AFTER RETURNING FROM VOLUNTEERING ABROAD, Makayla Cavanagh found herself looking for direction. She was trying to figure out what was next when she landed on building a tiny house. The mobility of a tiny house meant that she could move and take her home with her, and the size meant she didn’t have to work the rest of her life to pay a mortgage.

To Makayla building a house was unlike anything she had ever done before, but in her mind it was something that she just had to figure out, not something she couldn’t do. She remarked that “you can’t be afraid to make mistakes,” and for her, knowing that she had the support of her friends and family helped.

Photograph by Jessica Humiston

She comes from a family of craftspeople: Her mother is a machinist, and her father works in construction. For her house she was able to get about half her framing lumber from a job site on which her father worked. The lumber was going to be thrown out as scrap. Makayla encourages people to consider looking to construction sites for scrap wood, saying, “It’s really disappointing what construction companies will throw away, but it was great for me.”

Photograph by Jessica Humiston

Her flooring came from an old building in downtown Spokane, WA. In all, it took her three days of cleaning and resurfacing to get the wood ready for installation. In the end it was worth it; the floors are her favorite part of her house.

Some of her siding and all of her roofing came from a decommissioned military building that was being torn down. She had seen an ad on Craigslist and picked up enough wood to cover her roof and provide accent pieces for the siding. The rest of her siding came from a local reclaimed store. Despite it already being de-nailed, it still took a lot of work to get ready because the boards were badly warped.

Photograph by Jessica Humiston

Her kitchen and much of her storage was built from a mixture of furniture pieces from the ReStore and scraps she found online. One of her countertops was an old wood door that she spent two days resurfacing. In the end she had a beautiful kitchen nestled underneath her loft.

Photograph by Jessica Humiston

There were a few items that she wanted to purchase new. To her it was important to have a solid foundation and invest dollars where it mattered. With this in mind she purchased a brand-new trailer on which to build her house. All of her electrical and plumbing fixtures were new so she didn’t have to worry about dangers resulting from used electrical components or leaky plumbing parts.

Now that her build is done, Makayla is very happy living in her tiny house. In total the house took less than a year and $13,000 to build. Throughout the process Makayla learned a lot about herself and has inspired others to build tiny houses through her example. It was a lot of work, but in the end she is glad to be living tiny.

Photograph by Jessica Humiston