To find the most practical debt relief program, most of us save, skimp on unnecessary spending, and set a budget every month. For this single mother in California, she found that a way to achieve that is by downsizing and moving into a tiny house with her 15-year-old daughter!
Before joining the tiny home movement, Shalina lived in the Bay Area with her daughter Katie. Living there was expensive and worse, the cost of rent kept rising every year. This and Shalina’s long-standing dream of building her own house inspired her to begin working on the tiny home after seeing it featured many times in TV shows and online. Luckily, her dad, a contractor, owned a 1-acre property in Sacramento, so she was able to use the location as her building area.
Shalina built the house herself, with the help of her father’s tools. The modest house was eventually finished after two years of hard work, and the mother and daughter moved in. Outside the house, Shalina built a fence, a deck, and a shed. You’ll stroll into the kitchen as soon as you enter the house. Shalina kept it tiny on purpose so she could have more room for the living room.
It includes everything you’d find in a typical kitchen, including a 20-inch stove, oven, 18-inch dishwasher, and nearly full-size refrigerator. Shalina incorporated a lot of storage into her home. The kitchen has roll-out drawers on the walls and drop-down cabinets on the ceiling. Her motto is clear: a tiny house can never have enough storage!
TheShalina is a collector of unique items and likes going to flea markets, thrift stores, and estate sales to search for them. She and Katie love to collect what they call “curiosities.”Although it’s rare for a tiny house person to be a collector, Shalina has her reasons why she continued being one despite living in a small space.“As much as I have learned about downsizing and minimalism,
I’ve also found that finding the things that you really really love and surrounding yourself with it can really make a space feel like your home,” she said. Shalina works from home four days a week, so she placed a little office in the corner where she has the option to sit or stand. The bathroom has a soaking tub, and it’s also where she placed her washer and dryer. Privacy was of utmost importance to Shalina, so she designed both her and Katie’s bedroom to have closing doors.
Her room’s most notable feature is the closet with a glass door – one that she’s always wanted to have. Katie absolutely loves her room because she had complete freedom to design it. Like a typical teenage girl’s room, it has a vanity, posters, pictures plastered on the wall, and fairy lights, which give the room a cozier feel. All in all, Shalina spent about $35,000 building the tiny home.
She saved up on costs because she did the labor herself and used mostly recycled material. Building a tiny house and living in it for over a year is the best debt relief program Shalina discovered.
Living in a tiny house has brought this mother and daughter closer together. Shalina built it with her own hands, which makes their abode ultra special. Take a tour inside Shalina’s beautiful tiny home in the video below.