Tiny House Lifestyle Podcast

 The first time I met Sean he was sketching tiny houses in a sketchbook at a speaker dinner after a tiny house conference. I'm so glad to have him on the podcast all these years later. Sean is an active member of Tiny House Engage, my online community, where he does monthly design reviews of various members' tiny house designs and he is a professional architect. In this interview, we tal...

 Have you ever struggled to figure out what you want to be when you grow up? Or maybe you're already grown up and you still balance multiple interests and don't feel like you can just fit into one box. Today's guest, Emilie Wapnick, has created a whole set of resources just for people like that - people like you and like me - and I actually have a hunch that there are a lot of us am...

In this special episode of THLP, your host Ethan Waldman joins forces with veteran tiny house designer, builder and instructor, Lina Menard, to chat about "what we wish we knew before we started".  Plus, we bring you a sneak peak of our upcoming LIVE course, Tiny House Considerations, an interactive, 8 week course with Lina and Ethan as your guides. To get on the waitlist for Tiny House...

Michael Janzen is a legend in the tiny house world, having started his website, TinyHouseDesign.com in 2007 and just continuing to work as a prolific designer pretty much since then. Michael has put a lot of plans out into the world and I have no doubt that there are many, many tiny houses that are built either directly from his designs or were inspired by them. On today's show, Michael stopp...

If you've been listening to the show for a while, you may recognize the name Natalie Bogwalker because she's been a guest in the past! Natalie is a wealth of knowledge about natural building techniques. In today's show, we are going to do a deep dive into two natural building techniques: slip straw and hempcrete. I went in knowing nothing about these and I asked really basic questio...

 My Guest today is Betsy Barbour. Betsy’s tiny dreams began in 2017. After downsizing and selling her condominium, she moved into her 200 sqft tiny home in 2019. She has since lived in 3 unique communities in 2 states. Betsy has become passionate about tiny house advocacy and community development. On today’s show, we’ll talk about the different kinds of communities that Betsy has found, the wins...

Can developing the tiny house mindset help you start tiny living sooner? What is the tiny house mindset anyway? My guest Angela Barnard is not only a tiny dweller but a life and career coach who specializes in helping people change the direction of their lives. IN this interview, Angela gives us the Be - Act - Have framework and explains how to use it to become a tiny dweller… even if you‘re not l...

 I wouldn't hesitate to say that my guest this week is one of my all-time favorite professional tiny house builders. JP Marquis from Minimaliste Houses has been building gorgeous, modern, premium tiny houses since 2015, early on in the movement and his company really has staying power because of their pursuit of building excellence. And I'm not reading any pitch, this is all coming from...

I was really excited to invite Leslie on the show because she has just published a book called "Tiny Plants: Discover the Joys of Growing and Collecting Itty Bitty Houseplants" and I just knew I had to have her on to talk about plants that you can bring with you into your tiny house lifestyle. I had no idea that this was even a thing so I'm really excited to share this conversation!...

I've known Sarah for close to 10 years but we only met in person last summer. Sarah is a bicycle touring professional and also a tiny house enthusiast who got in touch with me nearly 10 years ago when she was looking for people interested in both bicycle touring and tiny houses. It turns out that they are a lot in common! In this episode Sarah will share her story of how she fell in love with...

My fascination with houseboats really started when I saw a video tour of Bonnie's houseboat, the River Den, on the Exploring Alternatives YouTube channel. I've been trying to get her on the show ever since. It turns out I had no idea that Bonnie was a talented entrepreneur who has multiple houseboats and unique Airbnb stays. In this interview, we go through the ins and outs of what it ta...

 In their own process for going tiny in 2014, Joshua and Shelley Engberg decided to design a custom trailer for their dream tiny home. Frustrated by how difficult the process was, they went into business as Tiny House Basics and now build over 450 custom tiny house trailers per year. In this interview, we’ll hear Joshua and Shelley’s tiny story, their tips for finding an ideal Parking spot, and we...

Certification of tiny homes has been a tricky topic for years now. I’ve been skeptical of many of the certifiers because I haven’t always seen the benefit. Last week’s conversation with Jenifer Levini only increased that skepticism. But this week, I’m happy to bring you my conversation with Alex Ontiveros from Pacific West tiny homes. Pacific West has been in the certification business for a long...

The legal landscape of tiny homes is one of the most frustrating and confusing parts of the tiny house movement. In fact, “tiny home” isn’t even a legal term, so municipalities have had to figure out what form of existing law they fit into. My guest Jenifer Levini is a housing and land use lawyer, and author of Building, Occupying & Selling Tiny Homes Legally. I would consider this episode a m...

 SquareOne Villages is an amazing organization creating self-managed communities of cost-effective tiny homes for people in need of housing in and around Eugene Oregon. My guest Amanda Dellinger is the Community Relations Director, and if you’re curious about tiny home villages, this conversation is a must-listen. We start by exploring the co-op model for housing and delve into all the details of...

 The concept of Lifestyle Design certainly predates the tiny house movement, but I see the two as very linked. Enter today’s guest, Jessica Malone, a lifestyle design coach who lives tiny herself. In the interview, we’ll talk about the difference between Decluttering versus Downsizing, life hacks for easy minimalism, and the mindset required to succeed. I hope you Stick around! Full show notes and...

 One of the best ways to spend time as a family is traveling full-time. Traveling together can be fun, interesting, and educational for your children too. But it can also be difficult. My guests today are Jessica and Will Sueiro, and they are two parents who have done it successfully. They left the American rat race in 2014 and haven’t looked back. In this interview, we’ll get into the nitty-gritt...

 In some ways, the Yurt is the original tiny house on wheels. If you’ve never seen one, a Yurt is a portable, round tent covered with skins or felt and used as a dwelling by nomadic groups in Central Asia. In America, Yurts have been popular since the ’70s, and I’ve wanted to interview a yurt dweller here on the show for some time. Enter my guest, Kevin Obrien, who lives year-round, off-grid in hi...

Is it possible to convert a cargo trailer into a tiny home? On today’s show, I take with Nicoll Davis, who currently lives and travels full time in a 112 square foot converted cargo trailer with her husband Jake and their dogs. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the photos and total cost of the conversion. Oh, and a few days after scheduling my interview with Nicoll, I saw her featured prom...

Figuring out how to get your tiny house a supply of water is one of the biggest challenges you’ll face living off-grid. Wouldn’t it be great if we could simply capture and use the water that falls out of the sky? I had always thought that rainwater harvesting in a tiny house would be inconvenient and ineffective due to the small roof size. Enter today's guest, Brad Lancaster. Brad is a tiny h...

Michelle Jones discovered the tiny house movement well before most of us, struck up a friendship with Dee Williams, and had her 84sf tiny house built by Dee’s company PAD. She’s been quietly living tiny in Portland, OR backyards for 11 years now, and in a lot of ways, tiny living has helped to guide and inspire her unconventional career choices. In this interview, Michelle shares her reflections o...

The home you build or buy may be the single biggest purchase you’ll ever make. That’s why choosing the right builder is such a consequential decision. But since we’ll only ever need to do this once or twice in our lives, it’s very easy to be taken advantage of, or miss red-flags before we plunk down our life savings on a tiny home. My guests this week, Paul Dashevsky and Jon Grishpul started the c...

 Chad Deschenes is a building inspector who is usually called in when issues like air quality, mold, and moisture have gotten out of control. Chad is here to blow the whistle on some of the standard tiny house building methods, and share some common problems he sees in buildings, large and small. Plus, Chad will share the one system that EVERY tiny house must have. Chad has kindly shared lots of p...

It’s every homeowner’s nightmare to discover a small patch of mold, and then learn that their floor, subfloor, and insulation have all become a soft, rotten waste. But that’s exactly what happened to my guest today, Chris Murphy. Chris and his wife Bri had to move out of their tiny house unexpectedly when it was discovered that there was a terrible moisture issue in both the floor and walls. In th...

Lindsay Wood is an evangelist for tiny living, and these days she’s as busy as ever. As the pandemic has put economic pressure on a large swath of the country, tiny houses are being increasingly seen as a solution to housing affordability and inequality. But there are some big legal hurdles to get over before we get there, and in this interview, Lindsay helps us explore them. Full Show Notes and I...