Quick recap: In part one of our story, Bela and I pushed off into the unknown after we sold all of our worldly possessions, did not renew our lease in Redwood City, and left on a two-week vacation to Spain. During our time abroad, we realized that Bela was pregnant! Now on a nine-month clock, we bounced around between at least eight different places to live.
You know how some people debate whether to move before or after the baby is born? Well, we decided to do both... multiple times!
By the time we returned, we knew that a tiny house was the direction we wanted to take our lives. We set up a house-sitting gig for a couple weeks in Berkeley for when we first got back from Puerto Vallarta, and started trying to design our own tiny house!
There are so many moving parts in this whole story, that it's very difficult to communicate the variety of simultaneous decisions being made in the background of our lives.
First, we'd just had a baby... for anyone who's been there, holy hell what a life-changer!
All of the sudden, we didn't get to chose when we woke up (or if we slept at all, haha), we embraced the complete astonishment and disarray of realizing that child-raising techniques amount to mostly guesswork and superstitions, and we adapted to the fact that even the smallest decisions now took tremendous amounts of planning.
Second, to accommodate for the constant uncertainty in our lives, we decided that I should not return to work after my paternity leave. Since I had plenty of valuable skills at home but low overall employability, it just made sense.
I mean, I know that "homelessness" denotes a sort of poverty that obviously didn't apply to us, but for real... we were homeless drifters. For what it's worth, we called it 'floating' (makes it sound a little more idyllic, right?).
But when we decided to design a tiny house, we made that decision despite all of these other radical changes going on in the background. Since I was at home now, I took charge while we worked on the initial concept design, figured out how to pay for the thing, found someone to build it, and figured out how to actually live in one.
So far, tiny houses incorporate a minimalist approach -- they're all about down-sizing. Living in a tiny house always carries the theme that "less is more." Focus on getting outdoors, remove the things you don't need, find freedom in having less.
We love the minimalist ideal, but we wanted something more from our home.
Bela and I think that the objects within our lives have the potential of intrinsic value, brought out through the human hand and craftsmanship or the evolution within nature that created them. When we surround ourselves with these objects, every moment becomes an opportunity to appreciate a deep aesthetic within our lives.
So when we considered the concept of our tiny house, we looked for ways to turn each aspect from a down-size into an upgrade.
We wanted to be able to host friends for dinner parties at a full-sized table, we wanted to have an incredible lounge space, and most importantly, we wanted to use the small square footage of our home as an opportunity to include top-quality finishings and essential features. We knew that Escher would need space for her life. We wanted her to have a place to play and grow. A home that she would be proud to have grown up in.
The big problem with designing a tiny house is that it's just as hard as designing a regular house
How will you power the house? Solar? Off-the-grid? Do you even know how electricity works? How will you get water? What will you do with the human refuse? Where will you put the house? Did you know it's not legal to put it there or practically anywhere else? How are you going to pay for it? Who's going to build it?
And those are just the infrastructure questions... you're in the same pickle when it comes to the interior design. Any one of these questions seems a bit trivial, but we wanted to get everything right, everything perfect.
If we did it well enough, then we would never even feel like we'd sacrificed a thing by living in a tiny house. On the contrary, we would have built the quality of home that most don't even think about until they retire, and we would have done it at thirty on a modest income within a single-earner home while raising a baby.
Up next? Bela and I reach out into the tiny house community.
We find dear friends who help us and after a month of disappointment we finally find the perfect builder for our house! Everything begins to shift from a jumble of ideas into a new reality, but that reality brings numerous tectonic shifts into the structure of our lives.
Let us know what you think of the story so far! If you could improve on your house in every way just by making it smaller, do you think you could switch to a tiny house? What's holding you back?!