Has living in a tiny house freed up more time? - #AskTheDreamTeam

Cover image via @tiffany_the_tiny_home.

Question: Has living in a tiny house freed up more time? In what ways?

Answers:

Lauren & Christian | adventureabode.blogspot.com

100%. For example, we just cleaned our whole house to prepare to have guests and it took us 15 minutes to have the whole place sparkling clean. Also, since storage space is rather limited, we have a system and everything has a specific place where it belongs. This really reduces the time we spend looking for things that we need. Overall, it’s not a drastic difference in time savings, but 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there—it all adds up!

Nicolette & Michael | nicolettenotes.com

Absolutely! In every single way. From cleaning the house to having to work less because we don’t need as much money to live our lives. Saving time in the form of not working as much means everything to us. That is one of the biggest reasons we went tiny—so that I could work 20 hours a week and have the rest of my time to partake in my hobbies or spend time with my love. Time is something we can never get back and the tiny house gives us so much more of it to spend together rather than working from 9-5 to make ends meet.

Bela & Spencer | tinymigrations.com

Hmmm, I don’t think it’s freed up time, but that wasn’t really one of our goals in owning a tiny home, at least not in the short-term. Owning a home is a lot more time and work than renting one...we’re always doing new projects and making additions to the house.

Most tiny homes probably save people time by saving them money, but we opted to build a very expensive tiny home so it didn’t immediately cut our housing budget (though it did turn it into a recoverable expense). While the design of the house brings us a lot of inspiration and joy, it has also created plenty of new opportunities and all those opportunities take a lot of time to capitalize on. 

Cleaning is in some ways easier, but really you produce the same amount of dishes, dust, and dirt. Since the space is smaller, all those little messes become noticeable much more quickly.  To that end, I now do cleanings much more often, but each individual cleaning takes very little time.

So, I dunno, it’s probably made us much busier on net to own a tiny house, haha!

But that’s not really concerning to us. We think our tiny home has been an excellent investment of our time...so we don’t lament the hours we’ve spent on it. Instead, it’s one of the cooler things we’ve done in life so far, and over the long-term, I think it will make a significant contribution to our financial freedom.

Jess & Todd | tinyhouseofny.com

Throughout the first year and a half of our build, I would say the answer would have been a resounding “no” because we were both working full time, traveling for work, building on evenings and weekends, bartending weddings on Saturday nights to pay a carpenter and not have to dip into our investments and savings—and the pace was truly frenetic.

But we knew there would be short-term pain for the long term gain of more free time, and the ability to save much more and achieve our goals of early retirement even earlier than we had planned prior to going tiny.

In terms of upkeep, it’s a net positive for us. It’s likely going to be said a bunch of times but cleaning and keeping up a tiny house takes SIGNIFICANTLY less time to do simply because there is less house.

Cleaning is a breeze. Because you don’t have a huge structure weighing you down—you will most likely see a big increase in your leisure time once your house is built in comparison to those who own large homes (but perhaps not in comparison to renters, or those who live in condos or townhomes—it just depends).

But we’ve found that going from a traditional home (with a yard + pool—a huge time and money drain), we can focus on the things that mean more to us; for us that equates to more time for hiking, traveling, running, baking, brewing, creating.

And with a less expensive house, one may be able to work less in terms of hours at a traditional job as well which yields more free time. We also feel that since our house isn’t costing us in terms of a mortgage, we’re more likely to travel and be as nomadic as possible. This past winter/spring, we left for two extended periods of time to travel and escape our Northeast winter and we hope to make those trips even longer next year since we both work remotely most of the time.

Tiny houses may be one of the very best conduits to more freedom, so if that’s something you’re looking for, this could be a great option. I say this often—the ability to have my time and freedom feels better than any extra square footage would. :)

Annie | pocketmanor.com

Living in a tiny house has absolutely freed up more of my time! I never spent that much time cleaning, because I was downsizing from 600 square feet as opposed to a 1,500 square foot house. And truth be told, I can be a bit of a slob when I want to be. That being said, my house is almost always clean nowadays, because it takes so little time to clean it from top to bottom. But that is also a side effect of just having less stuff. I guarantee you you'll spend less time doing dishes if you only have 4 plates, bowls, and coffee mugs.

But I think living tiny has also made me much more intentional about how I spend my time and energy. I don't have WiFi at home (read more about that in this post from my blog: https://www.pocketmanor.com/blog/how-i-live-without-wifi), so that means when I'm home, I spend a lot less time sitting on the couch watching Netflix and a lot more time reading, cooking, and writing.

I still work a lot—I have a handful of different part-time jobs, spend a decent amount of time pet and house sitting, and have been dipping my toe into the world of freelance writing. I also have an endless list of projects I want to do around my house—projects to build, things to paint, stuff to reorganize. So, I can't really say that I have a wealth of free time. But I never really did in the first place! And I do value my time at home much more, and try to make more space in my schedule to just be at home doing nothing, because it's the place I find most relaxing.

Alexis & Christian | tinyhouseexpedition.com

We’re incredibly busy doing what we love! Tiny house living helped us free up time and resources to spend on our passions, travel and filmmaking. Specifically, it only takes a fraction of the time to clean compared to our old house. Though we have to sweep twice a day—maybe six minutes total. Most importantly, it takes less working time to pay for our monthly expenses, especially when parked for extended periods of time. We still work full-time hours, but it’s for ourselves creating our own dream job. 

Sam & Tim | tiffanythetinyhome.com

I would say it's given us some more time. The obvious is the cleaning. It's pretty easy and takes no time at all to clean so we save some time there. There's virtually no maintenance on our home so we don't have a ton of weekend projects of fixing something. So, our weekends consist of more things we want to do. But ultimately, it will save us time in the future when we hope to retire early. I know we are only in our late 20’s, but this gets back to the financial benefits our home gives us. We are able to put more into our retirement because our bills are simply less. That's huge in our eyes.

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