Kim Kasl, far left, Sullivan Kasl, top middle, Story Kasl, bottom middle, and Ryan Kasl, right, at their tiny house on Roberds Lake. The family used to live in the home and now rents it out through Airbnb.

The Bless This Tiny House vacation rental, which is located on the shores of Roberds Lake near Faribault.

The interior of the first level of Kim Kasl’s tiny house vacation rental property on Roberds Lake.

A plaque provides words to live by in the Bless This Tiny House vocational rental on Roberds Lake.

The Bless This Tiny House on Roberds Lake features accommodations for two, living areas, a kitchen and a bathroom in 267 square feet of space.

Kim Kasl, far left, Sullivan Kasl, top middle, Story Kasl, bottom middle, and Ryan Kasl, right, at their tiny house on Roberds Lake. The family used to live in the home and now rents it out through Airbnb.

A unique vacation rental property near Faribault can provide guests with a first-hand opportunity to experience tiny house living on the shores of Roberds Lake.

The Bless This Tiny House vacation rental, which is located on the shores of Roberds Lake near Faribault.

Offered through the vacation rental website Airbnb, “Bless This Tiny House” is a 267-square-foot vacation rental hosted by Kim Kasl with help from her husband Ryan Kasl and their two children Sullivan (13) and Story (11).

The tiny house gained celebrity status as it was featured on the FYI network’s Tiny House Nation, and the family then used it as their primary residence for several years before relocating to a new house in Faribault.

“The tiny house is definitely a draw,” Kim Kasl said. “It is a new experience for many, and some people are really excited to stay there just because it is a tiny house. Some are tying it out, because they may want to live in a tiny house, and sometimes it is a couple, and one is treating the other, because that person loves tiny houses, and it is a birthday gift to stay in a tiny house.”

She added, “Most people are just looking for a retreat to get out of the city or explore something new, and I love that I get to show off minimalism living … and the area around Faribault is awesome to visit.”

The Kasl’s journey to this area from their hometown of Cambridge, Minnesota was a result of their venture into tiny house living over seven years ago.

“We were praying how we wanted to live and we were at a turning point,” Kasl said. “We wanted to home school our kids. At the time, I was a wedding photographer, and I was going to stop shooting weddings, so I could focus on my home schooling the kids, and my husband was a student and a full-time teacher. We wanted to be a one-income family, so we could home school. We were praying about it, and tiny houses came into our field of knowledge. We just learned about them, since there was no shows on yet about tiny houses. Every time, I had to define what a tiny house was, because they weren’t in the mainstream media yet; they were just barely trickling in. We decided we were going to do that, and we started downsizing our stuff.”

The interior of the first level of Kim Kasl’s tiny house vacation rental property on Roberds Lake.

Kasl then won a tiny house blueprint through a bumper sticker contest from Tumbleweed, which is one of the originators of the tiny house movement in the country. The family was also cast on the FYI Network’s Tiny House Nation hosted by Zack Giffin and John Weisbarth. The Kasls had already started the process of creating their tiny house before being cast on the show, but their venture in the world of television changed some of their initial plans.

“Initially, we thought we would build it on our own, but with our casting in Tiny House Nation, we didn’t really get to design it. They interviewed us and worked with us a lot on what we wanted it to be. I am not a house designer, but I had a thought on what it would look like; they took what they thought we wanted and created the design. We picked our own contractor, which was my uncle Pat Mattson, and they (the Tiny House Nation crew) worked with him and used the Tumbleweed plans to built it.”

One change on the blueprints that ended up in the final product was a catwalk between the two sleeping lofts in the Kasl’s tiny house and the addition of dormers into the roof line.

“There is a catwalk between both lofts, since we did not want stairs going to both lofts,” Kasl said. “That wasn’t in the blueprints, and I asked Pat if he could make it so the kids would have to travel through our bedroom before they go downstairs. If they had their own stairs in their loft, we were nervous they might go down the stairs in the middle of the night and be disoriented.”

After the construction of the tiny house, the Kasls spent almost a year living in the tiny house in two separate campgrounds, while they searched for the ideal location to permanently reside.

At the start, the Kasls thought they might use the mobility of tiny house living to explore a more transient lifestyle, but the size and weight of the tiny house quickly ended some of those plans.

“Traveling down the road in a typical RV makes sense, because of its weight distribution and it’s more aerodynamic,” Kasl said. “An RV is meant for road travel. A tiny house is very heavy, and it’s completely different to travel with it. We had a Ford F-250 truck, and it would really struggle at 50 to 55 miles per hour to pull the tiny house on the road. In the first year, we spent six months in a campground and then another six months in another campground while we waited, prayed and looked for a spot until we found this spot (on Roberds Lake) … and it has been the best place ever.”

The family’s previous residence in the southwest metro area and Ryan Kasl’s job in Richfield placed their initial property searches in those locations, before ending up in Rice County.

“We kept expanding our search for property until we found this spot (on Roberds Lake),” Kasl said. “We loved it so much, moved in, and we still had not even driven into Faribault before. Once we were parked that first night, we drove into Faribault, and it reminded us a lot of our hometown.”

Kasl continued, “On that first day here, we started church shopping, and the first church we pulled up on Google was The River Community Church, and we just loved it. We just immediately knit into the community, we’ve stayed at that church and we really love Faribault. We are glad we are here, and I am glad we didn’t travel everywhere with the tiny house. We feel so rooted here … it’s our new hometown and it our kids’ hometown.”

Of note, the Kasl children were 4 and 5 years old when they moved into the tiny house and are now 11 and 13 years old.

A plaque provides words to live by in the Bless This Tiny House vocational rental on Roberds Lake.

The family resided in the tiny house for several years and that experience was filled with benefits and challenges.

“You view your stuff in a different way — do I really need this cluttering up my space?,” Kasl said. “We would be very mindful to only allow things into our house that ranked as ‘This is my favorite’ or ‘I must have this,’ because anything other than that just jammed up the flow of things.”

She added, “With the people part, you are very close. Everyone is close with their family, but in a tiny house, you are really close, so if you have any issues, you take care of them quickly. Everything is magnified … in a small house, it is much more magnified, because it is much more condensed; it is right in your face, and you have to address issues that are coming up more promptly. You just need to get through them and address them to take care of things. In a lot of ways, it was really good for our marriage and for our parenting, and then there were times when you just needed to escape and go outside and sit on the dock.”

The location on Roberds Lake was an idyllic spot for the tiny house.

“We said that we lived outside,” Kasl said. “In the summertime, the door was always open and the kids were outside all of the time. They built a tree house and were by the water all of the time. In the winter, we would try to do our get-aways more often, and we would spend more time at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s.”

Although they did not travel a lot in the tiny house, the Kasls did use their new lifestyle to hit the road more often.

“Living in the tiny house did free us up to travel a lot,” Kasl said. “The kids and I especially road tripped all over the place in the first couple years. It freed up our budget and lifestyle.”

Change of plans As their children grew up in the tiny house, the family started to make plans for adding on potential space to expand with the conversion of a Silver Streak trailer that was on their lake property. The recent tornado that went through the Roberds Lake area put a halt to those plans. The storm damaged totaled the Silver Streak trailer but the tiny house remained unscathed.

“The Silver Streak was totally finished,” Kim Kasl said. “You couldn’t even see a blade of grass, because there was so much debris on the ground, but the tiny house was perfectly fine.”Kasl and the two children rode the storm out at a local church basement, while her husband Ryan had gone back to the tiny house to get the family’s dogs. He ended up riding out the storm in the tiny house.“The trees were down all around the house and he was stuck there for almost three days,” Kim Kasl said. “The roads were blocked, and the sound of chainsaws went on for about six months around the lake. We didn’t have electricity for over a month. It was a destruction zone.”Larger living Without the option to expand into the trailer on their property, the Kasls opted to look for a larger house to accommodate their growing children. After living in town for a couple of years, the family currently reside just outside of Faribault.

The move provided them with the opportunity to convert their tiny house location into a vacation rental property through Airbnb. The income generated by the property has allowed the family to meet its one-income goal and continue home schooling their children. Prior to using their tiny house as a vacation rental, the Kasls converted one of the lofts into a lounge for reading and board games, updated plumbing and insulation to prevent winter freeze-ups, repainted walls and installed new wood flooring.

Overall, maintenance on the tiny house is not extensive but living in that small of an area can offer some challenges. Having lived smaller and larger, the Kasls are seeing the differences between the two.

The Bless This Tiny House on Roberds Lake features accommodations for two, living areas, a kitchen and a bathroom in 267 square feet of space.

“In a 2,000-square-foot house, you spread your footprints all over,” Kim Kasl said. “But when its a small floor space, and you walk there all the time, the flooring wears really quickly.”

The current tiny house is set up to accommodate two people for stays with a full-sized bed in the loft and a bathroom, kitchen and living area on the first level. The bathroom features a toilet, sink and shower, while the kitchen has a two-burner cooktop, toaster oven, microwave, large farm house sink and an under the counter refrigerator-freezer. An attached deck overlooks scenic Roberds Lake.

“It is so beautiful; the location and the water are beautiful, and the tiny house has a sense of calm when you are there … it just feels perfectly balanced when you are in there,” Kasl said.

The family’s experience with Airbnb has been “outstanding,” and Kasl has even become an Airbnb Ambassador. She links up with people to help them in the process of starting up.

“A lot of people’s primary concern doing this type of thing is if guests are nice — are they going to ruin my stuff? Or challenges like that,” Kasl said. “We have exclusively had wonderful guests, and I only have good reports for my guests. We get to meet a lot of really cool people. We love it.”

The family still visits their tiny house when it is not being rented to enjoy some lake life.

“This is kind of like our cabin at the lake, and it is profitable,” Kasl said. “So there are a lot of goals met for us with the tiny house.”

She added, “In fact, we loved our tiny house so much, it took a tornado to get us out of it.”

Find the vacation rental listing for the Kasls' tiny house on airbnb.com at "Bless this TINY HOUSE on Minnesota Lakeshore" or see more at blessthistinyhouse.com.

Data included is taken from the Minnesota Department of Health Daily reports. Because all data is preliminary, the change in number of cumulative positive cases and deaths from one day to the next may not equal the newly reported cases or deaths.

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