With 178.5K posts on TikTok, #tinyhomes has long been a fascination in internet culture.
As the housing market becomes increasingly tumultuous, the younger generation is increasingly turning to alternative ways of living to save cash, whether that looks like refurbishing an old canal boat or living in an old VW van.
Married couple Destiny and Brianna DeJesus have gone viral for doing just that.
Branding themselves as ‘2 wives 1 pup in a Tiny Home’, they’ve accumulated 2,660 Instagram followers on @lezgo_tiny, sharing the inside-out of their day-to-day lives living in a tiny home on wheels.
First meeting in 2016, the pair moved into an apartment in Texas together after two years of dating.
However, their rent quickly catapulted, increasing from $740 (£585) to $1,400 (£1,108) in four years. As such, they became increasingly interested in exploring the concept of home ownership.
This, though, proved an expensive option: the pair wanted the flexibility to travel, with Destiny writing in an article with Insider that ‘we weren’t interested in spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to put down roots in a single location.’
And so, their 399-square-foot tiny home on wheels was purchased for $90,000 (£71,230).
But it isn’t as cheap as it seems: taking a loan out to cover the cost of buying outright, the couple will likely be paying almost $100,000 (£79,000) including interest.
‘This price doesn’t include how much we pay to rent the land we park on, utilities and maintenance’, Destiny added, noting that house removal companies can often prove expensive, with the couple having shelled out in excess of $2,000 (£1,582) to move their tiny home from Los Angeles to Portland.
‘Our next move will likely cost us over $8,000 (£6,331) to go from Portland to Texas’, Destiny writes.
Maintaining a tiny home can come with unexpected costs, too. The pair recently had to replace their shower door with a curtain after it randomly shattered.
‘Just another friendly reminder that tiny house living is far from glamorous’, the pair wrote, sharing a video of their floor littered with smashed glass from the shower.
In an attempt to cut costs ahead of another move, the pair opted for a shower curtain as a temporary solution.
In another similar situation, their door suffered from the rainy weather and needed a swift replacement.
‘Bc the house didn’t come with any type of awning, the door is now swelling, causing it to be hard af to close so we purchased an awning from Amazon to help,’ the couple shared in another Instagram post.
But, all in all, Destiny and Brianna are thriving in their tiny home lives. ‘We wouldn’t trade it for any other lifestyle,’ the pair wrote.
‘It’s been one of the most challenging things either one of us has done.
‘Things break and need to be repaired, money has to be spent.
‘But we chose this life, so we’ve dedicated our page to teaching people about the real deal when it comes to going tiny.
‘At the end of the day, we need to see more people of colour in this movement.’
This article was originally published on June 30, 2023.
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