In 2013 Jenna Spesard quit her job as an executive assistant at DreamWorks in Los Angeles, and with her partner Guillaume Dutilh, a French-born engineer and landscape photographer, she spent about a year building a 20-foot timber house on a trailer. In September 2014 they hitched it to a pickup and set off on Tiny House Giant Journey, a road trip that would cover more than 30 US states and five Canadian provinces.

Guillaume Dutilh and Jenna Spesard with their dog beneath the tiny house roof
Jenna Spesard and Guillaume Dutilh with their dog Salies inside the tiny house during its early journey. Gallery attribution: Tiny House Giant Journey.

Who Jenna Spesard and Guillaume Dutilh are

Spesard grew up partly in Centerville, Ohio, and had long wanted to be a travel writer. Dutilh comes from Pau in south-west France and had lived in the United States for about seven years, working as an engineer at Yamaha Motor Corporation. When they left her parents’ home in Shelbyville, Illinois, Spesard was 28 and Dutilh 30, and their one-year-old Australian Shepherd, Salies, came too.

Both found work connected to the trip: Spesard blogged for the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, and Dutilh hosted Tumbleweed workshops.

The timber exterior, sloped roof and round window of the Tiny House Giant Journey home
The timber exterior, sloped roof and round window of the Tiny House Giant Journey home. Gallery attribution: Tiny House Giant Journey.

The tiny house: design, size and cost

The home is based on Tumbleweed’s Cypress design, about 132 square feet of living space on a trailer 20 feet long. The couple built it themselves over roughly a year. Its key numbers, as reported by the Washington Times and New Atlas:

  • Weight: about 10,100 lb (4,580 kg) with a full water tank.
  • Cost: US$31,460 for the completed project.
  • Sleeping: a queen-size bed in a loft under a skylight, reached by bookcases and cabinets that double as stairs.
  • Power and services: a Goal Zero solar generator and an on-board composting toilet.
A bed tucked beneath the sloping timber roof of the tiny house
Boards stored above the doorway beside a round window and hanging instruments
The tiny house interior, with a worktop, laptop and compact corridor

Building it meant learning construction skills from scratch, and the interior photos show how every function had to earn its place: storage above the door, a compact work corner and a sleeping loft that frees the floor below.

The road trip: from Illinois to Nova Scotia and beyond

The pickup towing the house had a top speed of about 50 mph, so the journey moved at a gentle pace. The first leg ran east through Dayton, Ohio, towards Boston, New York, Montreal, Quebec and Halifax in Nova Scotia, and a ferry carried the house from Nova Scotia back to Maine.

A pickup towing the tiny house on an early road trip
The tiny house and pickup parked beside turquoise coastal water
The tiny house parked beside a rocky shore and lighthouse
The tiny house travelling along a road lined with autumn trees

From there the route wandered south and west. Spesard reports 25,000 miles in the first year alone; New Atlas put the total at about 22,000 miles when it reported the more-than-30-states, five-province tally in 2016. Hosts along the way offered driveways for the night, and the photographs follow the house past coastal lighthouses, autumn forests, the painted cars of Cadillac Ranch in Texas and striped desert hills.

The tiny house parked among tall trees at a forest campsite
The tiny house beside a track through a wooded campsite
The tiny house beyond the painted cars at Cadillac Ranch
The tiny house trailer passing between vehicles on a city street
The tiny house and pickup beside striped desert hills
Guillaume and Jenna sitting outside the tiny house beside a horse-drawn carriage

What happened next

The project grew into a career. Spesard’s videos about people living alternative lifestyles began earning revenue within a year, and about four years after she started she was debt-free. She went on to hire people from the nomadic and tiny-house community, and her YouTube channel now has around two million subscribers.

She no longer lives in the tiny house full-time, but it is still part of her growing family’s life. For anyone tempted to try the same, her story shows the practical side as well as the dream: a towing vehicle that can safely pull more than 4.5 tonnes, legal places to park and a plan for water, power and waste.

The tiny house crossing a bridge above a river and autumn woodland
Photo: Tiny House Giant Journey

For more on living on the road, see an Earthship-inspired van and a couple’s van journey.

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