We Built an Amazing Off-Grid Tiny House on Our Homestead for a Customer and Here is What We Learned

Seeing our tiny house on AirBnb, a woman approached us saying she wanted something larger and more personalized. So, we got to work on a custom build.

Reader Contribution by Kerry Mann
Updated on January 15, 2022
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Photo by Kerry Mann
Sam and friend on the "front porch."

A few years ago, my father and I built an off grid tiny house on our homestead. We rented it out on AirBnB and it was all booked up in no time. It was going really well and making some decent income for our homestead. In short time it paid for itself. All was going well until we got a call from our city zoning department telling us the tiny house was not in compliance. We could keep it if we went through a bunch of ridiculous hoops like adding on another 200 square feet onto it (kind of defeats the purpose of a tiny house). Zoning and Tiny Homes can vary wildly from state to state.

How We Were Hired to Build a Custom Off-Grid Tiny House

After a lot of consideration we decided to sell it and move on. During that time we got a call from a woman across the country named Sam. Sam saw our tiny house on AirBnb before we had to pull it down and she liked it, but she wanted something larger and more custom. Sam asked me if we could build her a custom tiny house. I explained that we are not builders and we’ve only built one tiny house but she was OK with that.

We worked out the details and agreed to design Sam a custom off grid tiny house. It was one heck of a journey and we learned some valuable lesions along the way. We also took 100s of hours of video footage and edited it all down into a short, start to finish tiny house build video you can watch below. Check out, we are really proud with how it turned out.

Design Process

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