Mighty Right-Sizing

Reading Tea Leaves

11/24/2013

7:00 a.m. Friday in the tiny house: a frosty morning contemplating the solidity of water. Last night’s footprints etched in crystal fuzz to the front step. Every leaf, frond, fencepost, wall and wire whitened under the moon. A spider web spanning the window bears vestigial flocking, and even the sun’s fingers cool in the grass.

In anticipation of the freeze, I had drained the water lines after dinner. Even so, I procrastinate my open air shower this morning, though the water will be hot and I’ll feel warmer afterward than I do peering out the window. Breakfast first, I decide, and pour myself a hot cup of tea, add a dollop of cream, watch it swirl, before nestling the hot cup into the nook under my ribs. Heat emanates. Sun’s up. The world begins to glisten and drip.

I know nothing of the ancient art of reading tea leaves. If I did, perhaps they would have imparted in a steamy whisper all of the secret places of water: where it hides, pools, solidifies in the lines, quick-disconnect fittings or camp shower units. Then again, this divinatory deficiency allowed me to leisurely sip my tea while admiring the frostscape before slipping into my bathrobe, shuffling out to the bath house, and the rude epiphany of the still frozen shower head… In the chaos that ensued, I managed to yank my clothes back on, snatch up some toiletries and dash to a friend’s shower before the ferry line to my off-Island doctor’s appointment (made by the skin of my teeth). By the time I returned home in commuter traffic, my lines would re-freeze and aqua-logistics would tumble from the ice dispenser into Saturday, where we’ve arrived. And, yes, I did resolve the problem. I think. The quick-disconnects I installed hoping to easily drain the lines in the event of a freeze, actually block the flow of water from the lines when disengaged--gmph! I will revisit the original plan of unscrewing the whole fitting each night. The forecast for the evening promises another test.

Fyi: potential tiny house purchasers, please note that my ice-capades could be averted with installation of a heated hose, not presently in my electrical allotment or financial budget. And now, back to our regularly scheduled program...

Editing tiny art shop pics

The remainder of Saturday was spent in culmination of a creative endeavor. In the last weeks, I have blogged about excavating my trove of stowed tools and materials and resuming a lost art. Curiously, the more I exhumed--the sketched and stuffed, the fabricated and forgotten, the designed and consigned to oblivion—and allowed myself to finish or ruin, resolve technical blocks, redesign, create I was surprised to find that I had plenty of materials and skills with which to work and play after what I had remembered as long periods of artistic famine. I even had inventory—remnants of past creative flurries stymied in overwhelm, faltering confidence and distraction (oh... look at that shiny object over there...) in spite of intermittent sales. Perhaps it was inevitable that the scattered and comparatively tiny bursts would explode into the comparatively elephantine manifestation of a tiny house-on-wheels. What’s more, the elephant’s memory held fast, led me back to little things, not so much forgotten as awaiting further instruction. I returned years later with fortified skill and a greater sense of possibility. So, it is with great pleasure to announce, just in time for the holidays...

Now Open for Business!

Pictures and a link to my new Etsy shop can be found on my Tiny Art Shop page. Currently featuring 'thumbtacky' art for your posting pleasure as well as one-of-a-kind, jewelry, mostly made in the tiny house. I specialize in handcrafted,' funktional' and wearable works. Feel free to peruse, ponder, share, tweet, purchase, dream.

Thanks for shopping by (window- or otherwise)!

Now, it’s 8:35 a.m. Sunday in the tiny house. I drain my last sip of rooibos from my favorite bee mug, swirl the encryption of leaves at the bottom. Where do I go from here? For starters, to fill my first Aartvark order that rolled in last night shortly after the roll-out. The rest is a mystery, a grand adventure for which I'm thankful.

Happy Thanksgiving! See you soon!

1 Comment

Tiny Confession

10/28/2013

3 Comments

I confess, this picture is from last year.

At 5:54 a.m. Saturday in the tiny house, the fog that enveloped most of last week gave way to clear, star-stippled darkness. The neighborhood rooster fills his bellows, ruptures the silence with practiced faith.

On that note, I was recently invited to be a contributing writer on the new online information hub for all things tiny (resources, information, inspiration, connection, etc.) TinyHomes.com. Thank you, Lina Menard and Kenny Bavoso for your hard work and your faith in me. O Muse of Writers Practice, don't fail me now! As if on cue, after struggling a couple of hours to write the first two lines of this post, a mantle of clouds moved in, filtering a pale wash of light into the afternoon that took a bit longer to filter through the writers block in my brain. I am happy to report the eventual sun-breakthrough I needed, resulting in my first submission. Although you can read it here, I would encourage you to check out the other articles and information that will be rolling into TinyHomes.com. Now, without further ado...

I confess. I am one of them. I live in a 136-square-foot house on wheels, parked in a field, in full view of a well-traveled road. I have permission of the landowners and, when I took up residence, fell quasi-legally through a temporary structures loophole for garden caretakers. The garden no longer exists, leaving my legal status in question. I remain without permission. I understand that the County is aware of me and receives many questions (I’m told) from folks who “want one” but cannot legally (with county approval) use one on their properties for housing, or even a spare bedroom. I built without permits (there were none that applied to structures on wheels) out of desire to learn new skills and shelter myself in a home that I own and for which I take responsibility. I plan to do it again and to encourage, teach and support others in the same. I confess it all. Am I just a tiny rogue against some proverbial machine I’ve labeled and targeted for my disaffection? I submit the following for your assessment:

Since my tiny venture began, I have engaged in numerous conversations over the uncertainties and illegalities of securing park/live sites for wee houses. Allan Cerf’s article, A Cautionary Tale on Tiny Houses (Cerf 2013), fairly comprehensively covers the quandaries faced by law-abiding citizens with whom the ethos (small, affordable, eco-friendly, unfettered…) resonates powerfully and who, enthusiastically, begin to dream in tiny/mobile only to become nearly mummified in the red tape of codes, regulations, reasoning that inhibit legal habitation of said dream on any fixed location for any significant period of time due to neighboring property devaluation, waste water management, city-legit water/electrical hook-ups, skeptical or hardline officials... The list dickers almost insurmountably on. The concerns are real. Are we doomed to steal like mice along the toe-kicks of civil society, hiding in nooks and crannies, relocating under cover of night, thumbing our noses at establishment and authority, never quite secure in our moorings simply in order to exist? The question of sanction and how to secure it is big.

A respected boss/mentor once imparted, “sometimes it’s better to ask forgiveness, rather than permission.” The context of the particular conversation is lost to me. Admittedly, the premise contains potential for abuse, but the message lingered. Through my twenties and thirties, I moved from place to place, navigating the financial whims of rental markets, observing ever-rising mortgage costs, weighing the latter against my salary and the 40+ hour work week, ad infinitum, that home ownership would seemingly require. Many did invest in mortgages, secure in the idea of ever-increasing home values, until 2008… Discouraged well before the crash, I took up residence in a tool shed on Whidbey Island to clear my head and met a friend who broached the idea of tiny wheely houses (see Tiny Origins page for full story). My mentor’s message rang with sudden crystal relevance. I was not a landowner. Furthermore, in a time of exploding population and finite land resources, competition dictates that not everyone can (or should) own land, though the need for housing explodes with the population, while increasingly expensive ‘cubicles’ of mass housing for rent proliferate. If there’s an alternative model for homeownership that encourages moderate consumption, sharing of resources, cooperation, community, new ways of thinking should it be dismissed outright for rules written in absence of good examples? Might the rules merit re-examination? Enter, the convoy of tiny houses and their trailored existential angst…

A new friend building tiny on the Island recently called me gripped in a moment of such angst after an unknown individual had showed up snapping pictures of the build site without permission. “Am I crazy? Are we in over our heads? Are we going to be evicted? I may have been over-ambitious…” Though I fall short of answering his questions, I wish him comfort in the burgeoning numbers of tiny homeowner blogs and builders and the increasingly audacious visibility of both (magazine features, news spots, films). As the adage goes, there is strength in numbers. So, what are we up against, really?

Throughout history, creative proposals and solutions to problems have been discouraged against the established ‘Ways’ of particular times and contexts. Built to weather instability, these mechanisms often, resist change, though not necessarily out of malice. As Cerf (2013) notes, many officials amiably discuss the topic with blunt skepticism. Such skepticism is the not uncommon companion of unfamiliar concepts. Even so, requesting mere consideration of our tiny proposal can feel a bit like asking a charging pachyderm to pivot on a dime (an admittedly outsized metaphor). Not gonna happen.

But wait! The pachyderm, in fact, roughly the size of a tiny house, has been around a while to achieve his immense stature. He has a long memory built from experience; knows a few things about his world; and, some say, possesses capacity for relationship, even affection. What if we parked the tiny house a mile or two down the line of charge, within sight; give the pachyderm time to react, consider, begin to slow or arc his trajectory? Furthermore, might the owner of the tiny house, wheels chocked uneasily in the line of rampage, on second glance, note that the elephant appears less at ‘angry charge’ than ‘determined gallop’; reassess the level of threat; consider inviting him over for a bucket of peanut butter, neighborly introductions and curious discussion? To be sure, there is a risk involved, but for all of the skeptical city/county officials who tolerate quasi-legal tiny houses within their jurisdiction (para. Cerf 2013), proliferating conversations among such officials, sometimes crossing into dialogue with tiny housers, themselves, resulting in such anomalies as the recently city-sanctioned, Caravan Tiny House Hotel (Portland, OR) seem, to me, to suggest a growing awareness, if not early signs of acceptance? Make no mistake. We have come far.

Poet/essayist/environmentalist, Wendell Berry, in a televised interview with Bill Moyers (Moyers 2013) musing on leadership from the bottom said, “[T]he country and I think… the world are full of people, now, who are… seeing something that needs to be done and starting to do it without the government’s permission or official advice or expert advice or applying for grants or anything else. They just start doing it.” He could be speaking directly to the tiny house movement. For many years, tiny houses have favored the shadow of peripheries, but the ground has been broken. Our early leaders began generations ago (read The Small House Movement in a Nutshell, by Jay Shafer), imagined an alternative, took risks. Their examples inspire and encourage the next wave of tiny builders, first, to follow, then to lead the next. We have grown in numbers and confidence, and there comes a time to step into the public forum with our vulnerability; submit ourselves to essential examination and critique; encourage debate, not for the sake of insurgency, but because we believe in what we’re building. There is much to learn on on both sides of the long journey home.

Bibliography

WENDELL BERRY, POET & PROPHET: Moyers, Bill. October 4, 2013. Moyers & Company. WNET: NewYork

Cerf, A. 2013, January 7. A Cautionary Tale on Tiny Houses. Retrieved from
http://tinyhousetalk.com/cautionary-tale-on-tiny-houses/

3 Comments

Racing the Rain

9/16/2013

2 Comments

7:50 p.m. in the tiny house. Post sunset. Paper Olympic cutouts fan peach horizon. The pigeons who’ve taken up residence in the last month have gone to roost, and the neighbor’s brood of peacocks have concluded their proclamations. Socrates, the visiting tabby, stopped in for a rubdown and well-wishes before heading off for his nightly hunt. The pale bowl overhead deepens to blue, fills with ink and glitter. Endless summer… That was last week.

On second glance, it’s Monday, 6:40 a.m. in the tiny house. Spiders tight-rope across windows, between flowers, spin corbels under the porch soffit, and tighten the rigging. Against a backdrop of summer burning along the edges of maple leaves and a final eruption of dahlias, Sunday rose like a gray-eyed oracle. I had heard her approach and, with the renewed vigor conferred by looming deadlines, I delved into my list of dry-weather details (trim baseboard electrical outlet, window weather-stripping, final sash touch-ups, new tires and paint wheel rims, exterior inspection and caulking, etc.). And so it was, on a possibly the last sunny Saturday, I set myself to a long-languishing quandary. Here’s some background on the matter…

The little house is secured to its trailer foundation with steel bars slipped into and bolted through welded, trailer side-brackets. Two additional bolts fasten each bar through the skids on the bottom of the house (for the ‘why’ of skids on a trailered house, see the Trailer Work and The New Foundation sections of my photo album). One of the connections had been disassembled last November in order to access electrical wiring and juice the tiny house for habitation (for more on that episode, see Taking the Leaks posted 11/11/2012). Somewhere in the hoopla, the steel bar had been removed and the bolts jammed in a position rendering it impossible to re-install the steel bar. After wailing mercilessly on the ends of the bolts with my hammer, buggering the bolt threads for their nuts in vain attempt to drive them out, I gave up, relegating it to the bottom of my ‘to-do’ list and turned my attention to more pressing move-in matters, like propane (see Plumb Crazy, posted 10/21/2012). Months later, the tiny marketing campaign well under way (click here for video tour), thunderstorm and subsequent rains in the forecast for the foreseeable future, priority came clear. High time for a second look.

And so it was with accompanying angst, a few weeks ago, that I revisited the pile of nuts and washers, steel bar, split block and corresponding stuck bolts with the original logistical brains behind the operation, my friend and mentor, John Shinneman. He very sensibly advised me to take a chisel to the block through which the offending bolts passed between the steel bar and skids and remove it. Pressure/tension on the bolt between the block and skid should, theoretically, be relieved, and I should be able to drive the bolts back, hacksaw and/or re-thread the mangled ends, replace the block, re-insert bolts and secure with facility. I crossed my arms, furrowed my brow, emitted a dubious grmph! and thanked him for his time and expertise. John grinned and wished me luck before exiting jauntily stage left. I stashed the detritus parts out of sight of impending open house guests and stuffed it well into the back of my mind for just a bit longer.

Well past the wee open house, newly motivated, and having located most of the stashed pieces of my project, after a brief meditation on the problem, donned my grubbies and spelunking gear (for crawling under the house), suspended disbelief in my abilities and headed to the chicken coup and barn (about 300 feet) to gather my tools.

The first step was easy. I inserted the chisel into the spilt in the block and with a few hammer taps, dispensed with it. Sure enough, without the added pressure of the block, the bolts—with another few hammer blows—were driven flush with the wood. My confidence lifted. I made a second trip to the barn (another 300 feet, times two) for consultation with fix-it guru, Bill Andrews, and acquisition of a couple of long punches, enabling me to prevail in driving the bolts clean out. I shimmied under the house to retrieve them and trekked back to the barn (more exercise) to clean up the threads with a tap and back to the work site to shimmy under the house again, and drive them back through the skids to flush on the outside. Back to the barn. Bill helped me locate an oak plank (very hard wood) from which I could fashion and drill a replacement block. It took several more trips to the barn and removing and re-threading bolt ends and aligning holes to find myself wedged under the house again in the failing light driving the bolts back through the wood and hitting the misaligned steel bar, once again buggering the bolt threads. I lay in the dirt, contemplating the mud pie I would make of myself trying to finish the job in the infinitude of autumn rains forecast to begin tomorrow. I crawled out and shuffled to the barn again to put away my tools.

Pacific Northwest weather is famously unpredictable, except that when rain is forecast, it is reasonably certain to occur though with wide variation in the timing and quantity. Despite the thunderstorm scheduled for 1:00, the sky was a soft, seemingly stable, gray. By 7:15, I was scurrying about to replace window weather stripping, touching up paint and caulk. Finally, after brief meditation on the pressing quandary and beseeching of the rain gods, it was back to nuts and bolts. I am extremely pleased to report that, with only seven or eight trips to the barn, by 11:30 a.m., just as the rain began, I had prevailed, only slightly dampened, fairly dirty, well-exercised (from repeated barn jaunts) and a not just a little triumphant.

It gets easier. Every quandary vanquished (no matter the time elapsed in self-doubt), is a new tool in the belt, and salve for the next angst. Even as knowledge and skill develop, angst is a habit that takes practice to break. In retrospect, I’m surprised to have come this far, given the gridlock experienced in fledgling problem-solving once I moved the house to a location remote of immediate mentor guidance. Somehow, I persisted, haltingly, hung up for months at a time on something as simple as trim before eventual break through, when I return able to look at the problem with new eyes. More stymies surfaced at move-in around the basic necessities for comfort (heat, cooking, shower) that would come from hooking up the electricity, plumbing for propane and shower facilities (see November/December posts for details of the challenges). During such periods of high pressure, response time improved, along with willingness to ask for guidance. Nowadays, more than ability or lack of knowledge, mindset is most often the block. Maybe it always was.

The storm broke mid-afternoon yesterday with lightning, rolling thunder, downpour and brief electrical outage. From my tiny kitchen, I amalgamated a satisfying pot of Russian root vegetable soup with sour cream, lemon and dill and reveled in the drama of it all, secure on my foundation, at least until the next bend in the road.

See you soon!

Tiny Art/Writing Studio, Hangout, Office, Refuge, House for Sale

Click for Details

2 Comments

Tiny House for Sale

8/11/2013

1 Comment

OMG! Woman repairs thermocouple, then makes dinner!

It’s 7:11 p.m. Saturday night in the tiny house. Here and there volunteer sunflowers periscope over the golden toasted grass thatches. I spent the last few days reorganizing for the big shift (see Oh Shift! Here We Go Again..., posted 8/5/2013), taking pictures, checking caulk around windows and trim, touching up paint, applying finish to the baseboards I’m finally going to install. Perhaps the major coup of the week was repair of my secondhand oven range, which, for the nine months of my tiny residence, has required inordinate amounts of coaxing in order to fire the heating element.

Typically, when the propane oven is set to preheat, the pilot flame envelops and heats a thermocouple wire, which creates an electrical charge, which sparks the heating element. Turns out that the piece of metal that holds my thermocouple just beyond the pilot light was bent. Thus, the pilot flame fell just short of the thermocouple, heating it only by proximity, taking much longer and much blind huffing, puffing and beseeching of the pilot to fire the element. Amazingly, with only a few tweaks employing my half-round jeweler’s pliers and a wrench, now, we’re cookin’!

So, why procrastinate a simple fix for nine months? What can I say? For each vestige of the I-don’t-know-hows answered by eventual action, the temporary blockages grow more permeable. In part, it's about readiness. Even when the fix is simple, the tiny victory of it renders more complicated fixes (or shall we say 'shifts') less daunting. Gradually, I take my regressionary reflexes less seriously. After all, when I don’t know how, there are others who do. (Shout out to Bill Andrews whose remote demystification of thermocouple function empowered my diagnosis and remedy.)

So, fast forward to 6:28 a.m., Sunday in the tiny house. Just finished my scrambled eggs and greens with toast, side of yogurt and a spot o’ tea: fuel for baseboard productivity (I hope). Covies of morning doves have replaced the robins who moved to greener worm-rife pastures (I presume) sometime in the weeks of my attention lapse. The doves pick over dry grass for morsels before lift-off en groupe: an uncanny parallel to human activity around the property, which is up for rent, or possibly even for sale. With regard to my own impending flight—the mighty ‘sell and move to Portland’ decision (see Oh Shift! Here We Go Again… posted 8/5/2013)—I don’t, yet, know the how of it all, but I'm moving forward on faith. With that, I submit for your consideration the following (you heard it here first, folks!). Whatever you want it to be, take a tiny moment and dream a little dream with me, and thanks in advance for helping spread the word.

Tiny House (or office, art studio, guest room, dream space, refuge) for Sale!

$38,000 (sales tax not included)

136 square feet

Great Room
Cathedral ceiling, box window seat, reclaimed steel and Milestone entry, iron trivet coat hook, Dickinson Newport propane fireplace

Kitchen
Antique leaded glass cupboards, 4-burner propane oven range, old stove door cook fan cover, bar sink, cabinet storage, under-counter refrigerator, toe-kick drawers

Sleeping Loft
Stowable ladder, dormers with leaded glass windows, gabled alcove

Closet
Clothing rod with overhead shelf, vanity/desk, 2-gallon, electric hot water heater

General
Knotty pine paneling, fir floor & trim, cedar shingles, siding & exterior trim

Notes
Wired for electricity and phone
Bath/toilet facilities not included
Top traveling speed: 25 to (maybe) 35 mph

Shown by appointment only.
E-mail MightyMicroBuilder@gmail.com or call Angela at (360) 331-3246

1 Comment

Homing

2/10/2013

1 Comment

It’s Sunday morning in the tiny house. I'm back, home sweet home, from my Denver visit where my sister, nephew and I spent the previous Saturday constructing a 'domino effect' installation (see OK Go’s This Too Shall Pass music video, for example). On a side note potentially relevant to alternative energy enthusiasts among you, my brother-in-law is collaborating on the design/construction of a gasification prototype for converting waste to electricity (see wikipedia entry for a general description) with possible applications for tiny homes. If you’re interested, feel free to e-mail or leave a comment at the end of the post. Otherwise, I will post links to tech developments as they unfold.

Meanwhile back in the garden this morning, the last haze has lifted. What’s green has never seemed so green under the sun’s fingertips. A cadre of nearly perfectly spaced robins and clusters of other birds are twittering about the business of tugging up brunch from the earth. No doubt, spring is afoot.

It has been a short and sweet, philosophical week in the tiny house. My friend, Dori, joined me Thursday for our periodic head-to-head over brunch griddled up in my tiny kitchen. Sipping coffee over Grand Marnier French toast with dried cherry lavender compote and maple syrup, (see Vittles page for recipe) we pondered the stories driving our respective endeavors. What is it about my wee house project that has held my sustained attention and efforts for the last five years often in spite of time/funds shortages, and where do I go from here?

Building a tiny house on wheels was not my idea. In spite of sharing Iowa roots with original Tumbleweed designer, Jay Shafer (now the owner/designer of Four Lights Tiny Houses), I was unaware that such a thing existed prior to my friend’s suggestion that I build something similar (see Tiny Origins for the inception of the project). Sustainability, too, is a part of it, though I was equally unaware of that conversation prior to the age of 30 and am continuously humbled by how much I have to learn. After the Tumbleweed workshop I recently attended, I wrote about the tiny house movement (see my January 20, 2013 blog post for reference), of which I finally feel a part, after three to four years laboring alone in the wilderness. But there’s something else...

What has driven us to build bigger houses where we sleep a little, get ready for work, and from which we commute longer distances, consuming more resources to work longer hours, hopefully, for enough money to pay for it and take occasional vacations until we can begin to live in that mythical land called RETIREMENT, if we make it that far? Is this living? I have a theory that we are all homing: seeking context, meaning, a secure place to be and time to appreciate. What if we could start living now, before retirement? What kind of world would we build together? The media examples with which we are daily bombarded are variously packaged versions of largely the same thing. There is another way. Since that tiny opportunity I now call home landed in my lap, the world is so much bigger than I had imagined. And in this tiny giant world into which I've stumbled, there is plenty of room for community. I hope to see you there.

See you next week!

P.S. Now entertaining client contracts and seeking grants for construction this spring.

1 Comment

It Takes a Village

12/2/2012

2 Comments

It’s December, day 32 in the tiny house. Here’s an illustrated snapshot of the view from my living room window. In the ‘fallow’ season of the Northwest, the garden still dreams up carrots, parsnips, leeks, onions, kale, beets, brussels sprouts, surprising masses of sage alongside a ruined lattice of sunflowers and sleepy squashes secreting grottoes of seeds. Beyond the perimeter, the boats have wandered up to Brad’s boat barn, moored on their cribs, sheets over their shoulders, battened down for the winter. If I could capture the sky this morning, I would. My photography skills still in early gestation, suffice it to say that the picture falls short of the scene, not unlike the unfolding of the tiny habitation project. If some of you begin to suspect that behind the poetic waxing hides another cadre of excuses for the ongoing lack of shower facilities… there may be some truth in that. In my own defense, the process seems to have an agenda of its own that has little to do with my imagined priorities. So, without further ado, here is the week’s wherefore…

The Ewings’ offer to build a set of steps for my front porch required that I, first, get the house off of its tires and lowered onto some cribs for the winter. I had been dubious concerning the necessity of this task, given the building could have been further stabilized with concrete pier blocks and posts (not that I had gotten around to that either). Nevertheless, Brad had a point that the tires would be better preserved from flattening and cracking if removed and stored. I had resisted his sensible advice for some time for not knowing what a ‘crib’ was or how to set about the project and a reticence to ask for assistance. Now, I needed to know the deck height (which would change for the house blocking) in order to give the Ewings specs for the stairs. So, I hired my friend, Bill, to build the cribs and coach me through the leveling, jacking and lowering of the house—done on rainy, muddy Wednesday afternoon. Great! Since the two-week remission of chronic leaks seemed stable, I thought, perhaps, I had cleared my weekend for focus on the bath house. Right? Well…

Crib--any of various cellular frameworks of logs, squared timbers, or steel or concrete objects of similar form assembled in layers at right angles, often filled with earth and stones and used in the construction of foundations, dams, retaining walls, etc. (websters.com)

Friday night, my electricity went out. A glance out the window confirmed I was the only one. I soothed anxious thoughts of stubborn wires that had caused such consternation a couple of weeks ago (see "Taking the Leaks" blog, 11/11/12) with gratitude that my heater and oven range remained operational. I lit some candles, finished cooking and consuming dinner, went to the barn to flip the breaker (to no avail) and went to bed, powerless again.

Wiring under the house

By Saturday afternoon, my wiring job had been taken apart and reassembled (thanks again, Bill). The electrical problem persisted—meaning it may not have been directly related to my wiring job (slight morale boost), although, with Bill’s expertise, it was, now, definitely not the problem. Turns out the cable had been clipped twice when the garden was being edged last summer. Additional work to resolve the issue was needed. In any case, things were sorted out, and the tiny house was live again. Sunday (today), I could work on the bathhouse, but first...

At least I have a door now...

With all of the ups and downs of downsizing, relocating, plumbing, leaks, trips to the hardware store, laundry (off-site), showers, Turkey Day and day job, one can begin to feel a bit ungrounded and, frankly, downright cranky. Ego aside, it has helped tremendously to step back and ask for help, or simply accept some—skills I am still learning. I am often asked—about the tiny house—if I built it, myself. The answer is, I framed and sheathed, roofed, shingled, insulated, wired, plumbed, paneled, trimmed, sided, laid flooring, applied finish, paint, caulk as well as the hammering, sawing, sanding, hefting and schlepping, teeth-gnashing, grousing, hair-tearing and countless other tasks involved. And I’ve had tons of assistance from others who’ve encouraged, coached, accommodated (sometimes tolerated), loaned and wielded various tools in many of the aforementioned tasks (gnashing, grousing and hair-tearing excepted). The truth is, that the tiny house project has taken a village (a phrase for which I've forgotten the origin and cannot take credit). In the beginning, the project may have found me (see Tiny Origins for more details). Through the project, I’ve found community and a place to be.

See you next week!

2 Comments