How do I keep from tracking mud into my tiny house?
Video transcription:
Presented by Bianca from The Giving Tree Consultancy.
So this is a fun one because it is something that not a lot of people think about when you are downsizing into a tiny home. And that is, how do you keep your tiny house clean, especially when tiny home is very self-contained and you usually don’t have a foyer or a mud room. Or, you know, the things we have in regular size homes.
So it’s really important to think about how this will affect your entry and exit into the home. So, for example, I have an 8 by 30 foot tiny home. I have a slider doors in the middle of my house. When you walk into the home, you are coming right into my kitchen. So, I don’t necessarily have a space to put anything.
What I do have is a creative use, so I have a carpet that is used in the winter, the fall and the shoulder seasons. It’s a utility carpet, so it’s still pretty, but it’s tough and rough and it’s going to make sense for people who live mostly outdoors.
We live tiny because we have a relationship with nature. We also have a 5 year old who makes a lot of mess, so we have to ensure that we have spaces for that. So we have an almost six foot utility rug right in front of the door as well as drying racks and areas for our shoes that still look nice, and we also have rubber mats and different things so we can transition.
We have a wall hutch as well from IKEA that has two kind of – you open the panel and you can put your shoes inside. That is where a lot of our shoes go.
So to keep mud and snow and dirt and all of these different things out of the house, it takes a lot of time. I probably sweep that area minimum (minimum!) four times a day. In the morning, when I come home after dropping my son off at school after school, midday. My husband is always in and out because he works on the property here and he is all up in the mud and our garden is right outside. It’s wet, it’s muddy.
We live in the middle of the woods, so you’re going to have to think creatively. You’re going to have to figure out how that works. If you’re designing your own home, from scratch, I really recommend you thinking about these things when you’re designing the interior of your home.
Having a bench or a space where you can sit and take your things off, where you can have them hang. If you have an exterior building with a dry area where you can have some things hang off, I think this is also super important to kind of ideate those things.
So, mud, dirt. It’s inescapable. We just don’t have the capacity to have it any other way. So we deal with it and, you know what? It’s a small price to pay to live in this stunning tiny house, so. That is some food for thought. Thank you so much.
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