Environmentalism

At the end of the day when dusk comes the dogs are brought out for the last potty trip.  I like the way that Tiny House Ontario looks in the semi darkness now, with its LED lights on, shining through the windows.  Like the paintings of simpler times in cozy little houses, not too different from my own.

I can’t help but be reminded of a section from the the new Tiny House Magazine that Kent Griswold has put out.  If you have an iPad you can download a free first edition preview copy until October 31 here.  Unfortunately, this is only available electronically for the iPad.   The discussion that I found most interesting is about how the McMansions that are all going up now are a fad that will not last because of the sheer magnificent cost of upkeep.

Through history, you know, everyone except the ~1% rich lived in small homes.  Tiny Homes are not new thing.  My friend Donna who is from Jamaica, says that “people all over the world have been living happily in Tiny homes for hundreds and thousands of years”.  Space is not a luxury, rather it is the great burden of our time. So much TIME goes into paying for it, filling it, cleaning it,  fixing it, decorating it and then starting over again and again.  We give away our lives one short increment of time after another… just to keeping up those big homes instead of doing what we want with our lives.  The cycle of it is quite out of balance.  One cannot ever get that time back, not ever.

For me, the space in THO is perfect but when my husband stays I have found it too small.  He is a big fellow; about 6 feet tall and close to 250 pounds.  Hj simply fills the house.  We bump into one another, he is always in my way.  I am of the opinion that another square foot in width would have been better for us as a couple – 12 square feet more (in total) would make this house far more livable.   I am a bit envious of the people who are allowed 120 square feet, for us the interior 97.75 is it. Another Tiny room would be really great!  Still, we have the space that we are allowed, so I gave it a lot of thought and found a simple solution to this and it feels so much more spacious.  Remove the table and chairs.  This opened things up a lot.  Admittedly, one chair still has to be moved back to Hamilton so we will have to wait and see the full result of this.  In place of those items came Vernie’s ingenious little table that is sofa height and this makes a huge difference in the openness of the place already.  It allowed us to gain back ~10 square feet of open space.  Once the last chair goes, we will have about a 35 square feet rectangular open space to move around in.  I think one can easily waltz on a 5×7 bamboo area rug.  More accurately I think we can waltz around one another so that we do not invade one another’s natural space.

Another space saving item that I have planned is a breadboard in the kitchen.  These are an old idea coming from a time when homes were more appropriately sized and still useful in the context of the Tiny House.  When this is installed it will help with the livability because it will add another ~3 square feet of counter space when I need it.  Still I have to wait for this until I get the sink, stove and fridge in because I want to be sure what I notch in is correctly located.

Alas, dusk is falling early which means that the days are getting colder and the nights are getting nearly bitter.  All the planning will have to wait for another  year because now we must soon prepare THO for winter and tuck ourselves safely away in the heated house in Hamilton.  Not really the best of both worlds as one might imagine – but rather, I wish that THO was finished and I could live there permanently.

Heat and water, heat and water, heat and water… So close and yet, so far… sigh…