Married couple Josyln and Dave live in a 32-ft gooseneck tiny house at the Acony Bell Tiny Home Village. Their home is beautifully decorated with many antiques and a delightful touch of Cracker Barrel-inspired decor. Importantly, they wanted to display all of our treasured possessions but also use them at the same time. It’s a great example of how you can incorporate family heirlooms into your daily life. Interestingly, Josyln works as a decorator at America’s largest home, the Biltmore Estate.
“My mom, often in the beginning, was like, what am I going to do with all these family heirlooms? Where are they going to go? And I was like, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll put them in storage. Maybe we’ll use them. Maybe we won’t. But we do also have a few things throughout the house that are family heirlooms, like a clock and different pieces like that.
So we still used all of like our favorite things that were family, but they just weren’t the massive chest that no one touches in the dining room. We just have smaller, more important things, rather than larger things that don’t get used, and that was kind of appealing to us. It’s a fun process to constantly seeing it evolve and see all the options and things we can add as life changes, and all of that. So it’s fun.”
-Joslyn, @adventuresoftinyannabelle
Tour their beautifully decorated gooseneck tiny house:
Dave is an electrician by trade and wired their tiny home. Then he helped with framing while a local contractor built the rest. In total, the build cost them $50,000.
At 6.5 feet, building a tall man friendly tiny house was a top priority for him. So, of course, they used the gooseneck area for their bedroom to allow a standing-height space. Another tall-person accommodation was utilizing the high vertical space in the bathroom as Dave’s storage space, with Josyln’s being lower on the wall.
In their living room, they made a mantel. Joslyn really wanted this area to decorate for the different seasons. So they created one from an old railroad tie and salvage wood mantel from a nearby whiskey distillery in Tennessee. For them, it feels like having a little bit of history that lives on with them. Next to their fridge, they store a big beautiful folding table that their brother-in-law built for them. It is used as a dining table for Warhammer board game night with friends. Another flexible surface is their small rolling cart, used as extra counter space, kitchen storage, and another dinner table option.
Their bathroom has a lovely salvaged wood sliding door. Additionally, it was modified to have little cutouts to fit snuggly around the stairs and create a cat-size “doorway.” So their kitty Madeline can get underneath it, but their two dogs cannot. That was designed to keep them from getting into Madeline’s litter box area—tucked in a cubby under the stairs but accessed inside the bathroom.
The $575/month lot rent is unfortunate. Drilling a well and putting in a septic tank on your own lot would be better in the long run. Tiny homes are all about affordability. Personally, I would not want to live in anything that small. I live in a 14 x 52-foot singlewide. What we need is our housing freedom restored. Congress should introduce and pass what I am calling ‘The Housing Freedom Restoration Act’. IT simply says, as long as a home is not a threat to anyone’s health or safety, then any restriction against that home is null and void.
Our declaration of independence says that we are all created equal and that we have the self-evident, inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. SHELTER IS A NECESSITY OF LIFE. It doesn’t get any more basic than that. Certainly, that means we should have the freedom to live in a home of our own choosing and not someone else’s choosing. Certainly, that means that we should have the freedom to spend our money as we see fit and not as someone else sees fit. Freedom does NOT mean the freedom to take away someone else’s freedom, as exclusionary zoning restrictions do.