Laura my Tiny House twin from 120 square feet wonders if you are you thinking about building your own Tiny House? More so, are you a DIY?
Her guest post at Tiny House Talk mentions THO in her article. Thanks Laura!
http://www.tinyhousetalk.com/building-a-tiny-house-yourself/
I had a significantly worse time at the dentist yesterday than I had anticipated. My eyes were swollen nearly shut and my lips are double big, like that movie star with all the kids. Sexy, I suppose, if they did not hurt so badly. They found that the tooth which they intended to crown had to go… and it did not go well. They had to keep me under for five hours while they yanked and pulled. I am sore, groggy, dizzy, forgetful and irritable today. Not a good time to get on the train to Toronto, then to Kingston, then get back to THO. The trip from door to door takes about 6 hours which is more than driving (if the traffic flow is good) due to the always long and silly stop over in Toronto, wait times and so on.
This said, I am happy to say that the day before my surgery, my cousin Sandy was by to visit me and brought me this wonderful old photo of my Great Grandmother “Ma” Violet Henderson Compton. I never saw a photo of her from her youth. I honestly never imagined her to be so lovely because I never saw her before she was old, or before all the hardship she faced. She was such a good person: sweet, kind, patient and I loved her dearly. Still, if you will forgive me for saying this, she always looked sort of worn out even when she was dressed up. I knew her history, that she married young and that she and my great grandfather “Dad” lost their barn to a fire just as the country headed forcefully into the Great Depression. I know that financially they did not recover until the end of the Depression from that single significant loss. They moved from home in Kingston Mills when the barn burned, to another in Tweed, then to Odessa, then another in Glenvale, and then finally to another in Sydenham during those hard, hard years. In those years the kids kept coming too, 11 in all, there was no good way to prevent pregnancy in those years. Too, adding to her hardship, Dad, her husband was more of a poet who loved horses, then he was a farmer who loved to toil. He snuck away into his room and spent hours reading himself blind, like me. She was hand washing and bringing in water from the pump, cooking meals and suckling the rejected lambs. I don’t recall ever seeing her sit down, even when she became sick. She went from running, to laying down; a woman with no moderation. I expect she never had time to reflect.
My grandma, also named Violet, spoke often of those times. She spoke with particular sadness about the Glenvale house.
This small house was just as old then as it is now according to my grandma. She admonished me for taking a photo of it, she said she only wanted to forget those times. There were ten children and two grown ups in the house at that time because the youngest would be born later, and the land was such that Dad was not able to pull a living out of it. It was all rocks. The boys slept in one small room upstairs and the girls in the other small room. Ma and Dad slept downstairs in the corner. She said the wind blew through the house like it had no walls at all. They cooked all summer and froze all winter. It was a standard log house with clap boards nailed outside. The house is a centre hall plan of about 600 square feet 30×20 feet with a sloped ceiling divided loft. This was a very standard way of building a house about 200 years ago when those who built it settled here.
The joy that they had when Father Carey set them up on the Carey farm was clear. Finally they had the space they needed and a very comfortable home.
Nice to see the new owners are restoring the Carey Farm to its original magnificence! Imagine what it would have been like for them to move from that horrible little house to this beautiful well built stone one! Goes to show you that Tiny is not always best. Quality matters a whole lot too.
It has been a couple of days since I last posted. Basically, I have been at the Hamilton house working on my family tree stuff and fretting about the dental surgery that I will leave for shortly. If all goes well I leave to go back to my beloved Tiny House Ontario tomorrow morning.
I think that this is what she will look like when I arrive only perhaps a little more fall like?
It is a funny thing because THO feels like home to me more than any other place I have ever lived, yet she is still so far from being finished. Still, there are a lot of small jobs like eve troughs to the water barrels, covering the cloth porch, flooring, stone patio needs laying, drive needs 5/8 stone on the drive and so on and so on. This list of small but time consuming jobs will never end. This is part of what I like so much about it. I love projects. Still there is HUGE/EXPENSIVE stuff too, that has to be done. THO has no heat, no kitchen appliances and only partially finished cabinets, no water running or otherwise, these take more time because of the cost.
I am nearing the second year of work on THO and bit by bit she becomes more complete, to be sure. This year she got a lot of time and attention from me because I did not produce much in my creative life after my computer accident. Still truthfully I did not spend as much time there as I wanted to. Baby being broken twice, as well as visitors here in Hamilton, and a trip home for medical and another now for dental turned the 30 potential weeks of THO stay, into about 25 weeks there. Missing 5 weeks of the year is a lot! Next year I hope to do better.
I watched a video today which my friend Jim-Bob posted. It is a great idea this young man had and such a total tear jerker video! Consider yourself warned!
Anyway, I decided to finally get to the linen closet because of watching this. You see, I read that the SPCA is always in need of blankets and towels, so that the pets do not have to sleep on cement.
I once lived in a big house and had a big family and when I downsized last year I thought I had pretty much purged, but alas, this is what I had to give!
I am going to deliver them right now. If you have any old ones that you don’t need I urge you to check with your local rescues and shelters because chances are you have old ones you don’t need and dogs don’t care if they are a little bit ratty.
What other nice thing can I do today????
One thing is for sure, I am always writing about the forest at the THO blog. Too, there are a lot of tree photos posted. Still, when I take photos of THO, I always try to find the clearest image of the Tiny House and I post these. Seeing this image which Colleen Murphy took, makes me realize that I have not done a very good job of explaining why the woods are so significant in my day to day life.
I think until you see this image, you might not have realized how totally integrated into these woods THO is.
Really, THO is just a tiny dot built into a tiny clearing. Indeed, two weeks ago when I had the car, I picked up my neighbour and during the drive she told me there is a clearing because lightning struck there a few years ago. Where this small fire cleared things is just where I built the house. Lets hope lightning never strikes the same place twice.
There is only one more clearing in this forest. It was created because there was a really massive maple there and she was dead, thus I had her cut so I could use the place that she had been holding for herself for hundreds of years. This maple’s clearing is where my driveway ends, where stone is now dumped, and where both my solar panels and my garden sit. I am thankful she made it and kept it so well.
The thing is, that if I did not have a driveway, then THO would just melt back into the forest. She would disappear in the shadows. And while the structure is strong and built to last, I am sure that without a driveway the forest would moss over THO and turn her into a hollow tree.
Without a driveway, I am convinced that THO would exist only virtually here in the readers dream. She would simply be an electronic fairy tale.
Tiny House Ontario 