Tiny Home With Stairs: No Ladder, and a Room for Later
Updated: 3 days ago
Priscilla had one requirement when she started looking at tiny homes: it had to have stairs.
"One of the requirements for me was to have stairs because I did not want to be climbing up and down a ladder. That was not something I wanted."
She already knew she could live small. After her husband of 26 years died, she sold their family home in Southern California and spent the next three and a half years living in an RV. She eventually moved to Massachusetts to care for her parents, who both passed away within about a year. After that, she was free to decide where she wanted to go next.
By then, she knew she didn't need another full-size house.
"After living in the RV, I knew that I could live tiny, and I didn't want to buy another full-size house."
At a glance
Home: built by Compass Tiny Homes in Virginia, bought through a listings site
Cost: $96,000, plus $10,000 to ship it to Colorado
Site: Island Cove in Durango, lot rent $865 a month, utilities separate
Lives with: a small dog
Loft: queen mattress, reached by stairs, with room to sit up
Time there: almost two years
A Tiny Home With Stairs, and a Room Held in Reserve
The loft holds a queen mattress and enough headroom to sit up in bed, and she calls it one of her favorite parts of the house. The stairs are what made it possible to consider at all.
What she did next is the part worth copying. At the far end of the house there is a second room, and she has already decided what it becomes.
"If by some chance that I stay in this house long enough that I can't get up the stairs anymore, I've got an extra room down at the other end of the house that I could fit a bed into if I needed it."
For now that room is a closet, an office and a place for puzzles, with windows on more than one side. The plan for later does not cost her anything today.
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She Gave Up the Dishwasher to Keep a Cabinet
The kitchen has a large farmhouse sink, a three-burner RV stove and oven, and an apartment-size refrigerator with a cabinet built underneath. One thing it doesn't have is a dishwasher, and Priscilla prefers it that way.
"I actually prefer not to have a dishwasher because if I had a dishwasher, it would take away some of my cabinet space, which is important for me to have."
After cooking on an RV stove for three and a half years, there wasn't much of an adjustment. She usually only needs one burner, and she's even made pies in the small oven for potlucks.
There isn't much she would change about the kitchen, although she does have one small complaint.
"My only complaint about the sink is that the faucet's a little too far back, but it works."
The Bar Was Already in the Design
The breakfast bar came with the floor plan and has turned into the most used surface in the house. She eats there, works on her iPad there, and uses it as overflow counter when the kitchen runs short. It was built with plugs and USB ports along it.
Underneath it she found a gap and solved a problem with it.
"You do need to be creative when you live in a tiny space. So, rather than buying a bookshelf, I realized I could use this space under here for storing books."
The couch is smaller than the one she first pictured there, and that was deliberate too. It has a hide-a-bed, so her children and friends have somewhere to sleep when they visit.
"It's not any smaller than what I really need."
How She Ended Up in Durango
She looked at a community in North Carolina first and ruled it out as too far from her children, who are all still in Southern California. California itself had very few communities to choose from. Colorado came up because she and her husband had talked about retiring there years earlier.
Durango turned out to have five tiny home communities. She flew out for a weekend, visited all of them, and picked Island Cove.
The lot she wanted was already spoken for. She went home to California without one, and then the community owner called to say a space had opened up. She took it and paid rent on an empty lot before she owned a house to put on it.
The house came later, found on a listings site. It was part-built by Compass Tiny Homes in Virginia, which suited her deadline, and she still chose some of the hardware and where the cabinets went. She flew out to see it before it was finished.
What It Costs to Live There
The home was $96,000. Getting it from Virginia to southwest Colorado added $10,000, which is a real line in the budget rather than a rounding error when you shop listings nationally.
Lot rent at Island Cove is $865 a month and does not include utilities. She has propane for hot water and cooking, plus electricity and water, and says all of it runs low.
The reason those numbers matter is where they are.
"Being on a fixed income, this is the only way that I could live in Durango, and I'm very fortunate to live in such a beautiful place. Homes here are well over a million dollars, most of them, so there's no way that I would ever be able to afford to live like that."
About the Sponsor
Disclosure: this video tour was sponsored by Bluetti.
Bluetti makes portable power stations and home backup systems. The unit in the video is the Elite 400, with a 3,800 watt hour capacity and a 2,600 watt rated output. It charges from a wall outlet, a car charger, a generator or solar panels. The sponsored segment is read by the host of the tour rather than by Priscilla.
You can see the Bluetti Elite 400 here, and the discount code is TINYH5OFF.
What She Would Tell You
The bathroom surprised her by being bigger than she expected, with a counter, a shelf, a flushing toilet and a tub as well as a shower. She uses the tub after a cold day, and to wash the dog. A combination washer dryer sits in the hallway, and the community has a shared machine for anything too big for it. Outside there is a patio behind a privacy fence, a shed, some flowers and a hummingbird feeder.
None of this is where she expected to be.
"I never ever imagined that I'd be living in a tiny home at this point in my life, but I also never imagined I'd live in an RV for 3 and 1/2 years. So, all these things have led me to be where I am today, and I feel like Durango is just where I'm meant to be."
"If you have a dream and you want to live that dream, then you need to go take a chance and try things. And sometimes you'll hit obstacles, but if you just keep working and pushing through, you finally get to where you want to be."
For how her $865 compares, our lot rent guide collects what 12 real communities charge. If a loft is not for you at all, five homes with no loft show the alternatives, and you can see what we have filmed in your state.
FAQ
Can you get a tiny home with stairs instead of a ladder?
Yes, and for Priscilla it was a condition of buying. She would not look at a home that reached the loft by ladder, so stairs narrowed her search from the start. Her loft holds a queen mattress with room to sit up, and she calls it one of her favorite parts of the house.
How much does it cost to ship a tiny home across the country?
Priscilla's home was built in Virginia and delivered to southwest Colorado, and the transport cost $10,000 on top of the $96,000 home. That is worth knowing if you are shopping listings nationally rather than locally, because the delivery is a real line in the budget rather than a rounding error.
Can you live in a tiny home on a fixed income?
Priscilla does, in a town where she says most houses sell for well over a million dollars. Her lot rent is $865 a month and utilities are separate, with propane for hot water and cooking plus electricity and water. She describes it as the only way she could afford to live in Durango.
What is lot rent in a tiny home community?
It is the monthly rent for the site your home sits on, and what it covers varies by community. Priscilla pays $865 a month at Island Cove and utilities are not included. Her community also has a shared washer and dryer for larger loads like comforters.
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