People often ask Christine and I how we got started into the whole “tiny house business”. That’s a great question and one that, when asked, I usually start with “I'm so glad that God’s plan was so much better than my plan!”

For years, Christine said that we should get into some sort of business of our own, largely so that I wouldn’t need to be a corporate man in Columbus forever. Living in the Hocking Hills as we have our entire lives, her thought morphed into “we need to get into the tourism business and work for our ourselves!” How to do that however was never clear or obvious, especially since (at least in the rental cabin business) one needs significant capital and land to get started, and we just didn't have that.

I guess I’ve always enjoyed building and rough carpentry, and I’ve gotten the kids involved in that as well…we’ve built decks and finished our homes’ basements and things like that…even built a portable “Mayflower on Wheels” for the kids’ school once. That was fun! But sometime in 2018, we’d kinda run out of those kinds of projects. We’d just finished our basement into a bit of an apartment for when our college-age kids would come home. What could we do now?

It turns out that Christine has always been interested in (and pretty good at) interior design, and a fan of many design and renovation TV shows. At that time, she’d been into some “tiny house” shows on TV. One night in early 2018, Christine and I along with our oldest son Isaac were sitting in the family room and one of those tiny house shows was on the TV. Isaac said “that looks like fun…we should do that!” Of course, building a tiny house on wheels (THOW) seemed out of the question to me and Christine. Why would we do that? How would we pay for that? But, as I said, we had sort of run out of construction projects so we didn’t totally put it off as preposterous. A few weeks later, Isaac called from Toledo where he was in an engineering program at the University of Toledo, and said that he had found a guy that would sell us a tiny house trailer – “we could build a tiny house on that!”, he said. Apparently, Isaac was serious about this endeavor! After Christine and I discussed, a few days later I told Isaac to tell Joe Mabus at Ron’s Trailers that we wanted to buy a trailer. At that point we knew we had to do something!…we just weren’t sure what!

We took ownership of the tiny house trailer in mid-2018, and for the next year and a half or so we worked to design and build our first tiny house. It was all stick-built, with a simple shed roof design and a loft for the bed. Christine had gathered plenty of pictures from social media and other places that we used to guide our design. Isaac researched water heaters, mini-split HVAC systems, and all things mechanical (funny he now is an engineer working in MEP design!), and I did my best to put it all together on that metal frame right there in our yard. During that time we also tried to figure out what we’d do with this thing… we weren’t going to keep it in our yard! We figured we could try to rent to tourists, even though we didn’t know at the time where we’d put it (that’s the beauty of being on wheels!...we could figure that out later, and it wouldn’t need to be permanent in any location!). And we didn’t know much about the industry either. Thankfully, my brother Roger had a few spots in mind, including a spot he owned right on the north shore of Lake Logan. We named our first THOW “The Gladiola”, named after the color Christine chose for the front door (“Gladiola Red”), and we began renting it in October 2019.

So there’s an interesting part about this time period I haven’t mentioned yet, and this is where you know and are so thankful that God’s in charge. He was working His plan for us. You see, in late 2017 and into 2018, my corporate job started to get a lot more…uh…stressful. I became depressed…couldn’t sleep. It was easily the worst time of my life. Thank God I had my family and God and my Church during those tough times. Christine and I weren’t sure how I could continue at the job I’d loved and that had provided so well for us for 25+ years. Maybe I’d need to quit for health reasons? Maybe I’d be fired? What would we do? During these long months and almost a year, our entire family kept working on that tiny house a little bit here and there and whenever we could. Each of our kids worked with Christine and me on that tiny house. Isaac researched and installed the water heater, the plumbing, and lots of other odds and ends while he went to school in Toledo. Clare installed the electrical outlets and switches. Max and Ben helped install the ceiling and the shiplap and the metal roof. And young Sophie helped with the painting and even learned how to use the miter saw to cut boards. For me, it was my escape from a dreadful work environment, and a way to keep working and bonding with my family which was especially important in my darkest time.

Thankfully, my employer decided to eliminate my job in late 2019. (How often do you read a sentence that starts with "Thankfully" and ends with "my employer decided to eliminate my job?) They gave me a choice: I could either take another job at the company, or leave with a pretty generous financial offer that could support us for at least a little while, at least until we figured out what was next, and even finance a tiny house or two, And maybe, just maybe, this tiny house thing would work out. Guess what we chose?

We took a leap of faith and bought two more trailers from our friend Joe, with intent to build two more tiny houses as quickly as we could (what else was I gonna do with myself?!). Thankfully, the Gladiola did pretty well in terms of garnering guests and making a little money starting that fall and on into 2020 (despite a pandemic!). We knew we were on to something. We spent the winter and spring of 2020 building our second tiny house (the Trillium) and then summer and fall of 2020 building our third tiny house (the Juniper) right there in our yard, come rain, sleet, snow, or sun. And it is indeed working out. And we (well, at least me) have so much more time with each other, too.  ❤️