One woman makes paying rent look like child’s play.
Mckean Maston, a 24-year-old production manager from Texas, says she’s saving $10,000 a year in rent after she converted her childhood play house into a tiny home.
McKean first had the idea when she was a college student and didn’t want to fork out $850 a month for housing her freshman year, Caters News reported.
She said the project, which she began with her dad James Matson, 53, when she was 12, took her an additional six months to finish.
“I started it with my dad around when I was in fifth or sixth grade,” she said.
“I said, ‘Let’s go build a fort!’ My dad was like, ‘No, you’ve got to build a house because when you get big, you can go and play in it or whatever,” she recalled.
She said creating the house with her dad years ago was “so fun” and she enlisted the help of her dad and her mom Somare Matson, 54, to turn the 352-square-foot play house in her parents’ garden into a livable space.
“It was probably a six-month project whenever I was younger. All we did then was create the core-shell and the outer shell. We protected it with tar paper for water resistance,” McKean said.
“That’s kind of how it stayed until right before I went to college,” she added.
The home now has a bedroom, kitchen, living space, a bathroom and a front porch. It’s also connected to the family’s solar energy and water supply.
It was Somare who helped her daughter’s design dreams for the home come true and she spent 6 months implementing the interiors with her daughter.
“You have this dream as a kid and you don’t necessarily think it’s going to come true, but it eventually does — and it’s like totally better than what you could have thought!” said Somare.
For those who can’t live in a tiny home in their family’s yard, they may want to move to a tiny home community in Oregon where a beachfront abode is as low as $650 a month.
People deciding to live in Tiny Homes is on the rise with retailers like Home Depot offering a 540-square-foot tiny home for $43,832, a 170-square-foot model for $12,400, and one for 100 square feet that’s $10,000.