I can’t tell you how grateful I am that Colleen brought her camera and shared her great photography with me and you!
From a utility standpoint, the lights are great, because they allow me to stay up and read or just contemplate my next project. But they look so cute from outside! I so much wanted to share a photo with you because I think it looks charming or enchanted.
Do you agree?
Thanks again Colleen for sharing the day and your skills! xo L
My girlfriend Colleen Murphy was out to visit THO today. We have not seen one another in a long time, but we stay in touch. Colleen is a very talented artist and amateur photographer. It was wonderful to spend the day with my kindred friend.
She took and shared some beautiful photos which I will be posting over the next days.
I am standing here in the sacred grounds, can you find the warrior peaking out of the sun? This photo is NOT edited in any way at all.
For the past three days Hj and I have been busy installing the 12 volt lighting and power system at Tiny House Ontario. Like a lot of work that I do at THO, it is a longer task than I had expected it to be. This is due to two reasons. First, I have to be very careful when removing the wooden walls so that I don’t split or spoil any of the boards, which worked out perfect so far. Second my drill is old and not very powerful so drilling through the joists is not a fast thing to do.
We have installed four of the lights now. We put them up in order of our perceived importance, so the main floor, front entryway, loft, and the cloth porch all have illumination. Really bright: easy to read at night: see the lights as you come up the driveway, lighting! I have to say that he LED yacht lights are great! I would suggest to any off-grid person to put at least a couple of these in because you don’t need too much power to run them because they are straight up 12v and there is no inverter involved. They are a little bit costly but very, very bright! When I need to use the inverter, I will just plug this in!
My battery guy says that I have 6 times the power I need because of the awesome little LEDs!
You will notice in the bedroom that I maintained the LED battery operated lights. I have not been too thrilled with these because the batteries have a short life with them, still I think because they are already there, I might as well keep them as back ups. Then the Coleman LED camping lights are back ups of the back ups and then the flashlights are backups of these! Hilarious really – but I want to be sure that the lighting really works as I am sure it will, for a year before I start purging the extra gear despite the space that it takes up. Plus, for the bedroom the battery LED will be used to get up because it has a circular switch. I can turn this on/off downstairs/upstairs whereas the yacht lights are simply switched at the surface.
It took a lot more 16 gauge wire than I thought. I had to buy an additional 150 feet (!!!!). The cost was $75 plus tax. This means that it took 250 feet of the stuff to wire the little Tiny house! That is about six times around the house! There are only seven lights and one outlet so the wire that was needed for the job was mind boggling to me.
I have to say, if my camera worked better I would love to take and share some photos of the exterior of THO because it looks positively cute as a button in the dark with its new lights on!
I never heard of Dick Proenneke until tonight. I was looking up some videos on how to build timber frame place out of logs and basically stumbled on this beautiful footage. His footage, of himself, building a life in the forest of Alaska in 1968.
There is also a second video which was just released in 2011
The third is yet to be released!
If you love this, as I did then perhaps you will also want to read his Journals? Which can be downloaded free here.
Sometimes the internet is so cool. How else would I have ever met him?
I am grudgingly still in the city way over on the South West side of the big lake. I don’t like it a bit and miss being at THO on the North East. I have to stay here until late next week because I have to see an eye specialist. I am afraid that my eyesight is running away from me faster than it should and with some (a lot) of eye issues on both sides of my family, it is time. I need, as did my 89 year old grandmother, to use 3.75 glasses to read and often suffer with aches behind my eyes. Granted I do spend a lot of time using the green devils at the top of my face, I am hoping they are just tired, not sick and tired.
The family has left to go home to Germany which is another reason that I came here, it was lovely to see them. Too, I also had to see my dentist and I am glad to be done with it, I had a good cleaning, but must go back for a crown on a tooth that has been wobbly since I was about 14 years of age.
I think I am too young to be falling apart! I am just in my mid 40’s but I am not as fit as I would like to be and yet I refuse to go to the gym and stop eating candy, so I can’t want youth as badly as I think I do.
It will be 7 days exactly from this day that I arrive back home at THO and start connecting the wiring in. I have to say I am pretty darn excited about this! For now, I wait and dream about the Tiny House in the forest.
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.” ~ HD Thoreau
Tiny House Ontario 