A Tiny House Transition

The Mike family (from left):
Darren, Joey, Carter, McKenzie, Trinity, and Melody

Photo courtesy of The Big Family Tiny Life blog

Tonight, on Lifetime at 9 p.m. Central, the television series "Tiny House Nation" will feature a local family who has a tiny house dream.

In October, I mentioned the Mike family in "A 'Minimal' Blog Post" and promised to tell their story. With the help of Bridget's notes from that night, here it is.

Darren and Melody Mike have four kids – Carter, 14, McKenzie, 6, Trinity, 4, and Joey, 2. Them, and their large dog, makes a family of seven.

"I used to be that Dad who loved to shower the kids with presents at Christmastime," said Darren. "If the tree wasn't full up to the second level of branches, I felt my kids would be emotionally scarred because they didn't get enough stuff."

Melody had a different idea of the holiday: "Maybe just give three gifts."

"Are you kidding me? How can I only give three gifts?" Darren responded. He said Melody was adamant that it was important. So they tried her way and he admits he was "amazed that our kids did not suffer any emotional trauma" as a result. "They enjoyed the gifts, instead of playing with the boxes the gifts came in."

The experience got him thinking that "maybe stuff isn't what it's all about."

Melody and Darren said they eventually changed their focus to "if we give less (fewer) gifts, we can spend more money on experiences."

For Carter's birthday last year, they gave him a camping trip with just him and Darren. They purchased MREs ("Meals Ready to Eat") and did some "primitive camping." It was a memorable experience. Especially for Carter, who said, "I can't remember what I got the year before."

The Mikes determined that "stuff isn't really what matters." They said they were never "television people" - they didn't watch TV very often. But Darren is a Husker football fan and he "had to have cable since they (the Huskers) moved to the Big 10." One day, they were working on a project and turned on the TV and landed on a show called "Unplugged Nation," about families that were living off the grid. After that, they also began to watch "Tiny House Nation."

Darren had already learned about the tiny house phenomenon after seeing them on Facebook. He thought they were fascinating -- the idea of building something that was "complete, but really tiny." They watched one episode of "Tiny House Nation" and decided to DVR every episode, which they ended up binge watching.

"Melody started showing some signs of being into it," Darren said. After a few episodes, he started researching tiny houses online. He told Melody, "I think we should do this." She agreed. From that point, they started planning their tiny house transition.

At the time they participated in the Green Omaha Coalition event at Aksarben Cinema, their tiny houses were about a week from being completed, and they were a few weeks away from moving into their tiny houses. (They ended up building two independent-but-connected tiny houses.)

Darren told the story of their journey to that point. After deciding that they wanted to live in a tiny house, they sold their 2300 square foot home and moved into a 270 square foot RV, where they planned to live while they built the tiny houses. That journey is detailed in an Omaha World-Herald story from July. (An interesting aside: That story was the 12th most-viewed article on the OWH website in 2016, with more than 113,000 views.)

That didn't end up working out. Officials in the city of Valley (where the RV was parked) told them they couldn't live in the RV. So they moved into their church's building, and stayed in a two-room office. Darren said, "It was never our intention to live in the RV (permanently)." They had a plan to move out to a family farm and live in their barn while they built the tiny houses on the property. The day after they sold their house, that plan also fell through.

Melody picked up the story. "This has been a tough transition for us, for sure. We are all in. We feel called to do it. The coolest part for us is...all this stuff doesn’t mean anything. For us, relationships are a big deal. We don’t care about stuff. Life is about experiences, not stuff. You’re missing the whole part of our story. The point is that life isn’t about stuff, and it’s not about experiences. It’s about people. For Darren and I and our children, we love Jesus with all our heart. We want to spend time with people. Life is about people and relationships and not how much stuff we have."

The episode of "Tiny House Nation" was filmed a few weeks before the Mike family's appearance at the Aksarben Cinema Reel-to-Real event.

Darren said there's a scene that is always featured in the show -- the "pare down," where the family is shown getting rid of their stuff. He said he told his wife, "Okay, Melody. We are missing something, because you said you don’t care about this stuff" when she started to get frustrated. 

She replied, "Really, I don’t care about any of this stuff. There is nothing here that I couldn’t get rid off, except three items." The producers kept drilling her. Darren was like, "Really, she doesn’t care about that stuff. It was just extra stuff, and we didn’t know what we needed."

“Getting to that point was really painful. We had worked really hard to fill this 2300 square foot house. We were putting things out there that we really loved and really wanted but they just didn’t fit our dreams anymore. There was no more room,” Darren added. Even thought they didn't value "stuff" anymore, there were still things that it was painful to get rid of.

The hardest to get rid of for Darren was his guitar-building tools. Melody at the time was a personal trainer. "Our basement was a legit gym," Darren said. "We worked really hard to build it so we could have kids and (Melody could) stay home with them and pursue a career in training people," which she loved.

That was the hardest part for Melody, Darren said. Getting rid of her gym. Darren asked her about it at the time, and she said she couldn't talk about it for two days. "I'll get over it, and I'll be okay," she told him. "I worked really hard on this ... from going back to school to building the gym so I could stay home with the kids. It all comes down to what we value, so we have had to give up a lot of stuff. But if you look at it, we lived most of our life on one floor of four floors of our house. Stuff doesn’t make our kids happy." 

Melody added, "We wanted to spend more time with them -- and after that, we wanted to spend time with people and be available and make time available for relationships."

The audience at the Reel-to-Real event got the opportunity to ask the Mikes questions.

Audience question: "Do you face any issues with zoning?"

Darren: "Through random chance, we met a wonderful couple who is allowing us to put our houses on their land. We sort of got permission. We told one of the local zoning fellows what we’re doing. We refer to it (the land where the houses are parked) as 'The Meadow.'" (However, the Mikes never disclosed the specific location.)

He added, "When the TV shows come and go, you see the happy ending. The reality is, it’s not entirely legal to live in a tiny house in the U.S. It’s kind of a little scary. Some folks up in Portland, Ore. wrote an addition to the international residential code and were able to petition to have that entered into the actual international residential code this past weekend in Kansas City. The code council voted on it, and they voted to accept it. It doesn’t directly affect zoning yet, but the fact that there will be an official provision in the code allows that conversation to happen."

Darren described their setup: "We have two tiny houses — 300 square each — a mirror image of each other, except the main house has the kitchen in it and the laundry. The kids house has full size bathroom with tub and Carter’s room and a triple bunk bed for the girls. There's a home school room above it. McKenzie is in first grade; Trinity is in kindergarten. (Joey) does everything they do. They have a bathroom in their house. They have rock climbing walls, jungle gym, swings, and monkey bars. It’s like their recess."

An audience member asked about utilities. Darren responded that they have mini splits installed on both of the houses. Electric heat is not the most efficient way to heat, but they are insulated to R-22 value, so it doesn’t take much to heat it. As an additional level of redundancy, they have a gas fireplace in their house that runs off propane. They also have electricity through solar panels and batteries.

Near the end of the Q&A, Darren said the houses are on wheels, so they're "able to move them with their family." He added, "We never have to go through the painful process of moving and selling again." They designed them to what they need for their family, and what they want. But the completed houses are incredibly heavy. "We can't just hook them up to the back of the minivan." When they moved them to The Meadow, they needed a 1-ton pickup truck.

In hindsight, it's ironic that the discussion ended with the thought that once the Mikes moved into their tiny houses, they'd never have to move again.

Bridget became friends with Melody on Facebook after the event, and has been following their tiny house transition. It hasn't been smooth sailing. At all.

As yesterday's article in the Omaha World-Herald detailed, the Mikes aren't currently living in their tiny houses. They were asked to leave "The Meadow" because their generator was scaring deer away. The tiny houses are stored on a friend's land, vacant for now. Melody had put out a plea a few weeks ago for temporary housing, and they are staying in a four-bedroom house in Omaha for now.

You can read more about Darren and Melody's tiny house transition on their blog, "The Big Family Tiny Life":
http://bigfamtinylife.com

Darren had posted a blog post on Dec. 6 detailing their struggles since moving into the tiny houses:
http://bigfamtinylife.com/2016/12/06/breaking-the-silence/

As a follow-up, Bridget asked Melody to detail specifically how people could help. The result was this blog post on Dec. 8:
http://bigfamtinylife.com/2016/12/08/urgent-needs/

And a GoFundMe campaign to help them with their tiny house transition (Bridget donated):
https://www.gofundme.com/mikesgotiny

Watch the preview of tonight's episode, "It Takes Six to Tiny":

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