Mark And Adina Smith’s Tiny Home
Welcome to our Tiny Home website. The only tiny home we know of with a basement,
an attic, a plant garden (all in the tiny house) and a garage (garage is separate
but built to match the house -
We planned on building this house 3 years before the actual building process started. We drew up our own plans about 6 months before buying the trailer. These plans changed several times right up to and during the building.
The great thing about building our own home is that we customized it according to our lifestyle. We were able to do that when drawing up our plans but as we progressed in the building process, we had to change a few things around, mostly based on limitation of space when placing appliances in the plan.
Adina (AKA Donna) and I were in a Habitat For Humanity Re-
The 8’6” X 24’ trailer was special ordered to my specifications with extension steel
flanges and a scissor jack placed at all four corners of the trailer. The flanges
extended the bed width of the trailer to the outside dimensions of the wheel wells
bringing the total width to 13’6” (the legal width allowed on the road without special
permit). The jacks are not able to handle the finished tiny house weight on each
corner but they do help in stabilizing the leveling process.
We bought the trailer in the middle of October 2015. The building started within the week following.
Our son Brian took a week’s vacation from his job to help me with the foundation
construction which was the heaviest work of the whole project. Our other son Dan
also helped one day with the foundation that week. A friend, Larry Tomlinson, drove
2 hours at the end of one day to help Brian and I stand up the outside walls. (Adina
used the framing nail gun to nail the walls together in the corners -
Also, Pacific West Associates, Inc. monitored the whole project from beginning to end to make sure I stayed RVIA compliant. I sent them pictures of each step as I progressed to make sure I was building our house to the RVIA codes. They were vital in my understanding certain code restrictions I would not have otherwise known. Within days of completion they sent me my certification. I recommend any person seeking to build their own tiny house to talk to them first.
We have also sent the title to our trailer to the Oklahoma (we are permanent residents of Oklahoma) Tax Commission / Motor Vehicle Title Division with an ‘Affidavit of Assembly and Ownership for Automobile / Truck / Travel Trailer and they will give us a new title and VIN number registering our tiny house as a travel trailer.
When this final process is done we will have papers showing our tiny house is both an RV and a travel trailer.
Adina and I moved into our tiny house on April 24, 2016 -
So… in the first paragraph I mentioned that we have a basement, an attic, a plant garden and a garage. Lets take a look at those four unique items to a tiny house.
The first is the basement. The #1 complaint or negative so to speak of tiny houses
is that you have to get rid of all your stuff -
I designed our tiny house to have one foot of space between the floor and the actual
trailer from the front of the trailer to the back. Setting on the trailer is the
flat 2 X 4 bottom plate with a 2 X 12 nailed to the outside edge. The entire foundation
unit is then bolted around the perimeter to the metal flange with 1/2” lag bolts
(and get this overkill!) one every foot! There is 18” between (not on center) each
2 X 6 floor joist. We found ‘ZipLock’ bins with insulated lids that are 17 1/2” wide,
23 1/2” long and 11 1/2” tall.
There are 11 open channels between the floor joists. With three bins per channel
we ended up with 33 bins of insulated storage bins under our tiny house floor. Basically
we have around 120 cubic feet of ‘basement’ storage! The floor to the tiny house
has a panel cut into the flooring for each channel giving us 100% easy access to
our ‘basement.’
The second is the attic. Our bathroom area ceiling only goes to about 7 ‘ from the
floor. I cut an access door in that ceiling that allows us (because of the slope
of our roof) from 6” on one side to over 4’ on the other side and 3’ wide of attic
space. It works great for extra storage of bathroom items and quick grab stuff we
don’t need every day.
The third is our plant garden. Yes I know practically every tiny house has a few
plants. The first thing my wife said when I asked her what she needed in our tiny
house as I was drawing up the plans was -
And forth is our garage! Yes a… ok it’s more like a shed on a trailer but it sounds
cooler to say we have a tiny garage to go with our tiny house. I have been a carpenter
my entire life so I have my tools and they are my life. Try to take them away from
me -
The rest of the website are pages with some of the plans I drew up before the build and then pictures during the build. I hope you enjoy seeing our progression. Email us here if you have any questions.