Dale St. Jean is a big man living in a tiny house. While the place is 28 feet long and there is only 344 square feet, there are actually a few spots for a quick game of hide ‘n seek.
St. Jean, a 5-foot-11, 220-pound electrician who works in construction renovations, has to literally crawl up a set of stairs into a king-sized bed and move his feet to turn on and watch a big-screen TV. The bedroom is 8×12 feet.
The stairs neatly double as drawers. An open hanging area holds his dark clothing (“I never have to wash whites”).
His living room contains a smaller TV with two comfy black leather chairs and a gas fireplace. The kitchen bar has three stools. A full-sized washer and dryer are tucked away near the shower.
St. Jean bought a flat-deck trailer from Terry Todd and began building his tiny palace on his property in early June. He traded beer and pizza for help from friends. He designed and built the entire house from the flat-deck up, in two months. He has the lone pint-sized abode at Dutch’s Campground near Kalamalka Lake.
“It’s cozy,” smiled St. Jean, 54, who spends summers on the bottom floor of a 600-square-foot family cabin on Okanagan Lake. “This is the nicest house I’ve ever lived in. It’s deceiving; it looks smaller from the outside.”
Major flooding to his cabin last summer prompted him to start the tiny house project. He was originally looking at renovating an old mobile home but regulations nixed that idea.
“I got tired of the winters at the lake so I’ll be living there from April 1 to Sept. 1 from now on. I want to start building these. If I can do two of these tiny houses in a year between April and September, I don’t have to work for anybody else.”
He called in a few favours from buddies who either worked in trades or knew what they were doing. Everything was done to code on the teensy dwelling on wheels.
“Ross Melnick and his son Sam did all the gas work, Brian Coleridge and I did the wiring under the floor, Odie (Terry) Lowe helped me do the decorative rock siding and Dave Popilchak did the drywall. Not many cabin owners were around because of the flooding so I was running a generator at 5 a.m.”
The trailer is easily moveable and made weight at the Highway 97 scales at 12,200 pounds for two axles.
Once the house was on site at Dutch’s, he built steps to his front door to make it easier for the frail and elderly to enter. A barbecue sits on a small deck. There are vinyl-plank floors and in-floor radiant heating.
He has ample room to cook dinner or bake in the kitchen, but he’s usually in shorts and a T-shirt. The house is bright with a dozen windows.
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Take a tour of Dale St. Jean’s tiny home.
“When I cook, it’s a sweat box in here, but all the windows that you can reach, open.”
St. Jean said he didn’t want to be 55 and living in a mobile park. This way, he can move his tiny house wherever he’s welcome. He wasn’t keen on buying a fixer-upper home and is putting his tiny house up for sale this weekend so he can start building another one.
“I’ve watched a lot of shows on houses and I can’t justify buying a $300,000 piece of crap and putting in another $100,000 and you still have a piece of crap.”
St. Jean graduated from Vernon Senior Secondary School in 1981. He moved to Vernon from Trail at age seven.
