Our 180-Square-Foot Vacation Home Changed Our Lives

This cabin was 180 square feet of pure bliss. (Photo: Tammy Everts)

Most people go through life dreaming of buying a bigger house with more space. But for one family, their hopes and dreams changed dramatically after they built a 180-square-foot vacation cabin and fell in love with the “simple living” style that can only come from a tiny house.

Tammy Everts, a writer and researcher from British Columbia, Canada, and her husband, John, built their tiny wooden vacation home by hand.

Related: Tiny Hotels and Inns With Big Features

Tammy shared the family’s experience with Yahoo Travel contributor Sophie Forbes and explained how this tiny vacation home completely changed their lives.

“Real estate in Vancouver is completely astronomical, price-wise, so back in 2006, my husband and I, who had been renters in the city for around 10 years, realized that we were being completely priced out of the market to buy. It had become unrealistic for us. Our rent situation was OK — we were renting a nice house in a nice neighborhood. But we started to think about our other options.

Check out this killer view. (Photo: Tammy Everts)

“There are a lot of vacation properties close to Vancouver on islands that people don’t really know about. Islands that aren’t heavily populated like Galiano or Salt Spring Island, Bowen Island. Gambier Island was one that we had heard about, and you could get there from the city in just over an hour.

“We had heard that there were 5-acre lots for sale, so in June 2007 we decided that we would buy one of those and use that land as somewhere we could go and camp. We had this dream of building this big vacation cabin on it one day. For the next year and a half, we camped there on weekends and spent all our vacation time there, traveling over on the ferry for four- or five-day stretches. But we never let go of the idea of building the dream cabin. The plan was to build something not too ostentatious or big in size.

The living/sleeping area. (Photo: Tammy Everts)

“We hired an architect and told him we wanted to build something small, as in 600 or 700 square feet. The size of a small one-bedroom or small two-bedroom apartment. But when we came to the island and looked at our property, we realized that building a big cabin seemed out of our league, with having to pay rent in the city and the mortgage for the land. It just wasn’t going to be possible. It was so discouraging at the time.

“This led us to the idea of the tiny house.

“My husband, John, had been introduced to this thing called Shedworking. It’s this cool thing people would do to sheds, like a hack, to make them into offices or backyard workspaces, and John had the idea that we should just take a shed plan and kind of hack it and use that as our cabin.

“Initially, I was like, ‘Really?’

“But from all the time I had spent writing about small spaces for Apartment Therapy and his idea of Shedworking, we kind of collaborated on this idea of going with the shed plan.

“So it was settled. We bought a shed plan for $25 and then thought about how we could hack it. How could we raise the roofline, add a porch, build out the deck?

“The finalized footprint was 12 by 10 feet, and then we put in a sleeping loft, so in total it came to 180 square feet.

Their son chills out on the sofa/bed. (Photo: Tammy Everts)

“We went into it with this boat mentality. What do people do on boats? How can we maximize all of our storage? We decided to position the kitchen so it was just along one wall. We got the smallest-possible propane fridge, and then a little propane cooktop. All of the storage went along that wall, and then we bought a very simple pine Ikea bed, which we hacked to turn into a daybed.

“Then we got one of their underbed storage drawers and reinforced it so they would stack. That is where our boys slept, and we slept up in the loft, which had just enough room for a double futon and some crawlspace for our stuff.

“Bear in mind that we had absolutely no construction experience other than middle-school shop class. But fortunately one of our best friends, Stephan, has a construction background and agreed to help us.

“John had put together this crazy Excel spreadsheet with absolutely everything on it — down to the last screw and tool. It was a massive project-management undertaking.

Related: Inside the First Tiny House Hotel

“He and Stephan went over for 10 days and basically worked from first thing in the morning into the night. At the end of 10 days it was almost all done. There was a little bit of finishing here and there, but it was basically all done. After that, they put in all the furniture, and a week later John and I went back with our boys and stayed there for the first time.

All the tiny details. (Photo: Tammy Everts)

“At night we would put the boys to bed. We had this really great deck, which was about as big as the cabin. We would open the double doors and look out on this awesome view of the water and the mountains. John and I would sit on the deck and just hang out or go down to our fire pit. It was heaven.

“All in, the cabin cost us about $12,500 — $7,000 for materials, $2,500 for the propane fridge, $2,500 for the barge trip, and about $500 for the rental of a generator and a couple of big power tools we didn’t own.

“Someone once referred to it as our wooden tent, and I have always thought that was a really great way to describe it. But we never for a second felt like anything was lacking in the cabin. It had a really nice outhouse that John built, which really isn’t as sketchy as some people might think. And then we built an outdoor shower in another area in the enclosed grove of trees. We had all of the amenities we needed, and we would travel over with a tiny amount of stuff. Just a small duffel bag with all our clothes stuffed into it, a cooler, and then a dry box with dry foodstuff in it. Then us and the dog. And that was it.

“We used to keep some stuff there like sandals, towels, extra bathing suits — that kind of stuff. It was just so nice not to have to load everything in your car. It felt so minimal, and it was just part of the living-simply experience.

“Eventually, we found that every time we would come back to the city, we were sad to be returning. But we knew that the land on Gambier would never be developed enough for us to raise our children there. It was never going to be a viable option year-round and somewhere the boys could go to school. But we had started to become city-phobic and we had to make a choice about what we were going to do. We had this cabin that we loved and the city, which we don’t really love anymore.

“Did we buy a cabin somewhere else? Did we build a bigger cabin on the island?

“It was a hard decision.

“In the end, we made up our minds. There is this town called Nelson about nine hours east of Vancouver in the mountains. We had always loved it there, so we thought that maybe we should just pull up our lives while the boys are still young.

“We knew we loved being in the mountains and we loved being by the water. Nelson had both those things.

“So that’s what we did. We ended up selling the cabin to a couple who had been looking for property on the island. They run a summer camp just down the hill toward the waterfront.

“It was sad but worth it. Our ‘cabin’ we live in now is a 100-year-old farmhouse which is just about 1,000 square feet. My husband and I both work from home. Our sons are 7 and 10 now, and we have a dog, so it is pretty cozy.

Our original cabin was absolutely the trigger for us moving out of the city, and we are better off for it. We really explored all our options when it came to moving out and the possibility of living in the small cabin full-time. Can we live a cabin-type lifestyle? Especially with both of us working from home. But strangely, my career has taken a sharp upwards curve since we moved here, so clearly, working remotely has been incredibly beneficial. Before the cabin, we were young urbanites. The cabin completely flipped the switch for us in terms of what kind of people we are and what kind of space we wanted to live in. It was life changing.”

Let Yahoo Travel inspire you every day. Hang out with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Check out our original adventure travel series, “A Broad Abroad.”