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The Tiny House Travelers: Life in their DIY Gooseneck Tiny Home

on March 10, 2024

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This is an awesome DIY Gooseneck tiny home built by John and Angel from The Tiny House Travelers. They chose a gooseneck trailer custom-built by a company in Florida, and then spent a year and a half of weekends transforming it into an amazing home on wheels.

We were able to interview the couple and hear their awesome story of downsizing, exploring the country, and loving tiny living! Enjoy reading their story below!

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Traveling the Country w/ Their Pets


We were living in an 1800 square foot house, and we realized that we just didn’t use most of the space. We weren’t happy in the town where we were living, and we have always loved to travel but struggled to find someone to take care of our pets when we would leave them behind.

We started watching shows about tiny house building and RV life, and it seemed like the perfect way to shake things up and to travel and still be able to take our pets (and our entire home) with us. Plus, John had always wanted to build his own home and building a tiny house seemed like an economical starting point.

We ordered a custom gooseneck trailer from a company in Florida, and John built everything on top of it. We really wanted to come up with our own floor plan, and John really wanted to try his hand at building a home.

Unfortunately, the city we lived in was NOT very tiny house friendly and limited the hours we could work on it, so it mostly got built on weekends and the occasional day off over the course of about a year and a half.

John is work-from-home for his position with a local bank from our area and, as long as we have internet, works his regular M-F job from a small office space in our bedroom. Angel quit her job once we hit the road and handles all of our domestic stuff – cleaning, grocery shopping, taking care of the pets, paying our bills, and running our blog and social media accounts.

With all the day to day stuff out of the way, we are free to have adventures when John gets off work and on the weekends. We were fortunate to make enough money from the sale of our old house to pay off our truck, and now we can afford to live on only one income since our expenses are much less.

We both feel like it has really opened our eyes to living life to the fullest. We are able to do things and go places that really show how beautiful the world is. People always ask us where our favorite place is that we have traveled to, and we honestly love almost every single place we have been and think that every new campground or park is beautiful. We meet new people everywhere we go and have made several friends.

We also really take joy in experiences now, over possessions. We try to take photos and make memories instead of buying souvenirs. We really think twice about making purchases – we just don’t have the room for a bunch of things we don’t use regularly. It’s also made us appreciate each other a little more. John can hear how much time Angel spends doing dishes and cleaning while he is working, and Angel overhears John’s many work calls that he has every day.

It’s made us much more aware of each other. Our communication skills have definitely improved (try talking your spouse through backing a 32 foot trailer into a parking spot surrounded by trees and overlooking a giant drop off!). We genuinely love sharing new experiences with one another and are closer than ever.

The hardest part was probably paring down our belongings to move into the tiny house! We actually started a few years before we even started building our house.

We do have a storage unit back home with some furniture that Angel inherited and a few of John’s larger tools that would be too expensive to replace later if we settle down somewhere again, but we got rid of so many things! It feels pretty good now not to have as much stuff cluttering up the house, but it was HARD getting to this point.

The most rewarding part is probably the places we get to go and the things we get to experience. We have seen mountains and lakes and forests and the ocean. We spent a month in Maine and attended the Maine Lobster Festival and went whale watching. We spent a week just north of New York City and took the train every day to walk around the city and even attended a Broadway play.

We have seen sharks and jellyfish and dolphins and manatees in the wild. We’ve been to Mardi Gras. Twice. One Thanksgiving we spent the afternoon sitting on top of a waterfall. We were able to take our entire house and spend a week with family in Florida for a wedding. Having less expenses and less belongings lets us travel and experience the country – all while sleeping in our own bed surrounded by our pets every night.

Do your research! Watch television shows and YouTube channels for ideas and inspiration. Make a Pinterest board. Rent a tiny house to stay in for a couple of days. Do that a few different times to actually find out what layouts and features you like and how you will move around in the space. When you find a design that you like, tape off the outline of your house on your driveway or in your garage and walk around it pretending to do daily tasks. And COMMUNICATE with your spouse.

You will be spending SO MUCH time together. If you find yourself needing a little alone time, just be honest and ask for it. It’s easy to find yourself tripping over one another in such a small space and if you don’t take time for yourself, little annoyances can build up and become a big problem. Be honest with yourself and anyone else that you will be sharing the space with about your wants and your needs and try to find ways to make sure you are set up for success.

Also, no matter how much stuff you get rid of, your tiny house will still look cluttered ALWAYS just from you living in it. Cooking a meal? You will lose sight of your kitchen counter. Take a day off from doing dishes? Your sink will be overflowing. Make a big grocery trip? You will have things just sitting out because there might not be enough cabinet space. You will also track in sand and dirt and leaves and pine needles. Learn to embrace the chaos. You will ALWAYS be cleaning! But, since your house is super small, it doesn’t take much more than about 30 minutes a day of focused effort.

Highlights:

  • John and Angel are traveling the country in their 32-foot gooseneck tiny house.
  • They purchased the gooseneck trailer from a company in Florida, and John built the house on top of it.
  • It took about a year and a half of working on the weekends to complete the build.
  • John works from home, so he has an office in his bedroom with three screens to facilitate his job.
  • Angel does all the housekeeping, travel planning and social media management.

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Natalie C. McKee

Natalie C. McKee is a contributor for Tiny House Talk and the Tiny House Newsletter. She's a wife, and mama of three little kids. She and her family are homesteaders with sheep, goats, chickens, ducks and quail on their happy little acre.
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