes into functional homewares.
What should have been storage is an ongoing exercise in compromise.
By far the biggest frustration in our home's design is this bizarre triangular structure in the main room. It's supposedly meant to be a TV stand, but it's far too tall, sticks out awkwardly, and wastes an enormous amount of space.
The cabinet insert on the front is less than a foot deep, and the rest of the structure is completely hollow. Every year we do a fresh set of mental laps around ways to fix it — cutting an additional door, installing a top hinge opening, or knocking out back cabinet panels — but we always decide those changes could open a much bigger can of worms.
Instead, we've begrudgingly resigned ourselves to using it for its decorative potential, adding a modular bookshelf and claiming the surface as extra drying space for in-progress artwork.
It's not what the structure was intended for, but in a house where wasted space isn't an option, even a badly designed feature has a use.
This main room also houses my favorite corner of the house — my art studio.
When I'm not slinging stories, I work as a full-time artist, specializing in upcycled material mediums … which means my house is an eclectic and eccentric collecting ground for old climbing ropes, thrifted clothing, dried botanicals, and even animal skulls rescued from a landfill-bound fate at a local meat processing facility.
Everything in my studio was carefully curated for multiple uses.
The desk converts from a sitting to a standing desk, the top surface tilts for drawing, and its lockable wheeled design allows me to move it elsewhere, even to the kitchen where it becomes a countertop extension during heavy food-prep days.
My French easel has double layers of storage for paints and brushes, collapses into the size of a briefcase so I can stow it away if needed.
Who needs a laundry room when you have a laundry alcove?
The laundry "room" — really just a narrow vestibule between the kitchen and the den — is our catchall.
We chose a combo washer-dryer instead of a stacking set, which turned out to be a smart decision, given we rely heavily on the machine's top surface and a shelf we installed above it to store extra linens, cleaning supplies, bakeware, bulk pantry staples, and even my homemade plum wine during fermentation.
Again, vertical space is critical, with shelves, stackable bins, and hanging tiered organizers to keep things accessible and mildly organized.
The back den serves as both our primary lounging space and my partner's office.
The back den functions more like our main living room than the actual living room, since it's where we have the couch and TV, which is a computer monitor that, again, serves multiple purposes.
It also serves as my partner's office, which works well because it's on the opposite end of the house from my workspace, providing a bit of separation throughout the day.
The back den has an absurd amount of wall space — and a frustrating lack of studs to mount more vertical storage solutions.
The lofted bedroom feels surprisingly comfortable thanks to thoughtfully used vertical space.
Our bedroom is an upstairs loft, and unlike those I've seen in many tiny houses, it actually feels spacious.
Although we can't stand upright, we can kneel fully and sit up in bed comfortably, with plenty of headroom.
An antique chest holding pajamas and lounge clothing doubles as my bedside table. Beside it sits a perpetual stack of embroidery projects I work on while winding down in the evening.
When storage runs out elsewhere, the bedroom loft absorbs the overflow.
As much as I love my cozy corner studio, it isn't very efficient for storing art supplies. That chaos is relegated to one corner of the bedroom loft.
Occasionally everything gets put away in either a slotted yarn holder I built myself, an antique trunk that's been in my family for generations, or even old fishing tackle boxes that work perfect for keeping threads neat.
However, since I'm almost always preparing for a market or event, it's usually a maddening heap of everything from canvases to fabric.
Every single meal we eat is prepared in this tiny kitchen.
We never eat out or order in, and much of what we eat are things made entirely from scratch, including bread, wine, jams, and pasta sauce using produce I grow myself in my garden.
Suffice it to say this space looks pretty chaotic come harvest season.
We do our best to work with the limited counter space.
Regardless of season, counter space is always incredibly limited, which often means unloading pans from the oven (where they're being stored) onto any available surface just to get through a meal.
Even our microwave has been retired from a cooking tool and turned into an extra storage cabinet.
However, we try to keep a few appliances we use often readily available, like an electric pressure cooker. It's one of my favorite efficiency upgrades, as it combines so many appliances into one.
Cabinet space is precious.
Since we don't have much room in our cabinets, we prioritize buying whole foods and storing them in airtight containers.
Rice and whole oats are some of our go-to staples as they're versatile in a lot of different meals and easy to store.
We also avoid processed foods, like oversized cereal boxes or chip bags, which often come in bulky packaging. This helps us not waste space while also eating healthier.
The bathroom consists of 6 square feet of well-utilized space.
Our bathroom relies heavily on modular organization to function in such a small space.
We use stackable bins to keep toiletries grouped by type, making it easy to find what we need without quite as much visual clutter.
Over time, we've also switched to more space-efficient, low-waste products, like shampoo and soap bars instead of bulky liquid bottles, which saves space while cutting down on plastic waste.
Although our shower is just fine, I miss having a bathtub each and every day.
Outbuildings like this greenhouse are essential extensions, allowing us to live more fully and self-sufficiently.
We rely heavily on outbuildings, including a storage unit, our van when it's parked (we sort of use it like a garage), and now a greenhouse. This is a new addition to the tiny homestead, and I'm especially excited to break it in this spring.
In past years, February through May turned the living room into a slow-moving conveyor belt of seed trays migrating between windowsills, tables, and countertops, alongside a quail brooder that left little room for anything else.
Soon, the greenhouse will be filled with plants and serve as a brooder, which will help me raise quail for eggs without taking up so much space indoors.
