In this weeks episode we are back to revisit Evans, a retired boat builder who has constructed a brilliant and compact home in a 20ft shipping container. When we first met Evans, I was impressed by his obvious skill and creativity. After many years working as a shipwright and furniture maker he has clearly honed his talents, and those gifts have all been well used in the clever construction of this fantastic tiny home.

While some build their tiny houses as temporary stepping stones, other builders are truly in it for the long haul. After falling in love with the concept of living in a tiny house and the freedom that it offered, Helen set about building her dream tiny forever home.

Willem and Kate are a powerhouse couple who have teamed up to build a spectacular tiny home for themselves. With Willem’s skill as an architect and Kate’s designer edge, the pair have done an amazing job in creating a beautiful and functional tiny family home which sits perfectly nestled into their .5 acre New Zealand bush property on Waiheke Island.

 I’m always absolutely amazed at how a shipping container, a cold, hard, metal box can be transformed into an incredibly warm and welcoming home. This stunning house in Victoria, Australia is a perfect example of that, with three 20 ft shipping containers being joined together to create an amazing, solar-powered home.

Dolly’s Tiny House is absolutely incredible. While it may look a bit like a giant dollhouse, this wonderfully designed home is no toy. At 7.2 by 2.4 meters (23 x 8ft) this home on wheels fits a whole lot of house and is possibly one of the best designed homes that we have visited so far with an amazing amount of functionality built into a very small home. 

This incredible tiny house has been built for a remarkable price. Builder Jesse has taken a whole bunch of salvaged materials (mostly lots of old fence palings) and constructed a fully featured and whimsically beautiful tiny home all for less that $20,000.

This week, we take a look back over 2018 and five of our favourite tiny house tours of the year. It’s always hard work choosing only 5 tours for this video as we travel to so many incredible homes and love them all for their own uniqueness of design and function. I hope you enjoy our selection!

We are working hard to get the tiny house finished in time for Christmas, and with the help of the elves we might just make it! Of course, we had to take a bit of a break to decorate the house to get into the spirit of the season. We also ventured into the Variant Spaces workshop, where Jake and Kasia help us to turn offcuts from our cabinetry into some lovely Christmas decorations for the tiny house. 

This young couple has given themselves an incredible start to life! After graduating from university, Sam and Simone threw themselves right into a building a tiny house on wheels. 

This stunning off the grid home in Australia may be tiny, but it has a very big story to tell. Constructed as a do-it-yourself build by recent empty-nesters Jan and Kev, this tiny house is open, spacious very efficient and completely off the grid.

 Our ambulance camper (or campulance) makes for an incredible home on the road! We never set out to purchase an ambulance but when we found this one, it was love at first sight. Ambulances are well maintained, have plenty of space in the back and often come kitted out with all kinds of cabinetry and storage so they can be some of the very best vehicles to convert into campers after their service.

When we first met Ryan, he was living in a different tiny house on wheels. It was a beautifully handcrafted 28ft home which was finished to an exceptional standard – you can see the full video tour of that first home here. Today, almost two years later we caught up with him in a completely new and much smaller home. 

Jay Shafer is the Godfather of the modern tiny house movement. I say the modern movement, because for the vast majority of human history, we have lived in small, simple shelters. It was almost 20 years ago that Jay designed and built his first 90 square foot (8m2) tiny house on wheels and that moment sparked the very beginning of the tiny house movement and a trend towards reclaiming the human right to affordable simple shelter.

Hidden deep amongst the mountains of California’s High Sierra is a stunning little permaculture oasis. Surrounded by towering trees and flourishing gardens, one young family has taken the leap into permaculture and homesteading on this land, where they have also built a beautiful little yurt which the family now call home.

It’s been a year now since we built our Little Zen tiny house in North America and in this weeks episode we re-visit our own home and talk about our experiences living in a traveling tiny house on wheels. 

As a solo parent, life can be a bit of a challenge. The skyrocketing cost of housing in cities such as Sacramento, California certainly doesn’t help make things any easier. One solo mother decided to do things a bit differently though, and managed to get out of the rent trap by building an amazing tiny house where she now lives together with her teenage daughter.

 As children, so many of us have dreamt of building homes or unique sanctuaries in the trees. There’s something about a treehouse which truly epitomises nature and our ability to live in harmony with our surrounding environment. This treehouse, a stunning and geometrically ornate structure shaped like a pinecone and suspended amongst the towering redwoods in California takes that dream to the next level.

 This family are doing things a bit differently, living a minimalist, debt free life style in a stunning tent. Zac and Katie together with their children Fox and Grizzly escaped the high stress, high cost lifestyle in Southern California and returned to Katie’s family land in New Mexico where they have built an incredible tiny tent house, going back to nature and living a rewarding life close to nature and each other. 

SB and Matt are a young and dynamic couple, who after getting married decided to build a tiny house on wheels before moving to Colorado from Oklahoma in order to avoid the incredibly high rent prices. Working together to build their home, they were able to do the vast majority of the labour themselves. Matching that with some thrifty material sourcing, they managed to construct their home for the amazingly affordable price of only $18,000.

 Asha Mevlana is an incredibly talented musician who is used to a life on the road, traveling the world as an electric violinist with the Trans Siberian Orchestra. Wanting to put down some roots and have a solid home which would also suit her unique lifestyle, she chose to build a tiny house.

 Jayme’s home is something very unique. As a yoga teacher, she understands the importance of body movement and has designed her brilliant home on wheels to reflect that and encourage her body to move as much as possible. Her home isn’t only functional however, it’s beautifully constructed using almost entirely salvaged materials. 

Doug and Stacy are living the pioneer lifestyle in the 21st century. After quitting their high-stress city lives they moved onto a property in rural Missouri where they could be debt free and construct a beautiful little pioneer style homestead. Today, they raise animals, grow most of their own food and live simply on the land.

In a way, Purple is like a modern day wizard, transforming items which have been left behind by the world and transmuting them into something new, giving them new life and purpose via upcycling. The same could be said of his old Bedford bus, which he has renovated into a wonderfully comfortable tiny home on wheels.

When this young family grew tired of the city life, they made their escape to a stunning rural property in Northland, New Zealand. The land they purchased was quite unique and had a beautiful spring-fed dam which they have used to float a stunning tiny house cabin on pontoons. 

Sustainability and efficiency have become huge topics of discussion amongst commercial and industrial builders across the globe. By using more environmentally friendly building materials, we can create homes that don’t hinder the health of the environment or ourselves.

Mark has lived a very unique life, sailing and traveling around the world working as a professional mime and clown. Now, in his retirement he is living the island lifestyle on an incredible off-the-grid house boat where he is able to enjoy life and spend his days looking out over the ocean. 

Imagine waking up each day in a stunning new location, stepping outside your home, grabbing your surf board and hitting the waves. Kiwi electrician Johnny Johnston is living that dream, traveling and working all over New Zealand while hunting down the countries best surfing locations all in his converted van.

 There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. That’s how the story goes, but this incredible small home is no fairytale. Constructed from ferrocement, this tiny house has been built in the shape of a boot. Despite it’s whimsical appearance, it’s a functional home and is currently used as a retreat for lovers and those who are wanting to escape reality and live a little fairytale of their own.

As an architect, Doug is used to designing large and spectacular homes. When it came to his own house, he decided to do something a bit different and challenged himself with going a lot smaller and designing and building a tiny house on wheels. With the benefit of his years of experience in architecture, his home is beautifully designed and filled with clever concepts to help make the space functional.

When Mandy saw the two railway carriages which sat rotting away on a property she was looking to purchase it was love at first sight. Despite their derelict state she saw their potential to be transformed into an incredible home. After 8 years of part time renovation work, the carriages have now been lovingly transformed into a wonderful, off the grid, small house which overlooks the big sky country of the Central Otago region of New Zealand.

This stunning small home in Wanaka, New Zealand is a perfect example of the influence that the tiny house movement is beginning to have on more conventional builds.

This home is a unique hybrid between a tiny house on wheels and a natural building. This young apprentice carpenter, gave himself a challenge to own his own home before he was 22 years old. What he ended up constructing was an incredible tiny home, which uses natural plasters on the interior to give his home an incredible earthen cottage appearance. 

This incredible home has been constructed using two 40ft shipping containers, which have been placed slightly off-set from one another to form a large living space in the centre as well as seperate rooms at the ends. Built as a DIY project by owners Matt and Ilse, this off-the-grid container house is now a wonderful, functional home for their family of five. 

If you love tiny homes but also the freedom of living on a boat, this small floating house boat could just be the ideal solution for you. Designed by Ian Ugarte in collaboration with architect Drew Heath this house on the water is designed to be the ideal live-aboard home.

Emmet constructed his tiny home on wheels to be ultra portable. At only 4 meters (13ft) in length, it has absolutely everything he needs for a life on the road. When he found an incredible parking spot on an organic farm in the Byron Bay hinterland, he decided to expand on his home and created a luxurious bath-house all from old recycled / salvaged windows.

If you’re wanting to live a life on the road, there are few homes that will travel quite so well as a van and of those vans, there are few more iconic than a Kombi Westfalia camper. Kylie and Stu have beautifully renovated their old sage green camper into an incredible tiny home on wheels. 

This beautiful tiny house on wheels was constructed on the back of an old Bedford truck. It’s off the grid, using solar power for energy and was built almost entirely from salvaged or reclaimed materials. 

This incredible van conversion allows this adventurous couple to live and work full time on the road as they travel and explore Australia! Demi and Eli spent 8 months converting an old van into a remarkable tiny house on wheels which gives them all the comforts of home while they explore.

This tiny house has everything this young couple needs. It’s set up to be completely off the grid, running on renewable energies. The home has solar power, captures it’s own rain water, uses solar water heating and even generates it’s own gas via a bio gas digester.

 We are often asked how to deal with grey water in a tiny house on wheels, so when we discovered this amazing DIY grey water treatment system created by Murray for his tiny house, we had to show you! In this episode, we explore all the details of the system, and let you know how it all works so you can create your own.

 This spectacular school bus conversion is absolutely one of a kind. The Liminal Caravan has been constructed entirely from reclaimed and salvaged materials, mostly things which were found in hard rubbish. The resulting conversion though, is an absolutely mind-blowing skoolie which serves as a wonderful family home, filled with thousands of treasures.

John Paul has designed an amazing life-style for himself by building a tiny house on wheels where he lives in the Blue Mountains, just outside of Sydney, Australia and a stealth camper van which doubles as a rent free central city apartment during the working week.

This beautiful small family home has a very special story to tell. Designed by architect Michael Leung and his wife Tiffany for their young family, the 60m2 (646ft2) house is actually constructed from hemp. The couple chose to use hempcrete for their home after searching for healthy, non-toxic building materials. 

Murray, together with his wife Victoria and six year old daughter Grace has built a stunning home for their young family. After moving onto a property with friends in the Yarra Valley in Victoria, Australia, they needed to secure some housing form themselves on the property.