We’re Building an Airbnb!

If you’ve been around a while, you’ll know we don’t like to do things at half-strength. We tend to just make a decision and dive in, and this was evidently no different.

As background, our home is teeny tiny. Like, 1,000-ish square feet tiny. We don’t really have space for friends and family to stay when they come to visit and figured we could turn our disproportionately enormous shed into extra living space that also makes us a lil’ income on the side the rest of the time.

The shed is currently in rough shape, so get your vision goggles on before checking out these before pics, please. The shed is a real who’s who of fauna (Alex found an entire family of birds living in one of the broken windows last week) and there’s a corner of black mold that looks like a horror movie spine that we kind of just avoid and don’t speak about.

So, let’s get into the plan and vision, and then we’ll talk a little about the financing and what we’re contracting out versus DIYing (because I know you’re all curious, like I would be).

The vision: Modern Vintage Garden Cottage

Imagine warm woods, airy whites, and deep greens.

The way it currently sits, the roughly 250-square-foot main room of the shed is one big, open space. We’ll make that into a studio and there’s a secondary room in the back that’s maybe 100-square-feet we’ll keep as our own storage.

Ideally, we’d have a loft bed above the bathroom but we’ve got to work with the contractor and see if we can raise the roof (ayyeeee) a little bit for enough headroom to make that work. Also, since the idea is to have our parents come to visit, we’ll need to have a little staircase going up to the loft as opposed to a ladder.

We’re already on the hunt for a small sleeper sofa for the living room area so we could squeeze in a second bed/alternative bed if needed.

Here’s a little sample board for the general color scheme:

And in one of the most hotly contested arguments of our marriage, I’m going to add a wall of wallpaper somewhere in this damn AirBnB because I’ve been vetoed from doing it anywhere in our actual living space for years now.

One of the design difficulties is lighting so it doesn’t look like a dingy cave and also doesn’t have a wall of windows looking into our backyard. We’re planning big french doors as the entryway for as much light as possible right off the bat, and windows down the far wall which just looks at the neighbor’s garage but at least will be natural light.
The good thing is we’ve got about two months until the guys start their side of things, so we’ve been checking building material outlet stores for the big stuff like windows and doors to save some money.

Here are some more inspo pics we’ve frantically pinned for the last few months:

Credit: Uncharted Tiny Homes 

Credit: Tay and McKay

Credit: Marta Anderson

How we’re financing it

We’re generally pretty open book kind of people, so here we go. Though our house is, umm, cozy, it is in a pretty desirable neighborhood of town. We often joke that we bought the last livable, affordable house in it before the real estate market got really crazy during COVID and property prices skyrocketed.

We’ve done a whole lot of projects in our roughly nine months here already and decided we’d try use those spiking values to our advantage by taking out a home equity line of credit (HELOC), which is basically just like it sounds: borrowing against the equity of your home in a loan.

We had an appraisal done on the house in May and had built enough equity in our projects to get the money we needed without having to give up all of the equity, which is nice.

So, we’ve basically got a checkbook for that account we’ll use to pay the contractor and materials, and we pay it back in a loan but *if* it all goes to plan, we should still make a fairly good profit on top of paying back the loan when we get to the point of renting out the little cottage.

DIYing vs. Contracting

This was a big question for us because obviously we want to be in the middle of the Venn diagram of being budget-friendly and making 100% sure it’s done professionally. We’ve hired a contractor to do most of the foundational work, which is a lot.

The shed needs a new roof because last hurricane season – the very weekend we were meant to close on our house – a big storm rolled through and ripped a big chunk off the roof, it needs utilities like water and sewer run to it, new doors and windows, insulation, plumbing, drywall, and lighting, AKA Stuff We Can’t Do Ourselves.

But, once it gets to the drywall phase, we’re doing the rest. So all the flooring, installing cabinets, tiling, baseboards, painting, is on us.

It’s going to be a big job but we’re so excited. Make sure to follow along on Instagram where we’ll show more of the day-to-day as we get going, and make sure to sign up to our newsletter for regular updates on the progress!