The Tiny Home: Our First Build (2017)

Hi guys...April here! 

Many people often ask how we started building our unique projects so I thought I'd tell you a little about where we started.  We started small...real small.  Actually, it started tiny.  After several months of house hunting and one scam later (a story for another day), we decided to build a tiny home.  

We moved out of our high rise Atlanta apartment and into my grandmother's home in South Georgia.  We decided to build down there because I have a family full of contractors who were willing to lend us their invaluable knowledge and hands when they could.  Daniel took several engineering classes and grew up learning the ends and outs of tools and small building projects with his dad, but he had never built a home before.  

It was a hot summer but we used it as a learning opportunity and despite the long scorching days and one hurricane later, we had a beautiful tiny home.  We filmed the process with a production crew and it later aired on the show, "Tiny House Big Living".  (Watch the episode here.)

We built our tiny home on wheels and moved it up to a gracious friend's farm in North Georgia.  Building it was one thing, but setting it up was another.  It took almost another month to get it up and running.  We moved in and loved it.  It certainly had it's kinks to work out and there were some major adjustments to our lifestyle we had to make (composting toilet), but all in all we had a beautiful home that we built with our own two hands.  

Six months after we moved in, we found the gem/dump we would later name Selah Ridge.  We often stop and think, "darn, I wish we would've found this property before we spent 4 months building our tiny home." However, I think if we had skipped the "tiny home step" we would have missed a lot of life lessons like...

    * the value of hard work

    * humility

    * gratitude

    * contentment 

    * how to work together and stay married and in love :)

That little home has brought us so much...more that I'm constantly processing daily.  We bought the mountaintop of Selah Ridge in 2018.  We currently still live in our precious tiny house.  There's much to do at Selah Ridge...I'm sure we will be here a while.  I'm okay with that.  This is home.