I built my teenagers their own tiny homes — we couldn’t be happier

Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, Victoria Neidhardt’s youngest daughter, then 10, asked a question that led her to trade their New York home for nomadic life.

“Do you feel fulfilled?”

Victoria had recently divorced and was living with her four kids in a 3,000-square-foot single-family home in New York. She and her kids were settled into routines for school and sports, but then the pandemic lockdown hit, and Neidhardt thought it would be fun and adventurous to sell the house and convert a school bus into a home on wheels, aka a skoolie. The skoolie had full-size appliances and was fully off grid thanks to solar panels. 

“When we initially left, I thought it would be a year,” says Victoria.

But one year of exploring the country’s national parks became five. By then, the kids were ready to put down roots again and reconnect with family in New York’s Finger Lakes region.

“I didn’t want to buy a traditional house,” she says. “I wanted to build what we wanted.”

Building a new type of home

By then, she’d already converted two school buses into homes. The family learned a lot about tiny living before deciding they wanted to make some upgrades and changes — leading to the second build-out.

When they reached New York, Victoria planned to buy land and build tiny homes. The goal was to not get locked into a mortgage that would take decades to pay off. She also wanted the flexibility that several homes — each of them transportable — would provide.

She and her now-husband, Tyler Neidhardt, wanted a minimum of 5 acres in a rural area near Corning, NY. She sought land that was interesting — home to ravines, open fields, and ponds.

They ended up with 11 acres for $60,000.

The family continued to live in the bus while she and Tyler started construction. Within a year, they built three separate tiny houses with a central courtyard.

Space for everyone

The tiny house she shares with her partner is 600 square feet and has a kitchen and a living room, while the four children share two tiny homes all their own.

The youngest and oldest daughters share one and the middle daughter and the youngest of the four, her son, share the other as that “just happened to be the way their personalities fall together.” Each tiny home has two separate bedrooms, a common room, and a bathroom.

At the time of construction two years ago, the kids were ages 13, 14, 15, and 18. 

When Realtor.com® first reported the story about Victoria and her family, Victoria admitted she received a lot of negative feedback. Other parents were concerned that she wasn’t keeping an eye on her kids.

What readers may not have realized is that the teens’ homes are each just 10 feet from Victoria’s home.

“We are between all three of the homes all the time,” she says. “Or we are all in the main house, all together.”

It’s a nontraditional setup, but the traditional way of doing everything doesn’t suit everyone. This way of life comes with certain freedoms but also more responsibilities.

Victoria tasks the kids with keeping their own homes tidy, which they do. They also know what it means to live off-grid, having experienced skoolie life for two years. They also have jobs to keep the homestead running smoothly. Her son, for example, helps with the snow removal from their driveway.

They’ve now spent two winters on the property, contending with generator failures and water supply freezes. This led to more projects and problem-solving, including installing a backup generator and a newer wood stove system.

“Normal houses face these same issues—power outages where the furnace doesn’t run or frozen pipes.”

Keeping the next generation in mind

What a normal five-bedroom house doesn’t offer is flexibility. Victoria built these tiny homes with the idea of transportability in mind. 

“My kids are getting older and won’t be living at home that much longer,” she says. 

The “ultimate long-term goal” is to “provide affordable housing to the kids when it’s time for them to get started on their own.” Victoria says the kids are welcome to stay on the property to help save money to do whatever they choose to do. If they decide to stay, there’s another benefit: “We are there to help if they need us,” she says.

Each house is self-contained, with its own solar power–it could be moved to another location and be instantly liveable without the need to get connected to the grid. 

The three houses were constructed for $85,000 but since they were built, Victoria estimates she and Tyler have invested another $25,000 in upgrades, from sliding glass doors in her home, built-in closets for her daughters and a loft bunk-bed for her son. When they were first building, Victoria “didn’t want to go totally crazy” with spending in case they changed their minds. 

But so far, the gamble is paying off.

The plan this summer is to build two more tiny homes so each kid has their own home. 

That might sound ambitious, but building tiny homes, skoolies, and shipping-container homes has become Victoria and Tyler’s full-time work through their company, Blackbird. 

Work keeps the pair busy, given that more and more people are facing that familiar question, making similar decisions to exit the traditional way of life and set off on the path unknown.