Back in 2015, we were discussing as a family wanting to move onto more land. We were living on an acre, had built a home and a garden, and had adult children living with us for varying reasons (one going back to uni with children and unable to study full time and keep a mortgage going, another couple in between houses and needing a room for a few months.)
It was getting a little tight, with children, foster children and grandchildren all bunked in together, but we loved every loud, rambunctious bit of it!
One of our daughters and her husband had asked Rick to build them a small, tiny structure at the side of our home. It was then that we thought about moving to a larger property, to live together but also independently.
Actually, INTER-dependently is a better term. We all wanted our own privacy and space, but loved the idea of having people around to help with meals, childminding, chores and household duties. The appeal of the early days of generational family life was strong, so we began looking for land.
In late 2016, the shell of the tiny home was built and we had found some land! Now we had to figure out how to move this little home so we didn’t have to dismantle it.
Rick had a trailer made for the home to sit on, spent hours on the phone with our Roads Department to discuss the legality of moving this oversized load from point A to point B.
He found out it wasn’t a hard ask, a simple permit as long as the trailer was registerable, we were good to go.
Rick had welded brackets on the trailer to attach the home chassis and this became the simple basis for the better design we use today.
We’ve come a long way since that first tiny home that became a tiny home on wheels! Never knew there was an industry, never heard of Bryce Langston, didn’t know what THOW stood for, didn’t know these little homes had been in Europe and the UK for many years. We simply needed to move our daughter’s tiny home from one place to another, and that’s how it all began!
Isn’t it incredible how necessity is the mother of invention!?!?!