Small Living Journal

This article is about where we live and the question, what is small? I get this question fairly regularly on my blog, the Tiny House Blog. How does a family of four or six live in a tiny house? What is the answer?

First off here is a picture of my home, it is not tiny like Jay Shafer’s Tumbleweed, but I do not live alone in this house. Our home is a 1200 square foot home built in the early 60′s, 1600 square feet if you count the garage.

We rent this home which is on a private boarding school campus outside of Healdsburg, California. The home is on a quarter acre lot with a garden area on the side. The campus is on 360 acres and is surrounded by the Russian River on three sides. Both kids have gone to school here and it is a real joy to live here.

There are four of us living in this home, or to be more realistic only three most of the time, as our daughter is away at college more than she is home. We do still keep her room available to her, although now that I am working full time at home I am looking to convert a portion of her room into an office.

By today’s standards our house is small. Apartment Therapy is running a contest of small homes and here is how they list the different sizes:

• TEENY-TINY 300 Square Feet and under
• TINY 600 Square Feet and under (but over 300 Square Feet)
• LITTLE 900 Square Feet and under (but over 600 Square Feet)
• SMALL 1,200 Square Feet and under (but over 900 Square Feet)

So a home like my family lives in is considered small. If you divide the space down for each person, we each have 300 square feet. So yes, we live in a small, but not a tiny house.

My wife and I do plan to downsize even more when our nest becomes empty. When both kids have finished school and moved out completely, I visualize us living in a home in the 400 to 600 square foot range. With a separate office/spare bedroom for the kids and grandkids to use.

At the Tiny House Blog I tend to emphasize homes smaller than 400 square feet, but each person must figure out the amount of square footage each person requires and downsize your family to fit the home that is best for your needs. Tiny or small house living is not a set and sound rule that requires a certain size, we each must find out what is best for us.

-Kent Griswold publishes the Tiny House Blog.

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!

I sit at my desk aboard Raven, snugged up to a mooring in Burlington harbor. There is a bronze oval portlight above the desk, framing the view of the city immediately to the east of me. The sounds of the urban world filter in – the hammering of new construction along Battery Street, automobiles darting about, sirens in the distance, children playing in the park.

Another portlight frames the view to the west. Juniper Island floats on a watery foreground. The Adirondacks rise from Lake Champlain’s western shores. A squall has wrapped the peaks in cold, wet clouds that have now descended to the lake. They are moving quickly eastward toward Vermont.

“Talk of mysteries-Think of our life in
nature-daily to be shown matter, to come
in contact with it-rocks, trees, wind on
our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world!
the common sense! Contact! Contact!
Who are we? where are we?”

Ever since first reading Thoreau’s essay, “The Maine Woods”, I’ve thought long about his words.

“Contact! Contact!”

The modern world lies to the east of me, the approaching storm and wildness to the west.

“Who are we? Where are we?”

I climb the steps of the companionway. In the cockpit of my floating home, the views that I’d seen separately through two bronze windows now combine as one.

“Contact! Contact!”

Raven

For seven months of the year I make my home aboard a 34-foot Pacific Seacraft sailing sloop named Raven. The choice to to take up residence on a boat was born of three desires. First, from a practical standpoint, Burlington’s housing market was, and still is, well out of my reach. Even if I had been able to afford a home at highly inflated prices, I knew then that the bubble was on the verge of bursting. No thank you.

Secondly, I’ve had a decades-long love affair with water. Rivers, lakes and oceans have all seduced me. I make a large part of my living on the water and the water is where I turn when it’s time to play. In making a decision for where I would live, I knew that water would not be far away.

Finally, and most significantly, I had become more and more troubled by my own (and our society’s at large) increasing distance from the elements that sustain us. I yearned for a life of greater contact. And so it was, in May of 2005, a pretty boat named Raven captured my heart and became my introduction to the small home lifestyle.

Live-aboard communities have existed for many years alongside busy waterfronts in harbors up and down the coast. Thousands of these tiny homes often go unrecognized for what they are. They are too often lost amid the boats that function merely as a high-priced hobby, or perhaps as a weekend retreat or the object of an unrealized dream to sail over the horizon. For those of us who’ve adapted to life afloat, however, the cruising sailboat represents a highly evolved, self-contained and extremely efficient housing style from which the contemporary small house movement could draw on a wealth of innovation and ideas. In fact, it was my appreciation for the design of my boat that inspired my other tiny house.

Gypsy Rose

When I first moved aboard Raven I had visions of the boat as my year-round Burlington, Vermont residence. I dreamed of finding a piece of land on which I could “park” Raven when the waters froze, continuing to live aboard even while “on the hard.” It was a short-lived idea. Considering the challenges of finding a landowner near the lake to host my boat, moving the 14,000 pound vessel twice a year, and perhaps most onerous, dealing with the inevitable regulatory hurdles that restrict our housing choices in favor of homogenous neighborhoods, I decided to build a land-based home along more traditional lines.

Welcome to Gypsy Rose. She was built in partnership with my long-time best friend and now partner, Marion. (Being a land-based translation of the boat, nautical traditions dictate that our winter home be named and referenced as “her” and “she.”) She is 20 feet long (not including the shed on the tongue end), 8.5 feet wide, and 13.5 feet in height. The first level has a total of 115 square feet of interior space and a 4 foot by 8.5 foot porch. Above, a sleeping loft extends the entire 20 foot length.

We began building Gypsy Rose in November of 2006 and she remains very much a work in progress. I’ll eventually build the cherry and maple cabinets, the dining booth, the pantry shelves, and the pocket door for the bathroom, but for now we happily get by with temporary placeholders for those features that allow us to refine the design through our experiences of living in the space.

Gypsy Rose is sited in the central of three meadows on our land in eastern Vermont. The road up the mountain is unmaintained by the town and only passable during 8 months of the year. From the time of deep snows through the end of Vermont’s fifth season – mud season – we enjoy the absence of vehicles. We pack our provisions a half-mile from the nearest plowed road beneath the canopy of the 150-year-old sugar maples that line the single lane track. No power lines detract from a landscape that has remained unchanged for centuries. We make our own electricity from the sun and haul our water from the stream. We watch the owls and woodpeckers and wrens outside the window. Fox, deer, moose and bear regularly visit the meadows around us. Coyotes call from across the stream at night.

“Think of our life in nature-daily to be
shown matter, to come in contact
with it-rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks!
the solid earth! the actual world!
the common sense! Contact! Contact!”

To read more of Kevin’s small home adventures, visit his blog, “Building Gypsy Rose .”

Quiet Life. After considerable reflection, by the Spring of 2003, I had decided to commission Jay Shafer to construct a tiny off-the-grid home, the Mobile Hermitage. I felt it was time to live a quiet life, and I believed that dwelling in a 140 square foot hermitage retreat would be just the way to achieve that quiet life.

Media Attention. At the time, I didn’t realize that the decision to live in a tiny house would result in more news and media coverage than I could ever have imagined possible. Within a few years, my tiny home had been in Better Homes and Gardens, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times of London, PBS, National Public Radio, a CBS affiliate, and I’d even received a phone call from the Oprah Winfrey Show expressing an interest in having my house hauled to Chicago to be on their stage for a taping of their show on small living. It soon became clear to me that there was a substantial interest in simple and small living. Below is a video from PBS affiliate WQPT.

Making Small Work. Inside my home, there is a dining room, a living room, a kitchen, a study, and a walk-in closet. These are all the same room. This is possible because most tasks in life are accomplished at different times (cooking, eating, studying) instead of being done all at the same time. So, having a single room serve many functions is an excellent way to make small work.

Tiny Experiences Book. I wanted to share my experiences of living in a tiny space. Put Your Life on a Diet: Lessons Learned From Living in 140 Square Feet is the book I wrote about my experiences in the tiny house. Below is a video from the launch of the book on 11 July 2008. The interview, book reading, along with the questions and answers that followed were aired on public radio and broadcast on television.

Spreading the Message. I recently spoke at Viterbo University on my experiences with living small and the larger issues of urban and regional planning. The presentation includes photos of my home. A video of that presentation is below.

2 Bedrooms, 2-stories, 677 square feet

When Michael and I moved into this historic home several months ago I wrote that it is remarkably similar to a Tumbleweed Enesti design. That has been a largely unsubstantiated claim until now.

In the process of drawing up the floorplans to share with you today, I realized this is the largest place I’ve ever lived in since leaving the nest. The same is true for Michael. We’re no spring chickens either, which is why I think it’s amusing that this is where I’m living now, in the midst of writing This Tiny House blog and organizing a Tiny House Village.

Irony aside, without further ado, here are the floorplans:

Our current house

And for comparison, here’s the Tumbleweed Enesti floorplan:


Since we’re renting, I’m allowed to complain, right? But because the home was built somewhere around 1913, I give it a lot of credit for still standing. They didn’t have power tools back then.

The Stairwell
My biggest problem with the design of this house revolves around the stairwell. I’m jealous of Jay’s super-compact stairwell in the Enesti. Ours takes up valuable space. I can’t help but think that if our steps were steeper we could’ve had room for an upstairs bathroom. (However, since our only bathroom is downstairs and the bedroom is upstairs, I’m thankful that the stairway isn’t any steeper.)

The Big Kitchen
Michael and I were surprised by how huge the remodeled kitchen is in comparison to the rest of the house. It dominates the entire first floor. We were used to having about 1/5th the amount of space! The cabinets go all the way up to the ceiling and there’s no way we could fill them with our minimal amount of kitchen accessories. So we started putting our books there in lieu of a bookshelf.

The Weird Room Under the Stairs
Not too long ago we discovered a room under the stairs. (*Cue the creepy music*) It’s basically dead space because the refrigerator completely fills up the doorway to this emptiness. I imagine back in the old days when there weren’t such things as behemoth refrigerators, the space was a cellar to keep food cool.

Tumbleweed Envy
If I could wave a magic wand and all of a sudden our house were transformed into Jay’s Enesti design, I would be one happy woman. His kitchen is much more compact, and in using compact appliances he successfully made room for a very cute dining nook. But I suppose our big kitchen is a blessing in disguise as we are buying more food, cooking more and spending less money. We even got inspired to compost our food waste and start a garden in our tiny bit of green space outside.

The Utility Bill
We replaced every light fixture with either compact flourescent or LED lightbulbs. We keep the gas furnace set at 60 at night and 65 during the day. Our California utillity bill was $20 this month, which is about $5 electric and $15 gas.

The Homey Feel
Our guests often remark on how peaceful and uncluttered the space feels. I think that’s largely due to the fact that we don’t have a lot of stuff and we don’t have a big ugly TV. We furnished the living area entirely from Craigslist finds. As it is now, it’s pretty comfortable for 4 people (and our feline neighbor) hanging out together. More than that and it’s a party!

Hillary lives in a 677 sq. ft. historic home with her partner while renovating a 50 sq. ft. tiny trailer. Her blog is located at thistinyhouse.com. She is a freelance writer and consultant.