Jeremy and I have now been living in our tiny house full-time for 6 months, after arriving here in Eugene, Oregon with the house on Sep. 1, 2015. So what is it like to live tiny? (Read on, then see some photos at the end of the post!)
I have found it so nice to be able to relax in and enjoy our house, after spending a year plus working so many hours to build the house. There are moments when I look around and have a memory of building that part of the house, and it makes living in here feel really special. I am also amazed that two people with pretty much no construction experience (and a lot of incredible help from family and friends!) built a house that actually works- and then were crazy enough to drove it across the country!
There are lots of positive things about our lil’ house, including the fact that we’ll have our house loans completely paid off in a couple of years. However I don’t want to romanticize it too much. Most of the time it just feels like this is my new normal, it’s just a home (which it really just is!). While most of our house systems have worked very well so far, there are times when things fail and we have to do some dirty work which might not happen as often in a ‘normal’ house. For instance sometimes our graywater pump acts up, and Jeremy crawls under the house to get it working again. When our propane heater had issues firing up some weeks ago, we managed for a couple days with minimal heat until Jeremy was able to fix the issue. And on a daily and weekly basis we actually deal with carting off our human waste, rather than just flushing it down the toilet.
Then there’s the things that you don’t often see when you pore over online photos of a newly built (not lived in) tiny house, or get the chance to visit such a home in person which we did recently in Eugene at a home show. The tiny homes in those pictures look so simple and beautiful, because they are often so empty! There’s usually not someone living in the house yet, and there’s no clutter of the things people actually have in a home. In our house we go through the daily motions of dealing with mail that comes in so that it doesn’t pile up, making sure dishes are washed quickly, moving things around when guests come over so that everyone can fit, etc. This is the tricky part of living in a small space and not letting stuff overwhelm your life. Similar to how stuff is dealt with in any house, just on a smaller scale.
Here are photos from the past few months of living in our house, to show what daily life here is like:
Go Tiny 