The Joy of Tiny House Living. Chris Schapdick
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I was younger. I started to think about purchasing a piece of land somewhere reasonably close by where we could spend some time. The idea was to camp and have a place to escape to from the nuttiness of the outskirts of New York City. I found an area not too far away in the southern region of New York known as the Catskills. We could easily get there for an overnight trip or even a day trip. Once I had purchased a property there, though, I wasn’t sure what to do next. It was a great location, it was on parkland, and there were about three and a half acres to roam and explore. There were trees galore—I now owned the woods. Well, a tiny little part of it, at least.
Then I discovered Jay Shafer’s The Small House Book. I don’t remember exactly how it fell into my hands, but sometimes when we look back at things, we realize that they were just meant to be. I started looking through that book and was very intrigued. I wasn’t a huge fan of tiny houses on wheels at that point, but I did like the concept of a cabin or a small building built on a foundation. That book got me thinking about the land that I had purchased. One nuance of the land was that it was zoned for recreational use only, which meant that you couldn’t build a substantial, permanent structure on it. You could put up a shed, or a pagoda of sorts, but you could not build an actual house, even a miniature one. This recreational zoning of the land made me revisit my views on tiny houses on wheels, because tiny houses on wheels can get around a lot of zoning regulations by technically being a custom recreational vehicle (RV). They don’t fall under the same restrictions as traditional building structures do, and they generally don’t require planning/building approval.
My daughter lounging and reading in one of my tiny builds.
Aerial drone shot over my Catskills, NY, property. It’s beautiful up there.
With grand visions of a tiny house retreat in my head, I went so far as to purchase plans for a house from the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, which at the time was the premier supplier of all things tiny house related. I got the plans, I looked them over carefully, and I realized it was a somewhat daunting task to build a tiny house on wheels. I don’t come from a construction background, and these were architectural plans that had many symbols and details on them that were not necessarily easy for me to decipher.
Right around this time, Tumbleweed started offering something called an “Amish Barn Raiser.” They were effectively selling you the trailer and doing all the framing, sheathing, and whatever else you wanted them to do on top of that trailer, short of providing a totally finished house. This was fantastic, because not only did it eliminate some of the fear that I had about doing the framing correctly, but it was also going to save me hundreds of hours of labor and travel back and forth between New Jersey and New York.
Hauling my Tumbleweed tiny house shell back to the East Coast from Colorado. At this point I’m somewhere in Kansas.
I didn’t hesitate to place my order. The build took place, very inconveniently for me, in Colorado, about two thousand miles away from where I was. They did offer a delivery option, but I chose to fly out there and rent a U-Haul truck to tow the house back to the East Coast. All and all, this was a pretty bad idea, because towing a house was a lot for the truck to handle, and the distance and the speed limitations made for a very long and arduous four-day journey. I did eventually get the house back to the East Coast in one piece, where I proceeded to work on it.
Throughout this book, I’ll relate some of my experiences regarding the aspects of building a tiny house, so I’ll leave those details for later, but I did eventually complete my first build. In fact, I finished it just in time for a tiny house show in New Jersey that was being hosted and presented by the United Tiny House Association. In the span of the several years I spent working on the house, perhaps only about ten people got to see the work in progress. At the show, however, around three to four thousand people passed through my house during the course of the three-day event. The whole show was pretty overwhelming, and the feedback that folks were giving me was very humbling and something that I hadn’t expected.
Exhaustion and elation sometimes go hand in hand. I was thrilled and somewhat overwhelmed to have won this award.
People lining up to tour my tiny house at the United Tiny House Show in New Jersey in 2017.
There was a constant flow of people. I lost my voice at some point. It was a tremendous, life-changing weekend for me.
My house won best tiny house at the show. Winning was something that I would never have expected. After the show, I took the tiny house back to my property and returned to work, but, in the back of my head, I had realized that this was something I truly enjoyed, more than my dreary nine-to-five corporate existence and massive commute. I was working in advertising technology, which was certainly not a field that I was passionate about. I had many roles in various capacities, but it was always the people that I liked, not the work itself. Sure, I was well paid, but, as many of you know, money does not always lead to satisfaction—in fact, it rarely does. I started working on getting my life-coaching credentials, which is something that I saw myself perhaps doing on the side to help people.
Everything came together. I didn’t really like my job; I had seen that the construction of my tiny house had garnered so much great feedback; and my start down the path of becoming a life coach had also shown me that perhaps there was a life outside of the technology field that I had found myself in.
Here’s the key: At some point in all our lives, there’s a chance to take a leap of faith, to believe in ourselves and do something that doesn’t necessarily feel comfortable (like writing a book). That’s what I did. I quit my job and decided that I was going to focus on life coaching and tiny house construction. The house that I built became a fixture in my life and has taken on a much more prominent role than I could ever have expected.
It’s been about two years now since I left the corporate world, and I haven’t regretted any of it. Sure, it’s a little bit more difficult, and it’s sometimes tricky to structure your days around work and to be disciplined to do what needs doing on a daily basis. But my leap of faith has worked out rather well for me. I’m writing this book to share part of my story and my experience around tiny houses, and I encourage anyone and everyone to consider taking their own leaps of faith, whatever that may look like.
We’re only on this planet for a certain amount of time, and it’s the things that we don’t do that we generally regret, rather than the things that we attempt. Believe in yourself; you can do it, and you have so many resources that can help you do it: YouTube, various websites, and what has become a very tight-knit tiny house community are all great assets for your tiny house journey. Ask yourself, what do you want from life? What is your goal? If you find yourself stuck in a role or a job that you don’t like, then for your sake, please do something about it.
Anyway, that’s a bit on my background and what got me started in this field. Like I said at the onset, your story may be quite different from mine, but hopefully you can take away a piece of my experience.
The interior of my first tiny house. I kept everything to a fairly cohesive theme. I’m still very happy with how it turned out.
A TINY HISTORY OF TINY HOUSES
You may think that people have discovered tiny