Just before Christmas, Casey Friday's home was stolen.
The entire 228-square-foot house simply vanished from his property in Spring Branch, Texas.
He and his wife, Jessica, were more than two years deep into a demanding homebuilding process, hoping to make their tiny-house dreams come true: living mortgage-free in in a home custom-made for just for the two of them (and maybe a dog, too).
"It was long hours [laboring] in the hot Texas sun," Friday told Fox San Antonio.
An electrical engineer-turned-entrepreneur working out of San Antonio, Texas, he was balancing the build with a number of other projects: the launch of his own company that creates e-commerce websites, managing flatulence-filtering underwear sales (yes, Shreddies) and restoring old iPods to audiophile quality.
The Fridays were just a few weeks away from finishing up the house and moving in, the exterior paint job nearly finished.
"I put my blood, sweat and tears into it," he said, and the theft was "depressing, devastating -- made me angry and shocked all at the same time."
The couple had somewhere between $20,000 and $35,000 into the home and $18,000 for the property -- along with those years of labor -- when it was stolen.
Apparently someone hitched it to a truck and drove away with it.
Right after the theft, he wrote on his blog: "I just have absolutely nothing to show the people I care about [what] I’ve accomplished from this project, all because someone (or people) thought it would be okay to tear that all away from me."
So they launched a social media campaign, posting on tiny-house community websites, Facebook and Twitter, and were bolstered by support from friends, family and followers.
Word spread fast. Casey Friday's Facebook post detailing the theft was shared thousands of times (nearly 13,500 at the time of this publication), and one eagle-eyed local spotted the trailer and left an anonymous tip for Casey with a photo.
"There it was–our house–on someone else’s driveway, like it belonged to them," he wrote.
Two weeks after the couple reported the theft, the Bexar County Sheriff's Office found the home in a South San Antonio neighborhood, as Casey Friday announced on his blog. Thankfully, the home was little the worse for wear.
Two stolen vehicles and an illegal shotgun were also found at the property, according to the San Antonio Express-News.
Sheriff's officials told the local Fox TV affiliate that the person who stole the house would face charges, but that the thief was not necessarily the owner of the property where the home was found.
Friday acknowledges that if he could do it over again, he would purchase a hitch lock and a wheel lock, among other security measures.
"I'll be completely honest–I didn't even know that a hitch lock was a 'thing' before our house was stolen," he wrote in an anguished (and expletive-laden) post shortly after learning of the theft. "I only researched them after the house was gone. I am now WELL aware of multiple forms of security that I hope ALL tiny housers will implement on their own tiny house builds."
But to Internet critics who have insulted him for his admitted mistakes, he emphasized that hindsight is 20/20, and that his errors in no way justify the theft of his home.
Bloggers in the tiny-home community chimed in to say that although theft is a very real concern, there haven't been many reported.
After all, it's hard to hide a stolen home.
Despite the home's recovery, the experience left a bad taste in Friday's mouth, he wrote on his blog. He has trouble imagining leaving a dog home while running errands and thinking that someone might steal the home with the dog inside, or leaving his wife home alone without worrying about thieves showing up again.
So he and his wife have at least temporarily shelved their plans to live in the home. Instead, they're renting a 650-square-foot apartment.
"At this point, my plan is to continue building the house until it’s completely finished," hewrote on his blog. "No, that two-tone paint scheme was not planned – it’s just not finished being painted yet. Once it’s finished, perhaps the neighborhood our property is in will be safe again, and we can put it back there (assuming arrests have been made).
"If that doesn’t work out, perhaps we’ll find another place to put it, where we can rent it out on Airbnb. We also might just sell it when it’s completely finished."
Regardless, the Fridays say they continue to dream with ambition, but perhaps in a different direction. LINK
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