A 59-year-old downsized to a tiny home on wheels to shrink her housing costs while helping care for her parents

• Julie Lennox built a tiny home on wheels after selling her house in Missoula, Montana.
• High housing costs in Missoula led Lennox to choose a cost-effective tiny home lifestyle.
• Her tiny home offers flexibility, affordability, and proximity to her aging parents.

Julie Lennox’s fascination with tiny homes began after she tore her ACL downhill skiing in 2019.

During her long recovery from knee surgery, she spent many hours rehabbing on a stationary bike while watching a YouTube series called “Living Big in a Tiny House.” Lennox, 59, was captivated by the tours of postage-stamp-sized homes, and by how creative and cost-effective the lifestyle seemed.

“It made me a little bit obsessed with tiny homes,” she said. “It just seemed like a cool way to have a smaller footprint in the world.”

But she didn’t think seriously about shrinking her own footprint until 2021, when she and her former partner split up and sold their three-bedroom house in Missoula, Montana.

A surge in demand for housing across the Mountain West had sent home values skyrocketing in Missoula, and Lennox couldn’t afford much on the market. So she moved in with her parents on their 15-acre property just outside the city and began planning to build her own tiny home in their backyard.

Lennox, the head of a local private school in Missoula, eventually settled on a prefabricated mobile tiny home built and delivered to her by a Canadian company, Teacup Tiny Homes, in 2022. Unlike a regular tiny home, the structure was built on a trailer chassis and sits permanently on wheels, so it can be towed and relocated to a different piece of land if needed.

The tiny home on wheels, also known as a THOW, has allowed Lennox to significantly reduce her housing costs over the last three years. It’s also enabled her to live next door to her parents, whom she cooks dinner for almost every night, while giving her the flexibility to move the home if she ever wants to. She’s among a growing number of Americans, including older people who are downsizing, who are choosing this alternative form of housing.

Saving money by downsizing

Perhaps the biggest upside of the move has been the cost savings.

Lennox spent 191,000 Canadian dollars, which was about $146,000 at the time, buying the home. She estimates she spent another $15,000 installing a pad for the structure to sit on, building a porch around it, and hooking it up to water, sewer, and electricity. She didn’t take out a mortgage; she used the cash from her home sale to cover all of her costs.

These days, her housing costs are limited to utilities and home repairs, the latter of which she estimates she’s spent less than $500 on over the last three years.

Because the home is so small, Lennox said she spends only about $600 a year on propane, which she uses for cooking, to heat her home and water, and to power her dryer. She hooked her home up to her parents’ electricity, which powers the pump for her well water and keeps the lights on. While her parents cover the electricity bill, Lennox said her costs are quite low. In exchange, Lennox pays the Starlink Internet bill for her parents, her sister, and herself, which is $100 a month.

This brings her average monthly housing costs to less than $200.

But there’s been a learning curve associated with tiny living. She’s had to adjust to removing and refilling her propane tank regularly — every five or six weeks in the winter — and making sure to leave her taps dripping in the winter to prevent her pipes from freezing.

And her move required a fair amount of downsizing. But Lennox says that, these days, she doesn’t miss any of her old stuff. And she’s able to store some large things, like her skis and bicycles, in her parents’ garage.

She shares her home with her dog, Rizzo, a 10-year-old labradoodle. It’s just enough space for the two of them.

“I think if it were more than one person, that would feel a little more challenging,” she said.

The quarters also feel a bit more cramped when it’s cold out. “The winters can be a little bit harder because it is such a small space, and so I feel a little more closed in,” Lennox said.

Her living space is larger in the warmer months, as she spends much of her time outside on her porch, surrounded by Ponderosa pines and Douglas-fir trees, with a view of the Blackfoot River.

“Sometimes I feel more like I’m camping than I am living in my house,” she said.