Tiny House
It's nothing like living in a trailer
We have been living tiny for 10 years now. We are both really pleased at how cozy and luxurious this living is. We had lived for one season in a trailer previously, and this is NOTHING like living in a trailer. It’s a joyful existence, simple. Cozy.
In the summer of 2012, we bought the Tall Man’s Tiny House and began planning our transition into 128 square feet. This home, built on a trailer chassis, is perfect for our floodplain farm, as we can tow it out to higher ground during the non-farming winter season, when flooding is most likely.
As I wrote the original post during the bitter cold of January, from our 680 sq. ft. apartment, we were about halfway finished with redistributing the stuff we had accumulated over 48+ years of marriage (for 25 years we lived in a 3000 sq. foot house we designed and built).We watched ourselves go about our daily lives: how do we cook, what do we do in our space, how can we do all these things in a much smaller space? As soon as we whittled down our belongings to the point where we had only the items we love most that would serve us in our tiny farm house, we were ready to transition.
The first summer, Michael processed our cherry tomatoes for market in the tiny house kitchen—as many as 100 pounds of tomatoes being packed into clamshells, and he was able to do this just fine in the well-designed space. Tiny house space gets repurposed as needed: Some days, Michael teaches piano lessons, on 2 keyboards–and at other times, I commandeer the counter space for sewing baby quilts or cleaning and weighing seeds to sell.
Kudos to the builders of this lovely house, the Leu brothers from the Columbus OH area, and to Jay Shafer, founder of Tumbleweed Tiny Houses and now founder of Four Lights Tiny House Company. Following Jay’s blog for a couple of years enabled us to recognize a great tiny house when we saw it. There are many versions of tiny houses out there, but the ones that adhere to artistic architectural design rules (such as Jay follows, and which we had read about in the book A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander) are the liveable ones.