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Guillaume Dutilh, 30, Jenna Spesard, 28, are proof that you don’t need a lot of space for a lot of adventure. Their home, a modified a Tumbleweed Cypress-20 Overlook, is only 125 square feet. But if you look at their photos, their tiny house on wheels really doesn’t seem tiny at all—especially when all of North America is their backyard.
Currently, the pair and their pup are traveling around North America in a massive year-long road trip that started last August in Spesard’s home state of Illinois with stops along the country’s coasts and through Canada.
Along the way, Spesard blogs about their travels and imparts advice about simple living on their absorbing website, Tiny House Giant Journey, while Dutilh takes photos of luscious scenery. They also have a YouTube page that features other tiny homes they see on the road.
“It’s truly amazing what we get to see,” Dutilh told Buzzfeed. “The experiences we have are like nothing we could have had before in our jobs.”
Before living out their dream careers in travel journalism, Spesard was a executive assistant for a movie studio and Dutilh was a former industrial engineer for a motorcycle manufacturing company in Los Angeles.
However, as Spesard wrote, the two were “burdened” by high rent, their stack of belongings and college debt. They thought they would never get to pursue their true passions of writing and photography.
But when they discovered the tiny house movement, everything changed. They sold all their belongings, enlisted some friends and built their own tiny house from scratch over the course of a year. In total, it cost $29,328 to build.
Although it seems like a dream come true to get away from the 9-5 grind, Dutilh and Spesard also decided on their new, simpler lifestyle out of concern for the environment.
“We’ve done calculations and our imprint is now half of that of the average American couple,” Dutilh told Buzzfeed. “Because the house is so small it takes so little heat, water and electricity to keep it up, and we can live a cheap, low-impact lifestyle.”
For example, when they aren’t connected to a water source like a hose, their combined usage is covered by their 40-gallon tank, which is impressive when the average American uses between 80-100 gallons of water a day. “Together we use about 30-40 gallons of water a day,” wrote Spesard. “That includes the water we drink and use to cook, clean, shower and do dishes.”
It’s amazing how many people are coming up with alternatives to conventional lives and typical homes: snowboarding legend Mike Basich moved from a 4,000 home to a tiny cabin in the snow-covered Sierra Nevada mountains; a set of good friends have created a micro-cabin community by the Llano River in Texas; and on the small Canadian island of Lasqueti about 400 residents are live completely off the grid. As we said previously, for a growing number of Americans, the mentality of “bigger is better” has turned into “small is beautiful.”
By the end of this August, the couple should arrive at their final destination of Boulder, Colorado. But will their giant journey end there? “We could either stay in Colorado and enjoy the beauty of the environment,” Dutilh told Buzzfeed, “or if we’re still not losing money on the trip, we could continue for as long as we want.”
Check out the photos below to see the inside of their home. For more photos of their journey, visit their website or Instagram page.
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