This week, I’m excited to catch up with my friend Laura LaVoie. Laura and Matt were early tiny house bloggers that I followed while building my own house, and they really embody what I see as the tiny house lifestyle- going beyond what it means to just live in a tiny house and changing the entire course of their lives. Stick around!
In This Episode:
The “why-to” vs the “how-to” of the tiny house lifestyle
Altered plans make the house custom
The Zen of building a tiny house
Living tiny influences the rest of your life
Building a tiny house is an adventure
What a tiny house can and can't fix in your life
Do you have to live in a tiny home in order to live mindfully?
Can you make a poorly-designed space work for you?
Laura M. LaVoie is a writer currently living in Decatur, Georgia with her partner, Matt, and their cat, Toast. In 2012, after working as a recruiter for 15 years, Laura quit her job to move to the mountains of Western North Carolina. Things changed again in the summer of 2018 when Matt was accepted into the Emory University School of Law. Their return to Atlanta, where they lived for almost 10 years before, marked the next adventure for two people who have a hard time sitting still.
She's been a figure in the Tiny House movement since she and Matt built their own 120 square foot tiny home near Asheville, North Carolina. They began their project in 2009 and Laura wrote about the experience on her blog, Life in 120 square feet. They have also traveled around the country to speak about tiny homes at conferences and festivals. Laura really prefers to focus on the philosophy of tiny living: not the how-to, but the why to.
Tiny House Decisions is the super helpful guidebook that I wrote 5 years ago to share all of the knowledge and decisions that I made to build my own tiny house, along with what I did right, what I did wrong, and how I would change things. The guidebook, now in its second edition, has been completely rewritten and expanded to reflect how tiny houses are being built today and it also includes several new tiny house stories from other tiny house dwellers. The guidebook has been expanded to include things like SIPs, metal framing, and different types of insulation, and I seriously think this is the most helpful thing you can buy if you are thinking about living in a tiny house. If you go through the guidebook from start to finish, you will have a solid plan for all the systems and everything else that’s going to go into your tiny house. The second edition has been a long time in the making and I’m really excited to share it with the world.
