If you enjoy exploring tiny homes then you’ll love meeting Rebecca and visiting the Keva Tiny House on Salt Spring Island. Rebecca designed and helped build her tiny home on this beautiful Island in Canada’s Pacific Northwest, and now she lives in it all year long. Salt Spring Island is nestled between the coast of Vancouver and Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. With its mild climate and naturally off-grid atmosphere, it’s no surprise that the tiny house movement is slowly taking hold there. Rebecca’s story is an inspiring one. Her intention in building this tiny home was to express her creativity, explore a whole new way of living, and to see what freedom that could open up for her. Her quest was to question all that was, or seemed “normal.”
She entered into this tiny house project as she does with all other projects – she jumped in without over-thinking it and without any expectations. She was just curious to see what the process would be like. She learned so much, especially from wrong turns and so-called mistakes, and she continues to evolve and grow with it even now that the tiny house has been built. Every day is a new adventure in her new tiny home, exploring the forest and paddling the oceans near her beautiful Salt Spring tiny home.
A big motivating factor behind the tiny house movement is money. Many people are turning to smaller living spaces because they’re more affordable to build, buy, and maintain, especially in comparison to larger houses. Imagine the total cost of a larger home, when you think of the initial price tag, the mortgage payments, interest, property taxes, electricity bills, heating bills, water bills, repair, and maintenance fees. Consider also having such a large place to clean regularly. It all adds up to money and time. What if you downsized? What if you built or bought a tiny home – or, better yet, a mobile tiny home? Most people don’t have to take out mortgages for tiny homes, or if they do, they’re able to pay them off quickly.
You can keep the cost low by repurposing materials and turning your tiny home project into a quest for low-cost materials. If it’s a portable tiny home, then you can plant it anywhere you wish – whether you buy a property somewhere or ask a friend or family member to host you on their land. This is what Rebecca did, and she pays rent each month about $200 Canadian, which includes her utilities, as she’s hooked up to their hot water and electrical systems. There are so many different ways to go tiny, whether you want to live entirely off-grid or just live a little more off the grid every day. You won’t have the huge maintenance bills and you won’t be spending all of your time cleaning. You’ll have more time to do what you love, and more money to buy what you need.
Rebecca chose to build her tiny home using new, high-quality sustainable products, including wood from a local tree nursery rather than commercial lumber, which would have been cheaper. The grand total of her tiny home was a bit more than what we often hear about these days – $50,000 Canadian, but her intention was not to build it at a low cost, it was to build as greenly as possible and to support her local Salt Spring Island businesses while doing it. You can see how approaches to tiny house building can be as different as the people who are building them. This inspiring story and gorgeous picture gallery of Rebecca’s Keva Tiny House comes from her own website.
More about this story can be found at: Keva Tiny House