Tiny Homes Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Merging Home, Heart And Opportunity In The Mountains

Editor’s note: This story is the last in our series, “Plugging the Brain Drain” about young West Virginians deciding whether or not to leave the state.

Over this summer, Abie Reed will graduate culinary school, do a stint as a bread and pastry chef at a diner, plan a wedding, get married, and as if all that isn’t enough, build a house with her fiance — a tiny house.

They’re planning to move into the tiny home at the end of the summer, and settle in while she takes a gap year to find mentors in the food industry.

“It gives us an opportunity to create a home and have our first house together and everything,” she said. “But if I can’t necessarily find anything that I genuinely would like to be a part of, nothing would stop us from picking up and leaving.”

Her fiance works in Hurricane, West Virginia and has family in the area. They’re building the tiny home there and Reed said they will stay in West Virginia for at least the next five years.

“But after that, honestly, wherever life takes us, we’re really open to going anywhere,” Reed said. “Especially because my sister is in England right now with her husband and then my parents live in South America. And so the world is open to wherever we want to go. We just have to make that decision.”

The food industry is just one of many industries that might require young West Virginians to move away. And whether youth want to become engineers, software developers, stockbrokers, actors, musicians, or chefs — they look around at the state and see limited opportunities to advance that career, whatever it may be.

This was the situation West Virginia native James Rogers found himself in over a decade ago.

“When I first started my career, I wanted to be a chef,” He said. “And the best way to learn how to be a chef is to travel.”

Rogers spent 14 years working in restaurants, mainly in Pittsburgh and Baltimore.

“I didn’t expect to move back,” he said. “And I’m not saying that I would never have moved back, nor would I have never chosen to move back. I didn’t expect to because I’ve always liked high intensity, high paced jobs.”

After an injury in 2015, he did return. Last spring, he graduated from Pierpont Community and Technical College with a business management degree and planned to go back into the restaurant world.

That was right before the pandemic.

“The service industry really took a big hit,” he said.

Rogers reevaluated and is now going to school for accounting. He said he’d like to remain in West Virginia but will go wherever he can find a job.

“I’ve reached a point in my lifetime, where I would prefer not moving a whole lot,” he said. “I’ve moved 10 times since I graduated high school.”

After spending much of the last two decades living in busy metropolitan cities, he said West Virginia is convenient.

“I believe in West Virginia, we are provided with quick access, because we have a load of traffic on the roads,” he said. “We have a less dense population. So it’s less stressful to go satisfy all your day-off routines…Whereas in a city it may take the entire day.”

He’s also got a large family in the state and the cost of living is pretty low.

Sam Clagg just graduated from the culinary arts program at Pierpont. He’s got a job lined up at a restaurant in Charleston, near where he grew up in Putnam County.

He said he’s always been a family man and would never want to move far away from them.

“My family dynamic is where we always communicate, we never stop talking to each other,” Clagg said. “I think that if I leave that I’ll be leaving a part of myself.”

He plans to stay in the state, not just because his family is here or because he thinks it’s a good place to be a chef but also because he sees potential.

“You see big cities and stuff where they have these restaurants here dedicated for 50 years and stuff, but you don’t see that here,” he said. “You see closed down restaurants, you don’t see a community. They’re trying to get together, but they just need some glue. And I feel like I’m that glue.”

Like many young chefs, he hopes to open up his own restaurant someday.

Clagg tells people who are leaving West Virginia to give it time and wait for the right job. He said some jobs do require leaving but he believes one can build a comfortable life in the state.

“I don’t think I’m ready to live in a big city like Miami, Florida, or New York City, or California,” He said. “I don’t think I was ever born to go there. I think if I stay in West Virginia, I will be working towards my strengths.”

The dozen or so young West Virginians we spoke with for our “Plugging the Brain Drain” series have a lot in common.

They recognize the state has issues, and want to see it get better. They have family here but don’t feel like they’re necessarily bound to stay. They think it would be great to find a good-paying job in West Virginia. But if there’s a job offer in Pittsburgh or Los Angeles they’re probably going to take it.

Their future plans aren’t set in stone, much like Reed and her fiance’s tiny home.

“We can literally just attach it to a truck,” she said. “And leave at any given moment.”

A tiny home that Abie Reed and her fiance are modeling their own after.

Changing Course: 'Tiny House' Project Tackles Big Problems In Coal Country

The sound of power tools blends with teenage chatter as students clamber around, under, and over a trailer bed that they’re busy turning into a home. They’re part of a project called “Building It Forward,” which has vocational classes building tiny houses as a way of gaining practical skills and new confidence.

Just a few feet from the garage door at the back of the room, there’s a vertical rock face. It’s all coal from the ground up at least ten feet. Coal here can be a reminder of the past — of the time when this land that the school sits on was blasted flat by miners; of times when coal jobs were plentiful here in eastern Kentucky.

Letcher County Area Technology Center students install a tiny house’s floor.

Back inside, students are using hammers, drills, and saws. Educators hope that this class will help them to feel invested in their education, so that one day they might be able to rebuild the economy here in these once-famous coalfields.

Big Goals

The Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative, or KVEC, is one of eight school district cooperatives in Kentucky, and it’s the one that covers the famed eastern Kentucky coalfields. The fifth congressional district, which contains the KVEC region, has an unemployment rate roughly double the national average, and the country’s lowest life expectancy.

Three years ago, the cooperative won a $30 million federal grant to fund innovation and personalized education in classrooms throughout eastern Kentucky.

“One of the groups that may not have benefited right away was the vocational school students,” KVEC Associate Director Dessie Bowling explained.

She described the tiny house project as an effort to fix that — a way of making sure that the cooperative’s schools offer classes that are interesting and valuable to students, whether or not they plan on going to college.

This past school year, the cooperative funded three eastern Kentucky vocational schools to design and build tiny homes. The project gives students experience with a wide range of construction skills such as plumbing, wiring, carpentry, design, budgeting, heating and cooling to name a few.

Each school received $15,000 from the cooperative’s grant. Combined with some community donations of materials, that enabled the schools to build some very thoughtfully designed and full-featured tiny houses. When the three houses were put up for an online auction, each one had multiple bidders and sold at a profit.

The program is designed to be financially self-sustaining. Money from the sales covers the costs of materials it takes to “build it forward” again the next year.

Bowling said KVEC wanted to avoid falling into the pattern of school programs that go away when funding expires. Designing the project with sustainability in mind has also modeled long-term planning for students. Bowling recalled hearing a high school senior say that he wants the program to keep going so that his children could have the chance to build a tiny home, too.

“For them to think like that, I think, is a really positive thing as well,”

Tiny Interior

Bowling showed visitors around a blue tiny house that sits in the parking lot behind KVEC’s offices in Hazard. The tiny house was built by high school students at the Knott County Area Technology Center, and bought by KVEC to serve as a model for the program.

When you walk into the house, you’re surrounded by a small but beautiful oak interior. A staircase on the left leads up to a loft that fits a queen-sized bed. To save space, the steps are narrower at the bottom, and each one has been fitted with a slightly angled drawer.

Tiny house built by students at Knott County Area Technology Center.

When this house was first completed and presented to a gathering of people at a KVEC summit, Knott County student Charles Collin Mosley beamed. “I took a lot of pride in those steps,” Mosley told the crowd. “They’re all custom, they’re real sturdy. I’m just really proud of it.”

Steve Richardson is a truant officer in Knott County. He said the tiny house project has made a big difference for some the students who in previous years had missed a lot of class, to the point where he’d had to make home visits.

“We’ve been able to get them involved in the learning process,” Richardson said.

Danny Vance is the the principal of Knott County’s vocational school, the Knott County Area Technology Center. He was also struck by how much time and care students put into building the tiny house.

“It’s just the best project I’ve ever been involved with,” Vance said.

Next Round

Three schools are building their second tiny house this year, and five other schools got funding from the cooperative to join the ranks. The vocational school in Letcher County is one of the sites building a tiny house for the first time.

As her classmates knocked the final floorboard into place, carpentry student Haley Hart explained the process.

“They’re just knocking it in with a piece of wood and drilling holes on the side of it,” she said. “Then they’re just going to screw it down, and that’s the floor laid.”

This is Haley Hart’s second year taking carpentry. She said she likes how much freedom students have in the class. “Most of the time in other classrooms when you have an idea, you’re not allowed to do it,” Hart said. “But in here you’re allowed to do anything that comes to your mind.”

Hart said she never would have imagined that she’d take part in building a tiny house. She said the experience has made her more confident and also given her communication skills that she expects to come in handy when she’s applying for colleges and jobs.

One of Hart’s classmates, Matthew Collier, said he thinks the tiny house project is especially important in small towns like his own, where shrinking industries have left communities struggling to imagine a new economy and a new identity.

“Everybody loves this class,” Collier said. “We do the best we can, and when we’re done, buddy, it’ll look like a million dollars.”

Eight schools in eastern Kentucky are now building tiny houses. Students have a deadline to finish construction by April, when the tiny homes will be exhibited and put up for auction to fund another round of construction.

You Can’t Outsource Housing

On the day that Dessie Bowling was showing off some of the student’s handiwork in Hazard, another of the tiny houses built by students at Phelps Area Technology Center in Pike County was being hauled away.

Charles Hawkins explained that one of his sons bought it to use as temporary housing.

“They discovered that they had a black mold,” Hawkins said. “So they’re going to get this to use until that’s finished and then they’re either going to sell this thing or take it out to the lake somewhere and park it.”

Hawkins said he not only likes the product, he supports the idea behind it.

“They need to concentrate more on vocational trades, because every kid that’s going to school’s not destined to become a lawyer or a doctor,” he said. “Somebody’s got to fix the plumbing. Somebody’s got to wire the house.”

That thinking is echoed by another of Hawkins’ sons, Jeff, who is KVEC’s executive director. Jeff Hawkins said vocational training has been an important part of the cooperative’s education strategy.

“We chose to focus on college and career ready,” he said. “And I emphasize ‘AND’.”

Hawkins said vocational skills like those students are learning in the “Building It Forward” program are integral to the “personalized learning” concept that KVEC schools have adopted.

“If you are really focused on personalized learning it needs to be connected to individual passion,” he said. “Draw a solid line between what they were doing in school and how that translates to what they would do after that.”

Scott McReynolds heads the Housing Development Alliance, based in Hazard. He said that a tiny house could be a good, affordable option for tourists, students, minimalists, and many other people.

McReynolds said that eastern Kentucky has a lot of housing needs, including a large amount of rundown and substandard housing.

He pointed out that construction and home repair are kinds of work that can’t be done by people who aren’t locally available, so it’s an area where there will definitely be local needs, and jobs are less likely to go away.

“What really excites me,” McReynolds said, “is the skills that students are learning … are really translatable to the rest of the solutions we need.”

This series is supported by the Solutions Journalism Network.

High School Students Build Tiny Homes for Flood Victims

Ten tiny homes lined up in two rows at the National Guard air base in Charleston recently. West Virginia high school students built the homes for victims of the June, 2016, historic flooding who were still struggling to find adequate housing.

A student demonstrates a hideaway “Murphy Bed” in one of the tiny homes.

The idea was that instead of vocational students building birdhouses or shelves – they could use the skills they were learning in class – carpentry, electrical work, plumbing, welding – to help out local families.

“I was very concerned that folks in West Virginia were still suffering even though all the press had gone away — just like there’s a new story, there’s a new day,” said Kathy D’Antoni, West Virginia’s chief officer for career and technical education. Twelve vocational schools received $20,000 for the project from the state board of education.

A student works at Carver Career Center outside Charleston

“And it’s a killer time frame for these schools,” she said. “Takes normally 4-6 months to build a tiny home, they’ve done it in 9 weeks.”

It should also be noted that all the tiny homes projects also received significant support – both financial and labor – from the schools’ communities.

Most of these homes – there are 15 total – are less than 500 sq. feet, but are designed to house two-six people. For reference, the average American home is about 2,500 sq. feet according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

“Up here’s the loft that’s where they sleep, that’s where the hot water tank stays, then right here’s like your living area, your living quarters, then you have like your fridge right here, your stove’s in there – they’re working on that right now,” said Dakota Carte, one of the students who worked on the project at Carver Career Center in Charleston.

Inside one of the tiny homes built by WV vocational students.

We were standing in the house’s living room during one of the last days of production. The space also served as a kitchen, dining room and bedroom. All in all the structure was little bigger than a generous walk-in closet.

But it’s much better than what many of the recipients lived in all summer.

Rivers is a retired nurse who lived in her home beside the Greenbrier River for 18 years. During the flood, she, her dog and cat evacuated in a tiny camper to a neighbor’s driveway up the hill. There was 6 inches of mud on the floor and watermarks 2 feet up the wall when she returned to the house several days later.

She said after the flood she thought she might be able to clean up and move back in. But it quickly became evident that just hosing the mud off wasn’t an option. Not only was the foundation knocked off kilter, she said, but the mud hardened to a concrete-like substance that had to be scrubbed, rather than sprayed, off.

“We had to carry everything out and put it in a dump truck…so my whole life was like thrown out there,” she said.

Rivers was unable to find rental property that would take her dog or allow her to sign a month-to-month lease so she moved her camper onto the back of her daughter’s property and lived there for the summer – moving into the living room when it became too cold to continue living outside.

A student works on a tiny home at Marion County Technical Center. Marion County was the only school that built more than one home (they produced 4).

She said living with her daughter and five grandchildren permanently isn’t a great option – the kids are homeschooled and it’s a pretty chaotic house, she explained.

The hope was that the flood victims would be in the homes by Christmas. That goal was not quite met – partially because although a majority of the homes were finished before the holiday, the local relief agencies still needed to coordinate building a concrete foundation for the homes. They also needed to make sure that electric, water and sewer hookups were available, which is a bit of a longer process. Rivers said she hopes to be in her new home within a week or two, though. When all that is ready, the local National Guard will transport the structures to their new locations.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Benedum Foundation, Charleston Area Medical Center and WVU Medicine.