Small Living Journal

Welcome to the first issue of Small Living Journal! SLJ is the joint project of several writers who are currently active in the Small Home Movement.

Each of the writers on this site are enthusiastically busy with their own projects including: blogs, books, documentaries, community forums, and blueprints of new tiny home designs. However, over the course of time, each of us ended up crossing one another’s path and discovered how much we enjoy interacting with others who are passionate about the same subjects as we were: tiny homes, simple living, sustainable architecture, financial integrity, and the like.

Writing can be, at times, a lonely business–possibly even more so in the case of people with subject-matter that is contrary to the mainstream way of thinking. And, let’s face it, most people would consider someone whose ultimate dream in life is to live in a space of playhouse-size proportions a little… weird.

Until very recently, the concept of living in a space 500 sq. feet or less was definitely contrary to the American mainstream in all but the most dense of cities. In fact, from the 1950′s onward, the American home seemed to be ever increasing in size and grandiosity with little regard to the costs to either individuals or the environment. (Per the latest real estate sale information, this trend finally changed in the fourth quarter of last year.)

It wasn’t until the recent decline in housing values, failure of the sub-prime housing industry, and subsequent impact to the broader U.S. and world economies that most people were willing to consider any solution out of the norm when it came to housing options. Now, however, there is an increasing amount of media attention on any form of cheap housing solution. Older inner city homes, yurts, tiny houses on wheel, houseboats, RV’s, log cabins and the like are now featuring on the evening news and regular pieces in the New York Times.

I’ll be the first to admit that the small shift in mainstream mindset toward more modest housing options has been exciting to many members of the small home movement. But we realize that there’s a long way to go in terms of right-sizing the “American Dream”.  In the meantime, the group of us on SLJ thought it would serve a useful purpose to have a website where we could regularly release articles that might prove useful to people interested in downsizing their lives to more manageable proportions. (Not to mention, it’s great fun for the writers to have a chance to interact and discuss ideas with one another in the generation of the individual issues.)

Each of the writers who’ve chosen to be involved with SLJ has their own unique experiences and perspective on the small home movement. We hope you take as much pleasure in discovering these differences as we have in the creation of the issues.

Going forward, we plan to post a new issue every other week on Monday mornings. Each issue will be coordinated by a different writer involved with the project and focus on a specific topic of interest to the small home movement such as different options for housing, challenges with zoning, financing the building a small home, etc.

In the first issue, each of the writers shares a brief bio and explanation of how they came to be involved in the small home movement. In the second issue, we will focus on some of the challenges inherent in downsizing enough to fit into a small home.

Below is the schedule of upcoming issues and topics:

• Issue 2 – Downsizing   4/6/09
• Issue 3 – Personal Tiny Home Tours 4/20/09
• Issue 4 – Do It Yourself 5/4/09
• Issue 5 – Future Planning 5/18/09

Others who are interested in the small home movement are welcome to submit articles for consideration as guest posts in each of the issues.  If you’re interested in contributing something, please use the Contact page to reach us.

We hope that you will continue to follow the project in the ongoing weeks and contribute your own thoughts and ideas to the ongoing conversation surrounding sustainable housing.  SLJ can also be followed via RSS Feed or Twitter.

And with that, I’ll conclude with a quote from one of the most inspiring members of the small home movement, Jay Shafer: “Viva la tiny revolution!”

I hope you enjoy the first issue.

Stephanie

My name is Kent Griswold and small things in general have always been an interest to me. I enjoy tiny cars, tiny RV’s, tiny cameras and tiny houses.

As a kid I dreamed of working in a fire lookout tower and ended up spending a couple of days in the Prescott National Forest in Arizona on a tower to see what it was really like. This tower was an all inclusive workspace and eating and sleeping area. You did have to hike down the tower to the base to use the outhouse or take a shower though.

Later when I was in college, I was still undecided as to a direction to major in so took a year off and went and worked on the Navajo Indian Reservation as a school bus driver and teachers aide. I lived in an old 20 foot airstream trailer that year, and it was quite the experience as we had every type of weather, from snow to extreme heat.

In college I had the chance to take a course in homesteading. The school had a 5 acre parcel, that was developed into a small homestead over the years. I was lucky to get involved early on and we built a tiny cabin structure and learned some log building skills and did some gardening.

Over the years it has always been my dream to have a small cabin in the mountains or by a lake. Nothing fancy, just a nice little rustic cabin. My first choice has always been log for the building structure. It is not perfect, but you just can’t beat the old log cabin look in my opinion. This is still my dream, although it has expanded to be not just a vacation cabin but a full time home.

When I became interested in the internet, I started bookmarking cabin and small house sites that interested me. Later, when I learned about blogging, I decided to start sharing what I had been bookmarking and I started the Tiny House Blog. I had discovered Jay Shafer early on and the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. I found out that he had moved about 25 miles from my home in Healdsburg, California. We have sense become friends and I enjoy the times when we are able work and talk together.

I have been publishing the Tiny House Blog for about two years now, using my preliminary finds on the internet as a starting point, adding stories of those who are living the tiny house life and sharing it with my readers. It has been fun to be involved in the growing tiny house movement.

One of the joys of being involved in the tiny house movement is the people you meet along the way. Here is a picture of a group of us at Jay’s house and we jokingly call it “A Meeting of the Tiny Minds.” This group is built up of designer’s, builders and bloggers. We had a great time getting to know each other better and sharing experiences.

My childhood playroom

What kind of house did you grow up in?

During my school-years we lived in a moderately sized one-story ranch house for a middle-class family of four. To make more room we utilized the basement and the backyard. We were close enough to walk to school. We played “house” in our tree house.

My childhood best friend lived in a huge mansion by comparison. We had to drive 30 minutes to get to her house. I will always remember the “new house” smell (which I now realize was off-gassing). During thunderstorms and tornado warnings we would get flashlights and a box of crackers and play house in one of her walk-in closets.

Do you think your upbringing had anything to do with your interest in small spaces?

My hometown, Columbus, Ohio, is a classic middle American city… so much so that it is considered the market research center of the country. Imagine growing up in the exact median of America. Naturally, I was interested counter-cultures! ( I think the small house movement is certainly a counter-cultural movement in a society where people shop for houses like they shop at Walmart.) After college I joined an intentional community (read: commune).

The communal laundry line

And what was that like?

At the community I moved my belongings into my own 10×10 room, which, at one point was an old chicken coop. The rest of the 500 acre communal land was shared space for about 90 adults. Everyone had their own room in one of about 10 different “houses” — there was no lack of kitchens, bathrooms, living rooms, workspaces… plenty to choose from! I learned how to make cheese from fresh cows milk. I harvested potatoes. I helped manage a business. I discovered the concepts of peak oil, sustainability and permaculture. I sold my car and lived car-free for the first time in my adult life. I finally had a glimpse of what I wanted the future to look like.

How did you hear about the small home movement?

I learned about Tumbleweed Tiny Houses several years ago on the internet. It was just one of those random forwarded links someone sent me. I remember being really inspired for a few moments, but I didn’t think much of it. Later I got on their e-mail list and found out that they were experiencing greater success as a business and wanted to hire someone. This was maybe 3 years ago and I happened to be moving from New York to California at the time. A year later I was working for them.

What was your position at Tumbleweed?

Mostly I was answering the phone and fielding questions about the specifics of living in a tiny house. It was a frustrating job in part because I realized that I didn’t exactly have the answers. I couldn’t afford a Tumbleweed House (certainly not on the salary that I was getting!) but I really did have this intense desire to live that way.

So how did you start living smaller?

Well I say on my website that I’ve been living tiny for over 8 years. This is true when you count the commune experience and all the tiny apartments I’ve lived in. At one point I was living in my car after I had quit a job and went on a several months-long tour of the country. I visited friends along the way where I could shower and sleep comfortably.

My trailer, before and after

I loved the idea of a house on wheels but I was intimidated by the building skills needed to build one myself, nor did I have the time, space or money to do that kind of thing. So I did what I could afford to do, which was to buy a used fiberglass travel trailer and start renovating it on a shoestring budget. My significant other has been a huge help in this process. My ThisTinyHouse blog was created primarily to show my friends and family back east what we were working on.

What’s next for you?

I have a great amount of admiration and respect for Jay Shafer and others who are able to follow their dream and manifest it. My vision is a network of tiny house villages throughout the country. I’ve started the Tiny House Village Network as a beginning effort to connect people and really start discussing the details. If you’re interested, please join us. You can also cyberstalk me on Facebook and Twitter to find out what’s next.

Hillary’s blog is located at http://thistinyhouse.com.

“I want to be rich – REALLY RICH! – and you’re not getting me there!”

Those words, offered among the parting shots delivered by my former bride, marked the beginning of a period of enormous discovery and rediscovery. Discovery of one of the fastest methods of shedding material possessions known to man, and rediscovery of deeply held core values that had been slipping slowly into the background over sixteen years of an ill-fated marriage.

While I would not recommend divorce as a preferred method for simplifying one’s life – and certainly not a pleasant one – it can be one of most strictly enforced and quickest ways to shed at least half of one’s material possessions. In my case, the script came straight from the 1989 comedy, “The War of the Roses,” in which Oliver Rose (Michael Douglas) and Barbara Rose (Kathleen Turner) each stand their ground in a winner-take-all battle over the marital home. Danny DeVito directed the movie and played the part of the lawyer, Gavin D’Amato, whose memorable line resonates in the not-so-hilarious real-life script.

“There is no winning! Only degrees of losing!”

So, now what? Prior to the unexpected demise of our marriage, my wife and I had been working toward the previously agreed upon goal to take at least a year away from the work-a-day world, buy a cruising sailboat and take our two young sons on a pre-adolescent adventure of a lifetime through warm Caribbean waters. 2005 was to have been the year that we set sail. Instead, it was the year in which the divorce became final.

Faced with no home and a housing market that was still climbing beyond values that made sense in any economic argument, I decided to forge ahead with the dream of making my home aboard a boat. My city of residence for the past twenty years, Burlington, Vermont, lies on the eastern shores of the 120-mile-long Lake Champlain. With Adirondack and Green Mountain backdrops viewed from a thriving waterfront the sailboat became a very affordable option for once again owning a home in the community. I would not be setting sail for Dominica any time soon, but my boys would see that Dad had, in part, held on to the dream.

My search for a floating home covered the eastern seaboard from Maine to Virginia. When it came time to draw up a contract, I’d settled on a Pacific Seacraft Crealock 34, Raven, that I’d found along the Connecticut shores of Long Island Sound, not far from the home of my close friend of nearly 30 years, Marion.

With no more than 24 hours to prepare the boat, Marion and I set out from Five Mile Creek in Rowayton, Connecticut in a strengthening nor’easter for the 300 mile journey north to Vermont. We sailed my new home west to Manhattan, around the southern tip of the city, then up the historic Hudson River and through the locks of the Champlain Canal. Five days later we arrived on Lake Champlain. It was early June of 2005.

It took me no time at all to adapt to the new floating home. Cruising sailboats have been evolving for hundreds of years and Bill Crealock’s designs have amassed the learnings of the centuries into a highly efficient use of space. Berths (bedrooms) for six, dining space for the same, a U-shaped galley (kitchen), a nav station (office), a head (bathroom) that doubles as a shower stall, and a cockpit (porch) with views beyond compare. All for about a third of the average price of a Burlington home. What else could I need?

In the excitement of moving ahead with plans to live aboard a boat, I’d given some thought to the Vermont winters that I’ve known all my life, but I figured I’d cross that bridge (so to speak) when I came to it. After a glorious first summer aboard Raven I finally put her “on the hard” a few days before Thanksgiving and was forced to give more than passing thought to a winter domicile. “Ice out” does not typically occur until early or mid April. I needed a place to live on land for at least five months.

Family and friends offered what they had in the way of weekend berths during the time I spent with my children but it was the welcome Connecticut home of Marion to which I retreated for the days in between. I was extremely grateful for Marion’s generosity, but I knew that a more permanent solution was needed.

I was lost in thought on one of the 5-hour drives back to Vermont when it came to me. I called Marion excitedly to share my idea.

“What I’m looking for is a home in Burlington for the five months each year that Raven is on the hard.”

“Right,” Marion agreed.

“You’re looking for a way to spend summer weekends on your land in Tunbridge [Vermont].”

“Right.”

“Well, how about if we build a house on wheels? We’ll site it on your land in the summer and then find a place to park it in Burlington for the winter!”

“Great idea!”

I was bubbling over with enthusiasm and already beginning to work on the design in my head. With a background as a mariner, I decided that this home was to have a name as is the tradition with boats. Marion and I agreed to call her Gypsy Rose. A new adventure had begun.

Now, earlier in this story, I mentioned that my divorce opened the door to rediscovery. Emerging from the wreckage of a very difficult time I was given a tremendous gift in the opportunity to realign my life with some deeply held values. It deserves a moment’s elaboration as those values are at the heart of my small home story.

I grew up in rural Vermont in a time of great social unrest. Peace, love, dove. Question authority. Love Mother Earth. Vietnam. Through it all, I came to understand that our corporate controlled consumer-based culture in the United States was on a collision course with the needs of a rapidly growing world population.

In college, I studied natural resource economics and natural resource planning. After graduation I married and worked for 10 years as a planner for the City of Burlington before putting my energies into the sea kayak touring business that I own today. In the interest of marital compromise, however, I found myself setting aside many of the ideals in the pursuit of bigger, better, and more.

Less than a year before the marriage began to unravel I was jolted back to the truths I’d learned in my youth. It came while I was leading a group of University of Vermont students on a sea kayaking adventure on the Mexico / Belize border. At the end of a day of paddling and snorkeling on the barrier reef, we learned that the United States had begun the bombing of Baghdad. I didn’t for a minute believe what we had been told about WMD’s or the connections between 911 and those in power in Iraq. Clearly, this was a war about oil and an ill-fated U.S. initiative to secure our energy future.

I have two young sons. Iraq is their Vietnam. Despite assurances that victory would be attained in a matter of months, history and the realities of the situation said otherwise. As I watched those early images of “Shock and Awe,” I knew that we were in for a long, difficult confrontation. I became determined that my sons would not fight a war for oil, but I also knew that radical changes were necessary to minimize my own participation in the demand for global natural resources.

My divorce became the catalyst that allowed me to respond quickly to that new challenge. Along the way I’ve discovered that the real story of my new resolve has not been one of sacrifice and hardship, however. It has become a tale of new freedoms and the pursuit of a lifestyle that is not burdened by concerns of keeping up in our growth oriented economy. Today, I can focus on the things that truly make a home without worrying about “curb appeal,” burdensome mortgage payments, resale value, or losing my life’s savings overnight with the vagaries of the housing market.

I think about the final moments in “The War of the Roses.” Oliver and Barbara meet their end when the chandelier that they cling to crashes to the foyer floor in that oversized, overstuffed home. In my story, I’ve chosen to rewrite the script in search of a happier, more fitting future.

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

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.