- Blue Wells and his wife sold their Atlanta home and moved to a tiny-home village in South Carolina.
- Shortly after the lifestyle change, he was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ronald Wells, who goes by Blue, about moving into a tiny-home village in Travelers Rest, South Carolina, and his life there now. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I moved into a 600-square-foot solar-powered one-bedroom, 1 ½-bathroom tiny home in December 2021 with my wife, Pamela, and our two dogs and two cats. It was designed and built by Eclipse Cottages.
It's much taller than a typical tiny home: The ceilings in our main room are 16 feet, and the ceilings in our loft are 6.6 feet.
Before buying my tiny home, I lived all over the country: Virginia, Chicago, Missouri, Maryland, and Atlanta, where I was for the past 16 years before moving to South Carolina. After moving down here and getting diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, I realized that something was pushing me this way that I wasn't aware of.
The best thing about this place is the freedom. I can come home and go out to eat whenever I want. I never have to worry about it. It takes me 30 minutes to clean my entire house.
I've told people since my diagnosis: "I am less stressed now as a stage 4 cancer patient living in a tiny home than I was being a six-figure executive in Atlanta."
That took more years of my life than this cancer will.
I've always loved tiny homes, so after I got laid off, we decided to buy one
I was working for a software company. In February 2021, I got laid off and took a severance package.
I had been an aficionado of tiny homes for years. I watched every YouTube video and every TV show about the different designs and what people were doing and how they're doing it. I drove my wife and kids nuts.
We looked at several communities. The one we chose was affordable, unique, and community-based.
We spent a couple of months researching where we would want to be.
The place in Georgia we looked at was nice but not really a development. There was a lack of community. It also didn't have any cell signal or internet, and there wasn't enough industry around it where I felt I could go out and get a job.
We really liked a place in Tennessee, but the price for tiny homes there became the same as that of a regular home because of the way the houses were built. It was close to $200,000, and I had set a limit for myself of $150,000.
Then we came to South Carolina, and after meeting Justin Draplin, who founded the Eclipse community — and after seeing the design — we decided on it. So we put our 3,500-square-foot house on the market and sold everything in it. In May 2021, we moved and stayed in a rental while our house was under construction.
I may not have ever found out about my cancer if I didn't move here
Justin and I just clicked. He seemed like a decent guy who was the opposite of everything I'd dealt with for 35 years in the corporate business world.
In January, I went to work for Justin. That lasted four months before I fell off a ladder and broke my heel. After that surgery, they uncovered the cancer. If I hadn't fallen off that ladder, there would have been no impetus for me to go to the doctor and figure anything else out. It literally saved my life.
We pay nearly one-tenth of what we did in Atlanta, and it allows us a lot of freedom, but it took some getting used to
My home in Georgia cost us $4,000 to $6,000 a month. In the hot summertime, electric bills were upward of $600.
I pay my lot rent, which includes electricity, water, trash pickup, and access to everything in the community. That's about $500. My out-of-pocket expenses are my internet, which is $50 a month, and my propane, which is $30 a month.
It takes some getting used to when you go from 3,500 square feet to 600 square feet. It's taken us probably six to eight months, maybe a year, with everything else that's been going on to really decorate it.
Most furniture is not built for tiny homes. You stick a sofa from a big home into a tiny home, and there's an entire room filled. You have to be very judicious about what you're looking at. What we found was that antiques worked best. You can find a lot of smaller, older furniture that fits nicely.
This was the only manufacturer we saw whose builds had 1 ½ baths, and after the year that we've had, I don't understand how more than two people can live in a tiny home without an extra bathroom. It's also the only one we saw to offer lofts this tall. Typically it's a crawl space, so we have a true loft.
Everyone seems lighter in our community
We just had Thanksgiving in our clubhouse in the neighborhood. We had probably 35 or 40 residents and more food than you needed to feed an army: multiple turkeys, multiple hams, and a whole table of desserts. It was maybe the best Thanksgiving I'd ever had.
It struck me that I was looking at a bunch of people who decided that they were tired of the rat race, the stress, and the pressure that society and jobs put on us, and that we put on ourselves. The people that I've met here, they feel lighter to me than anyone else I've met.