DIY Couple Builds Scandinavian-Inspired Smart Tiny House on Wheels

Michelle and Sal, a long-time couple and DIY tiny house builders, constructed a stunning Scandi-modern tiny house on wheels with the invaluable help of Michelle's dad, drawing inspiration from Shaye's Tiny Homes' Hazel design. The build is a confident answer to what the THOW community keeps asking: can you do clean Scandinavian minimalism and still wire a genuinely smart home?

The finished house measures 28 feet long, 8.5 feet wide, and 13.5 feet tall, totaling approximately 400 square feet including the second story. That footprint puts it squarely at the road-legal limit most builders work within, but the interior punches well above its weight class. Most of the second story is full standing height, accommodating anyone up to 6 feet tall. Anyone who has crouched through a low-slung loft to get dressed in the morning knows exactly how significant that detail is.

The Hazel design served as the aesthetic north star, and the finished build is loaded with smart home features and clever small-space solutions throughout. On the tech side, the couple integrated Crestron Home smart home technology into the build. Layering a serious home automation platform into a THOW is still relatively rare, and it signals that Michelle and Sal were designing for permanence and comfort, not just novelty.

The build documents a maximized tiny kitchen, a multifunctional living room, a mini mudroom, a clever bathroom, a standing-height bedroom, and a flex room that doubles as both an office and lounge. That flex room in particular reflects the couple's core motivation: the feature section at the 9:41 mark of their video specifically addresses why they built a tiny home, with flexibility and lifestyle change driving the decision. The mudroom is a detail that rarely makes the highlight reel in tiny house content but matters enormously for daily livability, especially for anyone parking on a rural plot.

A dedicated chapter of their build video covers the tiny house build experience with Michelle's dad, a collaboration that adds the kind of personal stakes that makes a build story genuinely worth following. Another section addresses tiny house cost and how they saved money during the build, the question every prospective builder has open in a second tab.

Michelle and Sal document their ongoing build journey on TikTok at @tiny.dimensions. For anyone deep in the planning phase of their own THOW, the combination of Hazel-inspired design, Crestron integration, and a second story you can actually stand up in makes this build one of the more complete and replicable reference points to emerge from the DIY community this year.