Tiny House on Wheels

The first time I saw a tiny house on social media, I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could live that way. I had no idea I would end up building one.

I was in college, working for commercial design agencies on projects for Fortune 500 companies, and renting a rough apartment in Dallas. I was following a fairly conventional path, but I was already questioning what it would take to have more freedom over my life.

I paid around $900 a month in rent. My mom had paid off her house completely and was still paying roughly $500 a month in property taxes. The way I saw it, she’d just begun paying rent to a different landlord. I wanted a way out of that cycle, a home I could own outright and more freedom over how I lived.

In 2013, I began designing a 250-square-foot house on wheels. For two years, I went back and forth between wanting that independence and being convinced I couldn’t build it. I had no construction experience.

Eventually, I put my life savings into a trailer, structural insulated panels and framing. I wrote the check before I even had a place to build.

Over the next three weeks, I found one and got started.

I learned through research, YouTube videos, trial and error. I broke things, built things wrong, took them apart and tried again. Slowly, the drawings became a place I could walk into. In 2016, I moved into a home I had built and paid for.

I lived in it rent-free in Texas for a year. When I decided to travel, it became a rental. Eventually, it came with me to Arizona and became my permanent home on the off-grid homestead.

The house gave me financial breathing room, but it also changed what I believed I could do. I had made something tangible without knowing how when I began. Every mistake I worked through gave me a little more confidence to take on the next unfamiliar thing. Later, that meant building my own solar power and rainwater collection systems, and learning how to live off-grid.

The house also took on a public life. I exhibited it at festivals for thousands of visitors. It was featured on HGTV’s Tiny House Hunters.

I still carry what I learned from building it into the studio. I don’t have to know how to do everything before I begin. I need enough curiosity to start and a willingness to keep working when something goes wrong.