Six-year-old McKenzie Mike runs straight at a motor home futon, launches herself into a somersault and whips her heel right into a miniature mounted lamp. A little bit chips off and falls to the orange carpet. Down a narrow hallway, her 2- and 4-year-old sisters climb on top of a half-finished four-piece wooden bunk bed. The 4-year-old, Trinity, finds a way to get to the top bunk but can t get down. The oldest, 14-year-old Carter, lies back on the futon and watches the chaos unfold.
So too do the adults of the household, Melody and Darren, who cooked up this idea. Meet the Mike family, who, on Thursday, pulled out the wheel wedges and drove away from their 2,300-square-foot west Omaha house in a 1987 Fleetwood Bounder RV that looks just like Walter White s mobile meth lab from Breaking Bad. They took their vizsla puppy, Piper, and eight chickens with them. For the rest of this summer and into fall they re living in 270 square feet of Griswoldian glory while Darren and Melody build a pair of tiny houses.
They re not alone. The tiny house culture has people trading thousands of square feet for hundreds. It has spawned TV shows such as Tiny House Hunters, Tiny House, Big Living, Tiny House Hunting, Tiny House Builders, Tiny House World and, most important for the Mikes, Tiny House Nation, for which they are finalists to be featured. There haven t been many tiny houses built in Nebraska, but the ideology of living with less is taking hold, even for those who live large.
Mamie Jackson, a realtor with the JacksonChilders Group of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, said that even in higher-end neighborhoods, people are shrinking their dream houses. In the 1990s, homes in the Barrington Park subdivision, near 156th Street and West Dodge Road, averaged 5,157 square feet. The similarly valued The Prairies neighborhood, built in the past few years along 220th Street between Pacific Street and West Center Road, averages 3,504.
Buyers are buying and building more consciously, she said. They are making sure the space they are paying for is space they will actually use. More often when showing homes, we hear from clients How would we use this room?
The Mikes are taking that idea to the extreme, selling it all for a tiny life on wheels. They got the itch watching Tiny House Nation on the FYI channel and got serious about it in March, when Darren and Melody drove out to a conference in Denver. There, they bought blueprints. They started blogging about the build at bigfamtinylife.com1. They donated or sold almost everything their family owned, including the house.
They put it up for sale in late May, having found a place to build the tiny house, and they sold their home in just three hours. But the day after the house sold, their land plans fell through. So, without a place to live, they improvised. Darren, 45, a digital revenue project manager at BH Media Group, the parent company of The World-Herald, and Melody, a 34-year-old personal trainer, drove to northern Minnesota late last month and bought the Bounder.
Darren and a carpenter friend built quadrant bunk beds in the back room of the motor home. The fold-down futon will serve as the master bed. It s about 2 feet from the stove, 6 feet from the bathroom and 2, in another direction, from the CB radio.
People that I ve talked to think it s ugly, Melody said, but I think it s awesome. They weeded out their belongings, picking just their favorite few items to keep. The kids saved three compact storage containers with toys one entirely for dolls and happily donated the rest.
Trinity filled a backpack with a handful of clothes one day, telling Melody, Mom, I ve got everything I need for the tiny house. Not quite, but close. Each kid has under-bed storage for their clothes, and daddy Darren claims the biggest collection, a mix of casual and professional clothes for work. The family is leaving behind the swing set in the backyard, Melody s fitness studio in the basement and the chicken coop out back. For a while they wondered whether the chickens with names like Tinker Bell, Elsa, Nugget and Dinner would get to come along.
Originally we planned to eat them, Darren said. Cluckily, a friend will keep the chickens until the Mikes find a long-term solution.
For the family of six, the months ahead will be a boot camp for the years to come. The four kids will share a bedroom the size of a half-bathroom. Each bunk has its own trucker mattress, curtain and light. For all six of them, there s one bathroom and one TV, with a DVD player and a PlayStation 4.
Right now, if one of our kids gets upset with us, they can just run and slam the door, Darren said. Here, we re going to have to actually face each other s problems and work through everything.
I just think it s going to create an atmosphere of being more genuine with each other and working through issues as they arise. Darren and Melody asked family, friends and strangers to let them park the RV and build the tiny houses on their land, in their backyards, anywhere, preparing to move the final product elsewhere, if necessary. Three times they made plans and lost them, the last of which happened the week of the move. When their pastor heard about their last-second change of plans, he had an electrician go out to the Gathering Place, their church in Valley, to install an electrical hookup for the RV. After spending the night parked at a friend s house on Thursday, the Mikes moved the RV to the church, where they ll stay until they hammer out a long-term plan.
For us, one really important aspect of this story is just our faith in God, Melody said.
Just trusting Him through every detail of this and every anxious moment because there are several of them. If they survive the months ahead, the tiny houses will feel like mini mansions. Each one will be 349 square feet, larger than the entire RV. The three girls will sleep in a tri-level bunk bed, while Carter gets a loft to himself until he graduates from high school (and gets a tiny house all his own, if he gets his wish). Their floor plan calls for a bathroom plus rock walls, monkey bars and a sort of indoor playground area.
I think it s the superest cool!
4-year-old Trinity said.
The playground area will be the same space the kids will use as a home-school classroom with professor mom, except for Carter. He splits time with his mom, Darren s ex-wife, and he will go to public school. His siblings will, too, but not until they re in high school, like Carter. The two tiny houses will be connected by a deck. On the other side, Darren and Melody s tiny house will have a kitchen, a desk, a closet, a master bed loft, a lounge area and a bathroom.
The tiny houses, minus land, will cost them about $60,000, Darren estimates. They ll likely have to find a place outside city limits where code restrictions aren t as tight. Since the tiny houses will be on trailers, they re counted by the city as recreational vehicles, which can be parked at a residence, in use, for only 24 hours at a time. After they build the tiny houses they ll keep the RV. It will be their guest room and vacation house on wheels once the tiny houses are built.
And when they decide Omaha is no longer the place they want to live, they won t need a Realtor. Just a trailer hitch. Maybe they ll move to North Carolina, up in the hills. Who knows? The Mikes have invested $16,000 in custom trailers on which they ll build the tiny houses.
They re being assembled in Denver. This is actually happening. Darren s parents are on board, but Melody s aren t so sure.
I think my family is trying to reserve judgment, but my dad isn t a huge fan, Melody said. He s a stockbroker, and this is our investment. It s like we re getting rid of our investment to be free, which is great, but having that house and that investment is a pretty big deal to him.
But the Mikes are all in. The house is gone, and they re off in the RV. No going back, they say. From their perspective, there s not much of a downside to downsizing.
I don t think that anything is going to be frustrating, honestly, Darren said. I m really excited for the closeness that this is going to bring for our family.
References
^ bigfamtinylife.com (bigfamtinylife.com)