Man Living in a 10'x10' Tiny House & Homesteading in the City

MAT: Hello everyone, in this video we will meet with Rob Greenfield. He is a truly inspiring guy and now lives in a small

house

that he built for only $1,500 USD using salvaged materials. In this video, Rob will give us a complete tour and explain how all the systems work because in addition to building the

tiny

house

, he also collects rainwater, grows and harvests 100% of his food, uses a biodigester to create fuel and much more. On top of this, he's doing all of this in an urban backyard. We'll also ask him about the challenges and benefits of his super-sustainable lifestyle.

So stay tuned because there's a lot of good stuff in this video. ROB: I really strive to live simply and that's why, for me, this little house and this farm that I've created allows me to live the simple life that I want. I have no bills, no debt, no car, no driver's license and really a lot of that is possible because this small property allows me to meet the basic needs that I have and really stops me from trying too hard to want more and more. having more than I can ever need. I have food, I have water, I have electri

city

, the little I need; and I can live a pretty quiet and content life here.

So this is the house here. It's quite small as you can see. It's about 100 square feet, 10'x10' and one of the most important things for me when I decided I was going to build a

tiny

house was that I wanted to do it in a way that had as little impact as possible. could. So for me what that meant was using reused materials. So this was built with about 99% secondhand and repurposed materials and I made it for about $1,500 dollars. One of my big goals in

living

simply and sustainably is to really make it accessible to other people and help them be able to live in a similar way if they want to.

So I see some of these really expensive tiny houses that might cost $100,000 to $150,000 and my goal is to show the other end of the spectrum of how simple it can be, how affordable it can be and do it in a way that really minimize our environmental impact. I'll take you inside, but you know, 100 square feet, it's pretty small. I live in Orlando, Florida, in a very urban area. I am about 3 kilometers from the center. So the way I designed this house was to really fit into the neighborhood. I didn't want something that really stood out. Since tiny houses aren't legal in many places and I'm not going to put them on wheels.

So what I decided to do was build it to be basically like a shed and that's how I actually designed it. So what I used was mainly materials left over from construction sites. So I'm using basic 2x4s and plywood. I used palettes as a base. The roof is just basic metal. These are second hand materials, I got from Craigslist for the windows, same for the doors. As for construction, it was a very simple design. Basically, I researched sheds online and then tailored them to my needs. You know that sheds don't usually have that many windows and doors that big, for example.

Here in Florida, we face extremely hot weather during the summer. So one of my main challenges was to design this in a way that could withstand our heat, our hot, humid summers. So one of the biggest things was to leave the roof open so you could have a breeze, a cross breeze, that just comes in here, same thing with the windows and doors on both sides. There can always be a nice breeze blowing through here. Obviously I don't have air conditioning and I don't even have insulation. I used burlap just as a cover and the only thing it really is is that it makes it look better, so it's not plywood on the other side, but there's no insulation there.

So this is really designed for heat in the summers and the winter is a little harsh because I don't have a stove or insulation, but the winter here is short and I ran it through my first winter. Other things, the bed is mainly designed with 2x4 scraps from construction and this is the floor of a house that flooded, the same goes for the floor down here. I got this off Craigslist. It was a floor of a house that had flooded and it was material that was not damaged but they were still getting rid of it. The desk is built from pallets and leftover 2x4s.

Most of the things I didn't build I could find used. I bought this chair for $15, for example, at a garage sale. The shelves are from Habitat for Humanity, pretty basic things, pretty simple. You can see there just isn't much here. I always find it a little difficult to take tours because very little happens here. But what's really happening is the food. I am currently doing a project where for a year I will grow and collect 100% of my food. So what this house really is is a capsule for my food. I have pumpkins here that I grew last summer.

They are called Seminole pumpkins. These are all ferments like honey wine, vinegars and ginger beer, jun and so on. A small library of books, many of them about growing food. More food down here. If I come back here, this will be another one of my food storage shelves. I have a lot of honey. I have 4 hives, 2 here and 2 somewhere else. Last fall I bought 75 pounds of honey. It's been enough for me. It's a very important part of what I do and then I forage a lot, so there's citrus here, oranges, grapefruits and lemons. There are papayas here.

I grow them in my garden and have many of my staples down here. So, pigeon peas coming from my front garden, pumpkin seeds, lots of herbs, like onion and dried garlic. I have things like my coconut oil that I make with coconuts that I forage and salt from the ocean. So the purpose of

living

here in Orlando for 2 years and having this little house is part of this project of growing and harvesting 100% of my food for a year. So that's really what this whole house is based on. I live pretty simply, with pretty minimal things. This is my clothing rack right here.

All my clothes fit comfortably on 1 shelf. These are some of my personal possessions here. As for hygiene, I don't need many things: a bamboo toothbrush; a chew stick, which is an alternative way to clean your teeth; some essential oils; floss; Not much, pretty basic stuff. In my last tiny house I lived off the grid, so I had solar panels for my electrical needs and I wasn't connected to water utilities. For this project, I decided to connect to municipal electri

city

. One of the main reasons is the chest freezer. So I keep a lot of food here, things like cactus fruits.

Bags of stuff I'm trying to save. This is Roselle, for example. It is important to be able to store large quantities of food. This is cassava, for example. One of my staple crops. The thing about the chest freezer is that it only uses about three dollars a month in electricity, but I can store about 200 pounds of food. I only have one extension cord running from the property I'm on and I'm using less than $10 a month total. I was originally going to do solar panels, but I lived here for about 2 years and realized that I didn't really feel like the trade-off of spending the money on solar and having them for a short period of time was really good. necessary and I felt that it is actually more sustainable to be connected to the grid for the little electricity I use rather than doing something like buying new solar panels.

So I only have 3 outlets to minimize the amount of electricity I can use. My computer is something I use a lot, a lamp and other basic things. Under the bed, this is where I keep things, there is plenty of room to store things. A lot of this is also food-oriented. One of the most important things is my bee boxes. Honey is great for when not in use, just very basic storage. I would have a bed on the floor, but that's kind of the key to this storage. In an ideal situation, I would like to have a loft, but this time it didn't work out.

The bed works like a couch or my bed, you just take it out like this and I have my bed and then I put it back in, there's the couch. It's not always that simple or easy, but there is a screen behind it so you can see that this place is very open. I don't have screens on the windows so I have a screen. At night I put it on top. I don't have to worry about mosquitoes at night. They get pretty tough here in the summer. I'll probably put mosquito nets on the window and a net here and then put mosquito nets there because last summer was pretty tough.

I decided not to do it on wheels because I don't really want to move around a small house and because a trailer would have been the most expensive part. So I built it right here on pallets and it's going to stay here. That's practically the inside of the house. I don't spend most of my time inside my house. I spend more time in my community, in my garden, and in my outdoor kitchen. So I'll take you outside now. This is my outdoor kitchen behind me and I spend a lot of my time here. On a normal day, you might make breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

One of my favorite parts about this is that I drink rainwater, so I'm not on the grid for water. I have access to a hose, but 99% of the water I use here comes from rainwater collection. I harvested on the roof of the small house, and then to drink water, it directly enters here, and pure, delicious and fresh drinking water comes out. Behind me is a barrel and I fill it with water from the property owner's roof harvest. To have more surface area to harvest and this is just a gravity fed sink so there's no electricity or anything like that.

It just comes out using gravity, using the weight of the water in the barrel, and then the water, when I release it, just goes down instead of going into a sewage system to become a waste product that someone else has to deal with. It just goes down the tube and then out the back, where I planted different water-loving plants: bananas, for example, and taro. I have a few ways to cook. I have a solar oven that I need to start using more now that it will be summer and my backyard is quite shady. And now that it's summer, there will be more sun, so I'll start using it more.

I have 2 stoves. I have a regular propane stove and I fill a 5 gallon or 20 pound propane tank and that's what I'm currently using. And I also have a biodigester that converts food waste into methane that I can cook with. That hasn't been able to produce as much as I need. So I still need to keep my propane stove. I hope to make that work to the point where I can be completely independent of fossil fuels, but for now I'm still using propane. So I can also cook with firewood. It's just wood that I collect from the neighborhood from fallen trees or heat treated pallets that is clean for cooking and if I have a big project like boiling a lot of salt water, I will use it.

I would like to have a rocket stove, but I haven't been able to make one yet. This is where the biodigester is. So the food waste just goes down here and it's basically like a stomach. The bacteria here create methane as one of the byproducts of things breaking down. The methane is collected here in this bladder. And then this is pressed, it goes through a little tube that goes underground to my stove. That's one way I deal with food waste. Another way is here and this is the compost bin. So the compost bin is extremely simple.

It is one of the simplest forms of compost bins out there. It's just chicken wire wrapped in a circle and this is a way of not putting my burden on others, of not throwing food waste into the landfill where methane is produced. But instead, it becomes healthy, nutritious soil that I can then use to grow more food. So here you have one of my favorite plants. If it's not my favorite plant in the backyard, this is my toilet paper. It is called blue spur flower. It has many common names and not only does it smell great because it belongs to the mint family.

But it is actually one of the softest plants you can imagine. So I grow my own toilet paper. I haven't bought toilet paper in about 5 years and I just come here, pick some up and then go to the bathroom. The surprising thing is that this stays in good condition after being in the plant for a while. I've had it here for 5 days and it's still soft and strong. That brings me to the compost toilet. I've mentioned it a couple of times already, but in reality my lifestyle is designed not to place my burdens elsewhere, but to take things that would otherwise be a waste product and use them to add fertility to the world, make the world a better place. place.

Pooping and peeing is something that many of us are basically scared of and think is horrible, but it's not. It's something we've been doing for millions and millions of years and it can be addressed in a way that is environmentally responsible and that actually allows us to produce food. I have a pretty simple system here. This side is for urine. This is only used for nitrogen and isreally excellent for plants like bananas, papayas and is diluted with water. Mainly fruit trees, bushes and so on. For the poop, I just use sawdust as a means of covering it and then there's a 5 gallon bucket under here.

It is then converted into fertilizer. It's called Humanure and it's supposed to be composted for a year; and then that can be used to fertilize fruit trees and so on. This is the compost toilet, a very simple system. Everything probably costs between $30 and $40, something like that. Most of them are leftover construction materials. So next I want to take you to the shower. I shower with rainwater. It's really my favorite way to shower. This is a fairly simple system. I am using a 275 gallon bag. This is at the owner's house because I want to maximize my rainwater collection.

Hundreds of square feet capture quite a bit of rain, but this home captures a more basic and fairly simple rainwater shower. What I love about this shower is that there is no waste of water. All I'm doing is slowing down the water from the sky until the moment it hits the ground and then actually this water is watering a banana tree that I recently planted and that will hopefully grow into many and all That treats the gray water and I hope it grows bananas for me. You may be wondering how can I get around? Transport? A bicycle.

One of the keys is to have a bike rack here to throw baskets and carry what I need. I also have a trailer that can haul 300 pounds. So I got rid of my car about 6 years ago. I haven't had a car for seven years and I do most of what I have to do on my bike and with the trailer. Alright, I'll take you to the garden and one of the most common questions is: How does this work? How do you live here? Do you own the land? Do you rent? and so what I'm doing is a work exchange.

There are millions of unused backyards across America and what I decided to do is find a way that I could benefit and serve someone else and meet my basic needs at the same time. So I found someone here in Orlando who had always wanted to grow their own food and live more sustainably and the trade-off is that I turned their entire front yard into a garden and set up rainwater harvesting and composting and all this stuff. . to help them live more sustainably and be able to eat their own homegrown food, in exchange for me using the backyard.

This is the same thing I did when I lived in San Diego. It has been a great setup that allows me to live without a single bill in my name, without debt, and to live very simply while being of service to others. That's all it is. It's about how we can meet other people's needs. So this is the garden. I have 6 gardens spread around Orlando and spend a lot of my time here. It's amazing how much it grows in a small space. I'm an environmental activist and adventurer with a fairly simple mission of trying to make the world around me a happier, healthier place.

I do extreme adventures and activism campaigns to really capture people's attention and get them thinking about important environmental and social issues that we often don't think about. One of my big projects was Trash Me, in which I lived like the average American for a month, but I had to use every piece of trash I produced, to create a picture of how much trash a single person produces. I have toured the United States 3 times on a bamboo bike, raising awareness about sustainability. I had reduced my life to just 111 possessions and for 2 years I traveled with everything I had on my back to make people really think.

The more I have basically simplified my life, the less needs I have, the more I can help meet other people's needs, the more I can truly live in service to others. So I really love the setup that I have created here because it creates the foundation for meeting my most basic needs so that I can dedicate my time to helping others, inspiring others, educating others to live in a way that is better for the world. , better. for the Earth, better for our communities and better for ourselves. Many people think that by living with so little, they think you are giving up things.

And then you know the question of why I choose to have so little. Well, it's the opposite of that. I discovered that the more I surrendered, the more superfluous things I didn't need, the more space I opened up to live with more purpose, more passion to do the things I really want. do. So the reason I live with less is so I can live with more so I can spend time with the people I love. So I can spend time doing the things I love and so I can live the life I want instead of a life based on making money to buy more things, insure them, clean them, maintain them or organize them.

That's what it's about living with less in order to have more life. I have no desire to feed any illusion that life is easy and that no matter what life we ​​choose to live, there are challenges behind it. This lifestyle of living simply and really trying to take responsibility for all my actions and how they affect the world around me. It's a challenge, there's no doubt about it. I face many challenges daily. Just to name a few: it's constant maintenance. Whether it's emptying the compost toilet or filling my rainwater system or filling my water purification system or time in the garden, whether it's maintaining it or the amount of harvest or conservation.

I find that a small house tends to get a little messier because I don't have a lot of storage space. So I find myself cleaning quite frequently, but the good news is that the cleanup is pretty short. It doesn't take long to clean a small 100 square foot house. Living this outdoor life with no air conditioning and no heat means I am more at the mercy of the weather. Sometimes I am cold in winter and hot in summer. So that's a challenge. But I have decided not to outsource that load to the air conditioning. Which means burning huge amounts of fossil fuels.

So it's worth it, but it's a challenge. Bugs are a challenge here in Florida and they don't even have mosquito nets. Last summer I was bitten by a lot of mosquitoes. That's been a challenge, and with outdoor cooking, bugs are too. I would like to upgrade and put a screen around my outdoor kitchen to help with that this summer. So I constantly face challenges living with much less money. Last year I made $8,000. The year before, it was $5,000. So I live with very little money. That has its challenges. I really have to take care of what I'm doing.

And sometimes it definitely means doing without things that, at the moment, I would like. But this is all part of the bigger picture that this is the life I want to live and the challenges are all part of creating the lifestyle I want, which is to live simply, sustainably and be an example to other people. who have the desire to live that way. So there's no doubt it's a challenge, but the challenges are definitely worth it. MAT: I hope you enjoyed this video. If you want to follow Rob, you can watch him on his YouTube channel.

I'll put a link in the description of this video. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our channel. We publish a new video every week about people trying all kinds of alternative lifestyles.