Six Months In
Six months. Six months in my tiny house. Seven months ago feels like a different life. Didn't it always make sense to live in under 400 square feet? Yes. No. Well...
Six months. Half a year. Add a month for how long it took the sale of my old house and the purchase of the tiny house. More than half a year. Shopping for a new place while decluttering, semi-staging, and preparing for the sale adds more months. Basically, I've been preparing for a change of housing for over a year. A tiny house wasn't the only possibility, but after I decided to move, my emotions were already ready for a change.
Read this blog so far and get six month's chronology of some of the major shifts in my life.
Less to worry about.
My previous house wasn't large, only 868 square feet. It felt just right, and a little large despite having lived in standard suburbans of over 2,000 square feet for most of the time from 1988 until 2007. Sorry, conventional wisdom, the smaller the house, the more it felt like home. The smaller the house, the more it felt like I lived with the house, not because of it, not in service to it.
My trend to appreciating tinier houses has continued, and I suspect much of it has to do with how much house is there to manage. Without hiring a staff of maid, landscapers, contractors, and managers means bigger means more work for whoever lives there. Now, my house and I seem to be close to being balanced. I wonder how it would feel if it was on an acre I owned rather than the 5,000 square feet that I rent. More freedom and autonomy, and more work.
Did you notice that comment about "whoever lives there"? I know a very capable couple who own and are building out a much larger place on over five acres. They seem to be handling it well, as well as it obviously being a work in progress - indefinitely. Living alone makes it easier to live in smaller spaces. And yet, I am in a neighborhood of couples living in similarly small places. They make it work. I feel that I've so totally filled out my space that fitting someone else in would require an uncommon person.
I do miss being able to hold parties. In my previous house, I'd have parties of thirty. Surely, that could be readily done again, and yet a neighbor did just that. An outdoor tent and adaptable people made it happen.
One new mindset is thinking beyond the walls. Life doesn't have to be constrained to the exterior envelope. Party outside? Sure. A more reliable and less creative answer is commuting to a job, or the library, or a coffeeshop, or a coworks, or skipping the climate comforts by spending more time hiking, bicycling, volunteering on land - generally using the rest of the planet.
I do miss being able to garden, or at least make it look like I might. I actually miss having a compost pile, especially for kitchen scraps. All of my compost piles composted stuff faster than I could use it. I'm a minimalist, even with my garbage, evidently.
But the land is a variable. This blog is about the house.
As some friends have put it, they've never known me to not be busy. For many people, work, and much of life, happens in the digital world. Measure out that space and realize that most of what I own is unused for the hours I sit connected to a keyboard. If virtual reality becomes more real, it might be possible to lose track of anything beyond arms reach - until biology intervenes.
Six months in, and I sometimes feel like a pilot in a roomy cockpit where every control is close, where there's little clutter, fewer distractions, and an efficiency that I never felt in any office setting. And, when it is time to relax, I find that there's more time to spend doing that. Clean up after dinner? Sure. That's done. Now, what's the movie?
Tiny house living is not for everyone. I was a realtor for a while. Some families, even some couples, need spatial and acoustic separation. A painter might need larger canvases. A stone sculptor is going to create lots of chips and noise. Woodworkers, mechanics, anyone operating a kiln might be better in an adjacent building. My karate workouts (which are almost comical as I am over 65 years old) can usually fit in my tiny house's kitchen/dining room/living room, but some of those routines benefit from a 24 x 40 foot space. I'm renting a space for that, but I do miss having that indoors with no need for a commute.
Six months in, and gaining momentum. Life in a new old big tiny house has not plateaued, yet. Major adjustments have been made, and it is nice to announce that normal life is so normal that I have to remind myself that it was any other way.
Now, about finding a larger and nicer piece of land to own and use, especially because my park is still being sold...one reason to keep buying lottery tickets.