Small Living Journal

As I mentioned previously, Santa Cruz is well known for its lasagna layers of houses. The home I live in currently is one half of an old turn-of-the-century beach shack less than a block from the famous Santa Cruz Boardwalk. It is the 3rd apartment I have rented in Santa Cruz, the first being my little dollhouse, and the second one being one half of the upper floor of a somewhat ramshackle, though lovely, Victorian several blocks from where I am now.

Between then and now, I moved into a work trailer in Aromas with Tyson. The whole situation proved too much for me: I was living in a very small rural community without any central gathering places to speak of, knew only Ty and his parents, had to commute to Santa Cruz 3-5 times per week to attend classes and lead discussions, and on top of all that, had only a hot plate and microwave, a tiny countertop fridge, many many mice, and had to go into another house to use the bathroom (did I mention that I got to use a Luggable Loo in our trailer for middle-of-the-night potty needs?). At the time, Tyson was working constantly (which means he gets up anywhere between 4 and 7 am) and would usually get home right before or after I left for SC. I wouldn’t get home til 7 or so, and Tyson was usually working on the tiny house then. The living situation ultimately overwhelmed me and, combined with grad school stresses, proved the perfect prescription for depression. I was there about six months before I decided that it would be better for our relationship, our sanity, and for our little house, if I moved back into town while I finished school and left Ty mostly to his own devices.

Which brings me to my current home. It is shotgun style: 10.5 feet wide and 31.5 feet long… living room connected to bedroom connected to kitchen. From the back of the kitchen, there is a step down and an uninsulated add-on bathroom area which is 7.5 by 8.5 feet. The ceilings are high, which I love, but mostly it is a long white rectangular box. My particular house is very close to the next house, which is owned by the same landlord. In the yard behind us are four more <tiny> houses. The view out my side windows is of the neighboring house and my front window looks out onto streams of people walking toward either the Boardwalk, the laundromat/corner store, or the psychic, just beyond my front porch.

After the other places I’ve lived in the last year and a half, this place seems almost extravagant. There are two spacious closets (which I definitely haven’t had anything close to since I left Texas) for my clothes, camera gear, and to-be-sold-on-ebay-or-craigslist things to live. I have to confess to a certain fondness for the plentiful room for shoes and clothes, as I know that in a few months time I will have to share a space half this size with Tyson. My new roommate has proved a far more sharing bed companion, though she doesn’t keep me nearly as warm as Ty. Fortunately, after spending six months living with Ty in a very ill-equipped trailer, I at least know that we can tolerate each other in just about the worst of circumstances. You may have noticed that I’m not spending much time talking about the actual space I’m living in now. That’s primarily because I don’t feel much connection to it, beyond what it offers me for these few months. Having moved so much since I’ve been here, I see my apartment very much in terms of proximity to friends and school and having a comfortable space to sleep, eat, grade, and study. I know exactly when I’m leaving it and what I’m leaving it for. So for now, I am enjoying my last moments of city life and unshared space. My friend Briana lives just a couple of blocks down the road from me, so for the 2 months I have left in grad school, working and stressing over my tiny house project, our plan is to take advantage of the nearest roller coaster everytime we need to scream in the middle of the day.

Feel free to check back on Tuesday, at which point I will have a gallery up of my actual apartment. Just located my memory card reader, so I will be putting more relevant photos up soon!

Since the day I turned 18, I’ve been thinking about getting a tattoo. I’ve looked through numerous photos and designs, scoured the far reaches of my mind and memory to think what is the most meaningful symbol for me. And yet still my skin is bare. I approach consumption with a similar degree of purpose and contemplation.

I’m always on a mission to find the most perfectly suited, most well-made, most aesthetically appealing thing, be it a dish towel, a dinner plate, a raincoat, or a pillow. I do endless amounts of research into said thing and sometimes only get around to buying it years after I began thinking about it. Which is not to say that I don’t have crappy things—I definitely do—but most of these crappy things I wouldn’t hesitate to get rid of in favor of something better. I also place a very high value on comfort. When given the choice between, say, a gorgeous pair of shoes that I couldn’t walk in for more than 20 minutes, and my beat-up, practically treadless Danskos, I’ll pick the latter 9 times out of 10.

I think this need to have the best and most comfort-giving thing comes partly from the fact that I have fibromyalgia. If you don’t know what that is, the short version is that it’s chronic physical hypersensitivity. My mom compares me to the Princess and the Pea. If it takes 20 mattresses to keep my back from hurting, fine, but I’d definitely prefer to have just one that can do it all. As a result, I often end up trying something and if it doesn’t live up to my standards, then it’s time to find something else. Enter my enemy and yours: clutter.

As much as I try to rid myself of the disappointing thing promptly upon finding a replacement, this doesn’t always happen. And given the frequency of moves from apartment to apartment (12 moves in the last 7 years). I have learned not to get rid of things that might serve me well somewhere else in the future. Carrying around enough lamps, curtains, tables, shelves and rugs to fit into any space well is not an easy, or light, task. Moving the stuff I have acquired is exactly the kind of nightmare which makes Tyson cringe and want to live out of his car.

When I moved out to California in 2007, I had to take stock of a lot of my accumulation. I spent weeks throwing out photos that I didn’t like, getting rid of appliances and furniture, going through bags and bags of clothes and household items that I just didn’t use and donating them. It is a maddening process. Ultimately I whittled it down enough to fit into my car and a small U-Haul trailer. When I got out to Cali, I found that even the furniture I thought I would use in a 270-square-foot apartment had to go up on Craigslist—one small desk was sold in favor of a teeny rolling model. My coffee table crowded the entire living area and now sits on the porch of the trailer until I figure out what to do with it. My small wicker settee was sold off along with banana-leaf chairs to make room for a teeny gray sleeper loveseat.

For me, downsizing is a continous battle. I am addicted to coats and purses (one such coat above), and I worry about how I will possibly find a way to share a 2×5 closet with Tyson. Once I finish grad school in June, I expect to spend my remaining two months in my little Santa Cruz apartment trimming the fat with the help of eBay and Craigslist. Tyson calls me his “good little consumer” and I have to admit that I do feel a certain patriotic duty to stimulate the economy—but I try to remind myself that there’s only so much one woman can do.

Amanda is a photographer and grad student living in Santa Cruz, California. She is working on a photographic documentary of the Small House Movement in addition to working on retrofitting a little house with her partner Tyson. Photos from both projects can be viewed at http://greenaerie.blogspot.com; you can view her other photography at www.aliasgrace.com.

The Early Years

I’m not sure what the exact square footage was of the house I grew up in, but it probably wasn’t more than 1500 square feet for the four of us. My parents got a good deal on the house ($10,000 in 1981) and paid $10,000 to move it out to 10 acres in the West Texas countryside (which cost $15,000). From the outset, my parents thought it was extremely important to have a deck, so within a couple of years of moving in, they built a porch that wrapped around three sides of the house. The porch also served as a buffer by limiting the amount of direct sunlight coming in through the windows. Outdoor space was very important, so much so that they actually spent more on the porch than on the house itself. In addition to the main house, there was a guest house which was in considerable disrepair and which my parents spent years getting into habitable condition. As I think about it now, I realize that this house (which we called “The Little House”) is about the same size as the house which Ty and I will be living in, probably about 250 square feet. I’d like to say that I knew from the time I was small that I wanted to live in a little house like that, but the truth is, I didn’t think about it much. Our house was not large, but I never felt cramped and mostly I just loved living somewhere that I could watch the beautiful sunsets and hear the owls and coyotes at night.

The Lovely Middle

It was aesthetics, rather than reduction of consumption, which originally drew me to small houses. After I finished high school, I moved to Austin, where I lived for nine years. Central Austin has a large amount of craftsman houses from the early 20th century and slightly older Victorians. It’s become common for owners there to split these larger houses up into duplexes or triplexes and rent them out to students and young professionals. Additionally, there are often carriage houses in the backyards that get converted into smaller apartments. I’ve always been fascinated by people’s ability to mold and transform things beyond their original intended use, and that is what drew me to these little house apartments. Features like built-in shelves, large lead-glass windows, hardwood floors… it was the sense of age and character—of adaptation over time—that drew me to those spaces. And I, in turn, loved the challenge of molding and transforming what I had in a way that would fit a new space.

When I came out to California in August of ’07, I found that there was a plethora of backyard cottages. Driving through the streets of Santa Cruz, houses seemed stacked like layers of lasagne, as every house I passed appeared to have one or two mini-houses staggered just behind it. In the few days I was there apartment hunting, I looked at about 5 of these little houses. The one I settled on ended up getting snatched up by a friend of the landlord’s and so at the last minute, hours before my plane was leaving out of San Jose, I signed a lease on one that was way beyond what I wanted to spend ($1250 per month) but was nonetheless a lovely little dollhouse. The appeal of the backyard cottage as a living situation had many facets. As a grad student and relatively quiet person, I really wanted the privacy of no-shared-walls, no-roommate, and away-from-landlord living. My dollhouse had its own yard, which was separated from the backyard of the main house by a waist-high fence and a tree which blocked the main view into my house. It basically seemed like the perfect oasis for study and respite.

Santa Cruz is a haven for spaces like these for several reasons: SC is a university town, which only became a university town a few decades ago. As a result, there are not enough apartments for off-campus students. Growth here is restricted because of the ocean/bay on one side and the mountains on the other. ADUs have been embraced by the town in order to provide income to owners here and offset the high taxes and home values as a result of (they argue) the influx of students. The problem, of course, is that most houses with room for ADUs already have them, and the rent and cost of college isn’t getting any cheaper. Despite how much I loved my dollhouse, I was forced to move out after 7 months due to the cost and multiple problems with my landlord. I learned very quickly the racket that landlords run in this town and how difficult it is to stay afloat financially. I moved into a place that cost several hundred dollars less in a rather undesirable part of town, but it was a quirky Victorian triplex (like I love) and the landlord seemed much more harmless.

Tiny Reconciliation

Running parallel to all this was my new relationship with Tyson (whom I met after living in SC for a few months) and also continuing research into indigenous American history and the effects of colonialism on our country and people. Years ago, I had done a story on the Penobscot Nation in Maine and the effects of dioxin pollution on their culture, which is centered on the river on which they live. This experience prompted me to look more deeply at the effects of EuroAmerican culture on this land we took over. The more that I learned of its rightful inhabitants, the more difficult it was to dismiss my own occupation and consumption.

If you’ve read this far, you might be thinking how strange that all of a sudden we went from talking about houses and landlords to colonialism and natives. But to me, it is all very intertwined. Here, now, in the 21st century, the current stewards of our lands are concerned more with profit than with sustainability. This viewpoint is not sustainable. I see small homes and small living as an opportunity to level the playing field, and hopefully to promote a more equitable culture. The Small House Movement has a long way to go before that will be a possibility, but I am hoping that by putting our tiny minds together, we can effect some not-so-tiny change.