For the past three years, a family of four in Quebec has been living in a converted school bus.
“Try it and you're going to say it's easy too,” Louis Giard told CTV News.
Giard shares the yellow school bus -- which features everything from beds to a small but well-equipped kitchen -- with his wife and two children. Since moving into the bus, Giard says the family has been spending more time outdoors than ever.
“(You) go to the beach or you stay all day outside and then you go back at home,” he said.
There is, however, one small downside to downsizing.
“It can be a mess very fast in this size of vehicle,” Giard explained.
Giard and his family are part of growing movement of people opting to live in tiny houses -- that is, spaces that are 600 square feet or smaller, or roughly a third of the size of an average Canadian home.
“If you think of yourself in your house, you’ll probably notice that most of the time you’re in two or three rooms,” Caroline Cote of the Quebec Tiny House Movement told CTV News.
Smaller spaces, tiny house proponents say, also lead to lower energy bills as well as far fewer possessions.
“You become living as a minimalistic style of living,” contractor Dominic Frappier, who builds tiny houses, said. “So it obligates you to live with less.”
With a report from CTV’s Vanessa Lee in Montreal