Reclaiming in a BIG way for a tiny house!

When we build you a home on wheels at Seattle Tiny Homes, we take our relationship with you as a customer very seriously. While other builders may have forgotten what it means to craft beautiful, fully personalized homes that are meant to last a lifetime, you are who we’re thinking of every morning when we turn on the lights in our shop.

It only makes sense that our customers should get a custom product tailored to fulfill their unique goals. Our commitment to personalizing has made for some interesting stories at Seattle Tiny Homes and our journey. One of these recent customization stories began over a hundred years ago in a hardwood forest in Mississippi.

The Old Barn…

Many years ago, a young family moved to rural Mississippi for a fresh start, raising cattle and tilling the soil. Needing a barn, they sawed out planks from the surrounding hardwood glades and built a cozy home for their livestock and machinery. A couple generations later, the family moved away and the farm, with the barn, was sold.

Farming techniques and land use changed with time, and the old barn fell into disuse. The sweet smell of fresh hay, the swish of a contented cow’s tail, and the laughter of playing children only survived in childhood memories… as the lonely barn began to lean with the wind, stalls vacant and its corrugated roofing swinging askew.

But a new day, and a new life for those old boards was soon to dawn.

Bringing memories into the present….

A relative of a recent client of ours, who cherished those memories of carefree days at play in the hayloft, decided to do something with the barn before it completely collapsed and rotted away. She spent the better part of September 2016 reclaiming the weathered white oak and other mixed hardwoods from it. With permission of the barn’s current owner, she and her family and friends painstakingly dismantled it board by board.  Those planks were then trucked out to the West Coast for use as flooring in a new home.

Material left over from that project was kindly gifted to our client, thus keeping it in the extended family. It’s the memories and family connection with those wizened planks that makes them so special, after all. That, and they’re gorgeous—functional art at its finest!

Living and working in urban Western Washington, our client needed a place to unwind, to rest and refresh her soul. That’s when she came to us with ideas for a tiny home to park on the shores of Lake Chelan. This would be her retreat.

 

 The custom retreat…

Built on a 34’ fifth-wheel trailer and based on our most popular plan—the Alki—our client’s tiny home is exactly the way she wants it. A kitchen to fit her cooking style, built-in desk space for work and meals, and a layout with room for a full sofa… these were just a few of the personalized details that we made a reality. Lots of windows line the walls, opening the space up to the great outdoors and the stunning views surrounding Lake Chelan.

We were even able to fit a bedroom over the trailer hitch, with room for a queen-sized bed and the headspace to stand up and walk around. A custom butler door crafted from remnants of the family barn beautifully privatizes this sleeping space at the top of the steps from the rest of the house. Windows and doors are framed with the barnwood throughout, and the paneled ceiling tops it all off.

While everything about this house meets our exacting standards of durability, livability, and beauty, this home’s crowning feature is its original, reclaimed barnwood trim.

Like the unique lines creasing the palm of your hand, these old boards tell a story, one all the more special because it’s a story of peaceful play, of the fruits of agrarian toil, and the longevity of family ties. Like the knot holes in the door casing, the beetle tunnel running through the sill on the kitchen window, and the nail holes peppered about, none of us is perfect, but we’re all beautiful, and we all have a story to tell.

You may not have an old barn in the family, but there are a thousand other ways to write your story with a custom tiny home of your dreams.

Get in touch and let’s get started planning today!