Most 27-year-old college grads would be happy to own a home, but Kahla McRoberts went a step further and built her dream home by hand.
The project started just 11 months ago, when Kahla and her mother Roxanne borrowed a pickup truck to haul a 20-foot trailer back to their house in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. That trailer would become the foundation for a tiny home that McRoberts built from scratch.
She was attracted to the massive project by the possibility of living rent-free with almost no debt. Plus, owning her own tiny house made it much cheaper to settle down in Colorado, where part-time ski instructor McRoberts feels at home in the mountains.
"I just feel better when I don't have a ton of stuff" she explains.
But despite describing herself as "a huge 'project person'" to Lancaster Online, building a home from the ground up was a much tougher job that she ever expected.
With help from her architect dad Eric, McRoberts spent two years designing her perfect tiny home, and had to go back to the drawing board multiple times. Then, unexpectedly heavy snowfall delayed the project for months.
But after less than a year the tiny home is finished, and we'd happily switch places with McRoberts if we had the chance.
From her earliest designs, McRoberts wanted to include lots of windows, so her handmade home wouldn't feel as tiny as it is.
The graphic designer crammed a lot of personal touches into the home, including a pullout couch bed for guests, separate living and sleeping areas, a space-saving projector and a pull-down screen for watching TV.
She also included plenty of room for her dog Cooper, who has taken to his new space like a fish to water.
The house is even eco-friendly. While McRoberts plans to hook it up to the electric grid this year, by next winter rooftop solar panels will provide enough energy to keep the house running for free.
To make the project even harder, McRoberts kept painstaking notes on every detail and fixture, down to the last dollar, for her website To Live Tiny. She hopes that other tiny home builders will draw inspiration from her designs.
It may seem small on the outside, but McRoberts has already hosted 12 people at a family Thanksgiving dinner, and says living on a small scale suits her just fine.
"For now," she says, "I see all the possibilities."
What a great little home! I would gladly live here!
[H/T: Lancaster Online]