Ethan Waldman 0:00

Don't underestimate the appeal of tiny houses. I had literally no idea. I knew that people were going to want to stay in a tiny house. I had no idea that it was going to book literally, or, almost immediately.

Welcome to the Tiny House Lifestyle Podcast, the show where you learn how to plan, build and live tiny lifestyle. I'm your host, Ethan Waldman. And this is episode 122 with... me! Yes, this is going to be a solo episode. It's been a little while. It's actually been quite a long while since I've done a solo episode. But I have some updates for you. And I thought I could do a show about it.

So as you may or may not know, I have been experimenting with Airbnb in my tiny house since the middle of May. So it's been about a month and a half. And I wanted to do a show where I answer your questions and talk about really what it's been like turning my personal tiny house into an Airbnb, what some of the design issues or things that I just might do differently or might have done differently if I had known that this tiny house would eventually become a rental, and just some general reflections about what it's like being an Airbnb host. And for those of you who asked me and believe me, a lot of you asked me, yes, I will talk about what we do with the poop, how the compost toilet works in a tiny house, Airbnb.

I want to tell you about something that I think will be super helpful as you plan, design and build your tiny house. Tiny House Decisions is the guide that I wish I had when I was building my tiny house. It comes in three different packages to help you on your unique Tiny House journey. And if you're struggling to just figure out the systems for your tiny house, you know, like how you're going to heat it, how you're going to plumb it, you know what construction technique are you going to use like SIPs or stick framing or steel framing, Tiny House Decisions will take you through all these processes systematically, and help you come up with a design that works for you. Right now I'm offering 20% off any package of Tiny House Decisions. For listeners of the show, you can head over to thetinyhouse.net/THD to learn more, and use the coupon code tiny at checkout for 20% off any package. Again, that's thetinyhouse.net/THD and use the coupon code tiny for 20% off.

All right, well, let's jump into it. I'll just start with some basics. So one of the first questions I got from Pansy is, "Where is this tiny house? I would like to rent and check it out if tiny homes are for me." And Pansy, that's awesome. I have already rented the house to a few people who have expressed desire to build or live in a tiny house and that they found staying in my tiny house to be really helpful in terms of helping them figure out what they wanted. And so to answer your question, the tiny house is in Shelburne, Vermont, which is just about a 10 to 15 minute drive south of Burlington, Vermont, which is where I live.

And so the reason that I moved the tiny house to Shelburne in order to Airbnb it, there's a couple reasons. First, again, it's only about 10 or 15 minutes from where I live. And I knew that I wanted to be able to be on hand to deal with any issues. I'm also doing most of the cleaning either me or my wife, and we're doing most of the cleanings ourselves. And just having it nearby was more important to us. And most importantly, the place where it was parked before, the owners of that property did not want us to listed on Airbnb, so it wasn't even an option for us. And the reasons for that are numerous, liability being one and privacy being the other. But my new host actually also Airbnbs her house or a part of her house and is happy to have us there. And we pay her a fixed monthly rent for the parking spot. The parking spot includes water, and electrical and internet all from the main house. And there actually was a tiny house previously in this spot. She used to rent to a different tiny house dweller. So a lot of these hookups were already there.

But I did need to have the house moved about 50 miles in order to get it into the new spot. And I opted to hire a professional driver to do that. I posted a I basically help wanted ad on Front Porch Forum, which is kind of a local email listserv thing we have here in Vermont. And I got lots of responses and ultimately picked someone and he did it for $500. And just to give you a sense of, you know, is that expensive is that cheap, I actually reached out to One Call Logistics, who is a professional Tiny House mover that I had on the show a year or two ago, and their quote, to do the move was over $1,000. And so going with somebody local, was certainly more financially beneficial. Of course, when you hire a professional driver through a moving service, you're you're probably getting better insurance, better coverage, liability, that kind of stuff. But you know, I took the chance and and it worked out, okay. Also my tiny house insurance that I have, through, Insure My Tiny House, or Big Foot, that they have a bunch of different names, and I'll link to the company in the show notes for this episode. That tiny house policy actually has a writer that covers moves, so I'm actually able to let them know that the house is moving and and the house, the insurance will apply to the house while it's being moved.

Once the house was in place, I had to do you know all the normal things that you have to do to take up a tiny house, I needed to get a potable water hose and hook it up to the water spigot run that into the tiny house. Even though there was electrical in the barn that I'm parked by, I needed to wire up a new 30 amp plug for the house. For some reason the previous tiny house dweller had taken their plug with them when they left. So there was the wire was there, but the plug wasn't so so I had to do some wiring of a new 30 amp plug. And I had to build a compost bin.

And that's because my tiny house has a compost toilet. It is the classic Joe Jenkins style humanure toilet. And that is the system that we're using. And don't worry, I'm gonna go into much more detail about how that all works. But I'm just trying to give you the basics. The house moved in the middle of May, and I worked pretty much full time for about a week getting everything set up or as set up as I could. And we listed it on Airbnb on May 19. And we had a guest over the weekend on May 20. Don't underestimate the appeal of tiny houses. I had literally no idea. I knew that people were going to want to stay in a tiny house. And I also know that Vermont is a popular place for people to travel in the summer. I had no idea that it was going to book literally, or almost, immediately. That was a very pleasant surprise.

So let's get to our first listener question. I actually put out an email asking for people to either write in questions or to record questions. And we got a recorded question from actually a friend of the show Chris from Tiny Industrial. So here is Chris's question.

Chris Schapdick 8:27

How do you deal with liability aspects of renting out the tiny house? Not that tiny houses are inherently dangerous, but you have things like loft bedrooms and so forth that could cause injury. I know Airbnb offers some type of umbrella protection policy. But Is that sufficient? And what do you do in your particular scenario?

Ethan Waldman 8:52

Chris, that's an awesome question. So a couple of things. Yes, my tiny house does have a ladder, and a loft with a fairly low ceiling height. So you definitely can't stand up in the loft. And for most people, you'll have to kind of crawl around. So I make sure that in the listing, this is prominently displayed, and that I try to make sure that people know that there is a loft and ladder. And knowing that people don't actually read they just kind of look at the pictures. When somebody goes to book the tiny house, there's actually a setting that you can turn on that says "Require the guest to essentially answer a question or to type a message to you" and what we have is something along the lines of "please acknowledge that you understand that there is a ladder to the sleeping area with low ceiling height and that there is a compost toilet". We try to cover both bases of making sure that the guest tells us that they're comfortable with both of those things.

And so that covers kind of just the customer service guest expectation side, but about the liability. So our insurance policy on the tiny house that that comes through My Strategic Insurance actually covers rentals, and it has a liability piece to the policy. So, in theory, course, I've never had to test this, our tiny house homeowners insurance would cover us in the event of an injury or some other mishap at the house, as well as protecting the house itself from from damage from renters. So that's the first piece.

The second piece is yes, as you alluded, Airbnb recently kind of revamped their insurance offering, it's called Air Cover. And according to Airbnb, it's top to bottom protection, always included, always free. It's a million dollar liability insurance policy and a million dollar damage protection policy. They also are, I think they're trying to encourage hosts to allow people to bring pets, so they offer pet damage protection, and some other protections. I have not had to use Air Cover at all. I have had already a couple of situations where guests have broken things in the house. Most notably, I think the second guest that I had the second guests that I had put the electric tea kettle on the gas stove and turned it on. Luckily, they figured it out pretty quickly, but it ruined the gas stove. And you can actually submit kind of a claim within Airbnb. And it asks the guests to reimburse you for the damages. And if they accept the payment goes right through Airbnb, and it goes right into whatever payment method you have set. If the guest refuses to pay, which obviously hasn't happened to me, that's apparently, the way that you start that Air Cover process is by just kind of filing a claim within the app. Again, I've not had to test this out. So this is all just in theory. But those are the first two pieces, so the tiny house insurance, and then the Airbnb insurance. And that's actually one of the big reasons that we stay with Airbnb and that we booked directly through Airbnb is that having that additional insurance coverage and protection gives us a real peace of mind.

The third thing is that we actually set up a an LLC for the tiny house. This was the advice of my accountant essentially to protect our other assets from any potential liability. So the tiny house has its own LLC, it's actually Tiny House Lifestyle LLC registered here in Vermont. And our lease with our landlord actually lists the LLC as the tenant. Airbnbs payments to us to a business checking account that is specific to that LLC. And again, what that does is it limits the liability. So if something goes wrong with the tiny house, someone has a problem someone sues us, they're suing the LLC, rather than than me personally.

And then the last piece is that I do have my own umbrella insurance policy, which is something that you can usually do through whoever provides you with with auto and home insurance. You can get what's called an umbrella policy that just covers whatever, any additional liability. So we're fairly conservative about insurance. We like to have insurance. And I think that we've done as best a job as we can, covering our liability in terms of Airbnbing the tiny house. Again, haven't had to test it out hope that we never do. But that is how we deal with the liability piece with having guests in the tiny house.

All right, so I don't want to make you wait any longer so let's get to it. The toilet. As you may remember from past podcast interviews, my tiny house has a sawdust bucket style toilet as described by I'm Joe Jenkins in the invaluable Humanure Handbook. If you aren't familiar with that style of toilet, I highly recommend checking out my interview with Joe Jenkins That's episode number 54. You can find it in your podcast app or at thetinyhouse.net/054. And in that episode, we talk about that system why Joe thinks it's better than the commercial composting toilets out there. And why you shouldn't call it a composting toilet. Because the composting doesn't actually happen in the toilet, the composting happens outside.

Anyhow, I thought about changing my toilet from this bucket style toilet to one of the commercial compost toilets. But I'm actually glad that I didn't. And that's because with the commercial compost toilets, most of them require that you separate solid and liquid waste. So even if you're a guy, you have to sit down, you have to make sure the pee goes into kind of the front hole of this toilet and then the solids goes into the back. And if someone pees in the wrong spot, it's gross, it's a mess, and it needs to get cleaned out. Whereas my sawdust toilet is able to be used pretty similarly, pretty much like a regular toilet, except that instead of flushing the toilet with water, the guest is flushing -well they're not flushing, they're putting in two or three big scoops of sawdust on top of whatever just went in there in order to absorb excess moisture and just cover up any smells that come from the toilet. And we are a month and a half into it have 15 five star reviews. So far there have been no complaints about the compost toilet. So it really, it really doesn't smell.

But let me give you a sense of what the system is like, when when we were using the house ourselves. We didn't line the buckets at all, you know, so you have these five gallon, you know, we have Home Depot buckets, the orange ones, and it goes in the toilet, you add usually about a third of the way up in the bucket with sawdust to kind of start it off. And then when the bucket is starting to get full, you bring that out. You make kind of a little indentation into the compost bin into the hole or sorry, into the pile. You dump everything in there. And then it's really helpful to have a hose with water right at the compost area. So that's what we've got. We've got a hose there, we got some dish soap, we have a toilet brush, you give the bucket a rinse, you squirt some soap in, you swish around with the toilet brush, you rinse again and you dump it in. For us that worked great.

But given that we would be having Airbnb guests, and more importantly, we would potentially be having outside people having to clean the toilet bucket because, you know, while Anne and I are trying to do as many of the cleanings as we can right now, if we ever expand to a second tiny house rental, or simply when we go away, we actually do have someone local who we pay to clean the tiny house. And I wanted to make sure that the toilet system was was easy to use or easy to clean. So what we have found is using compostable trash can liners, I think they're eight gallon liners in the bucket makes the changing of the bucket and the cleanup even quicker because the bucket doesn't really need any scrubbing. In that case, the the liners, they're not completely waterproof, there's usually some urine kind of that seeps through the liner into the bottom of the bucket. But that's much easier to just rinse out. There's no scrubbing or getting sawdust that stuck to the side of the bucket or other things that are stuck to the side of the bucket. There's no scrubbing that needs to happen. So the liners have really helped us with that. And, and other than adding those liners we really haven't changed anything about how Joe Jenkins describes the compost process in Humanure Handbook. And if you go to the show notes page for episode 54 So again, that's thetinyhouse.net/054. You'll find a couple of YouTube videos that we embedded there from Joe Jenkins that kind of shows the general process of how to how to do the toilet.

I'd like to tell you a little bit more about Tiny House Decisions, my signature guide, and the resource that I wish I had when I was building my tiny house. It starts with the big decisions, which is, you know, should you build a tiny house yourself or with help? Is a is a prebuilt shell, a good idea? Is a house on wheels better than on the ground and what works better for you? Deciding on the overall size, deciding on whether you should use custom plans or pre made plans, different types of trailers and more. Then in in Part 2, we get into the system, so heat, water, showers, hot water, toilets, electrical, refrigeration, ventilation, and we're only two thirds of the way through the book at this point. From systems we go into construction decisions, talking about nails versus screws, SIPs versus stick framed versus advanced framing versus metal framing. We talk about how to construct a subfloor, sheathing, roofing materials, insulation, windows, flooring kitchen... I know I'm just reading off the table of contents. But I just want to give you a sense of how comprehensive Tiny House Decisions is. It's a total of 170 pages. It contains tons of full color drawings, diagrams and resources. And it really is the guide that I wish I had when I was building my tiny house. Right now I'm offering 20% off any package of Tiny House Decisions using the coupon code tiny, when you head over to thetinyhouse.net/THD. That's THD for Tiny House Decisions. Again, that's coupon code tiny when you check out at thetinyhouse.net/THD.

The last piece with the toilet is that it's not something that most people are familiar with. So we do have instructions for people. We actually have a whole house manual that is online. And people can just scan we have this card, they can scan the card with their phone, it's a QR code and it brings up the manual. One of the advantages to that is that we can update the manual and we don't have to like reprint it and put it in the tiny house, I can just make a quick update here. They're online and it's always up to date. But the very first section of the manual is how to use the compost toilet. We do provide a second bucket for guests. So outside of the tiny house by the compost area, there is a second clean bucket with a liner in it with sawdust in it. So should the guest start to fill up their bucket, they can switch to the other bucket. And we've only had that happen once most of our guests tend to stay one two or three nights. And that's really not enough time to fill the bucket. We did recently have a guest who stayed for five nights and they actually did switch buckets themselves and everything seemed to work fine. We also do obviously provide sawdust for the guests. So there's a nice metal bucket inside of the bathroom that we fill up with sawdust before each guest comes and you know if they run out of sawdust they're welcome to go and get more from there's there's a trash can that's covered outside again by the compost zone where they can get more sawdust.

So hopefully that provides you with some more details about the compost toilet I know a reader named John wrote in to ask how we handle the compost toilet. And and Emma also emailed asking about Nature's Head toilet. And you know if your tiny house already has a commercial compost toilet, I don't think that you have to change it over to a bucket style toilet. But I do encourage people to try the bucket style toilets before they invest the roughly $1,000 in in one of the commercial models.

I want to recommend one other interview on the toilet subject. This is my interview with Danielle LaRock and Jonathan Carnill. It's episode 104. They're actually operating a multi tiny home, I'm not going to call it a hotel, but they own multiple tiny homes on a property and they are doing short term rentals with all of them. And in our episode, which is again thetinyhouse.net/104, we go in depth about the toilets because they put the bucket toilets in all of their tiny homes. And so in that interview we do talk about why they prefer a simple bucket toilet over the commercial models so you have episode 104 a listen if you want even more perspective on the toilet stuff.

Right now I want to talk about design stuff, some things that are becoming apparent to me, Airbnb being the tiny house that I might not have thought of, when building my own personal tiny house. One of them is that, and I've talked about this before the tiny house, my tiny house doesn't really have a closet. So there isn't a good place for cleaning supplies, the mop, the broom, extra extra towels, extra sheets, those kinds of things that you might need for a rental. And we've made do with some space under the sink, there are there's quite a bit of space under the couch, that we've kind of come up with a system of bins where we keep extra sheets and towels. And then under the kitchen sink is where the cleaning supplies are. But I do continue to wish that there was more decent downstairs storage space. And if I was building a tiny house for Airbnb, I might even think about creating a lockable space somewhere in the house where you could lock those extra supplies and just keep them you know, away from guests. They don't need to be able to have access to the extra pillows, pillow chocolates or extra bottles of dish soap, or you know, those kinds of things. It hasn't been a problem so far. But that's just something that I that I thought about.

This one is an interesting one, which is a lot of the surfaces in my tiny house are wood. And for the lower touch surfaces, like the ceilings, we just pickled the pine. So pickling is it's a combination of latex paint and clear waterborne stain. So it's white paint mixed with stain and it gives the pine that kind of white ghostly look and prevents it from yellowing. It's not very wipeable. And even the surfaces that are a little bit higher touch like the countertops, the cabinet doors, even the little shelves in the bathroom, they are not like finished you a high gloss, they are they do have some kind of finish on them, I think we use some kind of poly finish, but they're not super glossy, they're kind of more matte. And now that the house is being used quite a bit more and used by guests who maybe aren't always as careful as as owners, and noticing that the surfaces are not, you know, they're not as easy to clean as they could be. And so if you're thinking about building a tiny house for rental purposes, or you just think that you're going to be really dirty, maybe you have young kids, think about those surfaces and using materials that are easy to clean, or you know, if you use wood, finishing that wood with a finish that's going to make it like easy to wipe easy to clean. Something that's not going to allow the wood to just like absorb moisture, absorb stains, and things like that.

Another issue with the design of my house is that for Anne and I we never really thought we would need AC. It's pretty cool in Vermont in the summer. But now that it's a rental, I just had to put an AC in it because it can get hot. And you know, we're providing customer service. We're doing we're in the hospitality industry now for this house. And we want our guests to be comfortable. So I didn't have a lot of options. Most of the windows in the house are casement or awnings. And so we had to put the AC in one of the two double hung windows that are by the couch. And we again we're limited in size of what we could fit in that window. Ultimately, we went with this kind of interesting U shaped air conditioner that is pretty efficient and pretty quiet because of that shape. And I've been happy with it. But as part of the process, I thought about what it would take to install a mini split so like a mini split heat pump that does AC and heat in the house. And the issue for us is that our house just isn't wired like the electricity box. The panel does not have the amperage or a mini split. And neither does the barn that we plug our tiny house into. If you have a mini split in your house, it's quite possible that you're going to need a 40 or 50 amp hookup for your house. And that's that's pretty heavy duty that not all houses have that extra capacity to kind of give to a tiny house, let alone the wiring run to a convenient location where you can install Box have to plug it in. So thinking about the power needs of the house. And you know, if you want AC, if you want that mini split heat pump, making sure that the tiny house at least is wired for that. So that way, you can either add it when you build it, which is what I would recommend, or, you know, at least so that you could add it down the road if it's not something that you want to add right now.

Because we don't have that mini split heat pump, our house is heated with propane. And this has actually been a little bit of a saga as well. I was able to find a local company to come and bring propane. First they brought one tank for us. Then they came back and they switched the one it was a I believe 100 gallon tank for two. Actually, no, it was a 50 gallon tank. And they got it all set up. And then as they were leaving, they said, you know, how far is your tiny house from the driveway, because if it's more than 100 feet, our truck isn't going to be able to reach the tank with the hose. And so I'm like oh no like because it's definitely 200 feet from the driveway. And so they actually had to come back, they swapped out the single 50 gallon tank for 2 25 gallon tanks, these are 100 pound 25 gallon tanks, similar to what I had. And what they're gonna have to do is come in and swap the tanks kind of by hand. In the winter, when one runs down, they'll come and and kind of change it out, which I'm not thrilled about. I wanted to get away from having the two smaller tanks and having to keep an eye on the propane, you know, the auto changeover regulator and making sure that I scheduled delivery in time. I was hoping that I would have like one bigger tank that they could just come monthly or so and top off. But because the house isn't parked close enough to the driveway that that vision isn't available. So the propane company is going to be delivering propane. You know, they'll use like a handcart they'll drag 100 pound tank over to the house, pick it up, take away the empty one, etc. So I am grateful to have a company doing that moving those tanks is not something that I physically can or want to do. And again, like proximity to roads proximity to being able to get deliveries like this is definitely something that you'll need to think about whether or not it's a rental even if you're going to be living in it. That's going to factor in you know where your parking spot is and the ability to get things delivered to it.

All right, so we've covered toilets. We've covered kind of the general stuff, design things that I might think about for for an easier Tiny House Airbnb experience. Let's get a couple more listener questions answered. The first we have here is from Dianne. Dianne says, "Ethan I'm very curious about this topic. I'm wondering how important is the kitchen space to potential renters?" Well, I think that the kitchen space is somewhat important. People do look for rentals that have kitchens, especially when they are staying more than one or two nights. I don't think that it has to be especially if it's a tiny house this like gourmet giant kitchen. But if you have it use it so in our listing, we talk about that. The kitchen has all the basics, you know pots, pans, utensils, tools that you would need to cook a meal, we provide a bottle of olive oil, salt, pepper, coffee, a coffee maker, tea, and just kind of play that up as a strength. I have said many times before that the kitchen in my tiny house is actually too big. And I think that some of that space could be better used as a closet or as more living space. So don't go overboard on your tiny house kitchen. make it usable, make it make it good for you, make it like what you would want and I'm sure that your guests also will like having it. I obviously don't know how much cooking my guests do but just based on seeing what dishes were used seeing what pots and pans have been moved. They've been doing fairly minimal cooking. Again Vermont is like a tourist destination people are sleeping at the tiny house. It looks like a lot of people cook breakfast I've seen a lot of egg shells, maybe an empty bacon package. Coffee gets brewed. But I haven't yet seen any, like evidence of any big meals being cooked in the house. So those small usable, but it doesn't have to be like a commercial kitchen inside the tiny house.

Another question here from Robert is, is there an advantage to adding a half bath to a large tiny house in addition to a full bath? Ah, I would imagine that if you had room to add a half bath to a tiny house, that that would be a fairly large, tiny house. I certainly don't have room in my tiny house to add a half bath. I think that if you have a tiny house that can sleep, maybe four people so it has two bedrooms, that could be beneficial. But given the fact that it is a tiny house, and there's probably not that much living space, I don't think it's worth the floor space to add a half bath when you have that full bath. And then you also probably have a kitchen sink. I mean, keep in mind in my tiny house, there's no bathroom sink. So the kitchen sink is the sink for everything. It's the sink for brushing your teeth. It's the sink for washing your dishes. It's it's the everything sink. And so I still think that a half bath a 1.5 bath tiny house could be overkill. If you really have the room for it and it plays well into your design and your your tiny house sleeps four or more people and give it a try.

Well, that is it for your questions. And for what I thought about. I'm sure I missed something. So if you have more questions, you can record a question for the show at thetinyhouse.net/ask/. You know, A-S-K, ask at thetinyhouse.net/ask. And I would love to incorporate more listener questions in future episodes of the show. So head over to thetinyhouse.net/ask to record a question for me. It doesn't have to be related to Airbnbing the tiny house. It could really be about anything Tiny House related, and I'll try to incorporate it into a future show.

Now I usually ask my guests for two or three resources. And so I just want to share two more past episodes of the show that have been super helpful for me in how I've kind of figured out how to create an Airbnb almost like an experience. And this is something that I'm still working on in my house. But the first one would be the episode that I did with the legendary Kristie Wolfe. That's episode 111. So thetinyhouse.net/111. Kristie created the most requested or most saved property ever on Airbnb. It's this tree house she built in Hawaii. She also has the famous Idaho potato Tiny House Hotel. She has a fire tower lookout that was converted into an Airbnb, super unique properties. And Kristie is just a pro at finding and converting these properties and doing it for really cheap. And so that's episode 111. I wouldn't miss that one.

And then in terms of of some of the details about how to set up the inside of the house, look to Episode 91 with Lauren Hudson and Chris Krieger. That's going to be at thetinyhouse.net/091. And they really talk about again creating that Airbnb experience, how to think from the perspective of your guests, and how to just set up your properties for success.

That's it for this episode. Again, if you have a question that you'd like to ask for a future show, you can do that at thetinyhouse.net/ask. Aain, thetinyhouse.net/ask. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this solo episode. We had no guests this week of the show. And you can find the show notes from today's episode including a complete transcript links to all the episodes that I talked about and more over at thetinyhouse.net/222. Again, that's thetinyhouse.net/222. Well, that's all for this week. I am your host Ethan Waldman, and I'll be back next week with another episode of the Tiny House Lifestyle Podcast.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai