the thing about tiny houses
Nov. 10th, 2019 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/32Bra4u
There was a good article in the Washington Post (I think?) about the downsides of tiny houses– basically, the Tiny House people are so caught up in all the excitement of An Eco-Friendly Tiny Home that they’ve forgotten how expensive and wasteful it is to not have any storage space. Excellent point as well about how if you cram into a small space, your furniture will wear out faster too.
That’s the thing, as I’m looking at tiny house stuff. People are so enamored of it, and it all feeds into the same unsustainable trendiness as Expensive White-People Minimalism, which relies heavily on a dieting sort of mentality, where you’re Going To Become A Different Person This Time, so you throw out all your shit and buy new shit that’s Different Somehow, and eventually realize you’re still the same person you were (gain the weight back / gain the clutter back) and instead of noticing that it’s because the idea was ill-considered, you blame yourself for not having successfully been Remade, and in the end it’s way more wasteful than if you’d just kept living your life the way you had been.
So anyway. That’s a bit wearing, to have to sift through all that. I’m looking at tiny houses because it’s a fun way to consider the problem that my yurt is destroyed and I need somewhere else to stay part-time. And I’ve contemplated it, and yeah I could probably stay in a guest room either at my sister’s, my other sister’s, or my parents’, but that’s not sustainable and will lead to them getting cranky with me, me getting cranky with them, and a lot more miles on my car in the case of having to stay off the farm while their sole guest room is otherwise in use (and in fact, that’s how it was, before I built the yurt, and it was very frustrating all around). So… I can approach this with a pretty clear conscience that while it’s a bit extravagant to build a whole-ass cabin just for me, it’s not really that extravagant, and all the inherent wastefulness of a tiny house doesn’t really apply since i’m not making a separate kitchen or anything and I certainly don’t need storage space.
Although, for maximum flexibility– they’ve discussed having more apprentices on the farm, in the future, and if I stopped coming they could use my cabin for apprentices if it had a kitchenette, so it’d be nice if there was at least room to add one in future. (There is already a cabin on the property for apprentices, but it’s already full with two bedrooms and really can’t be expanded much if at all.)
As a side consideration, there are a number of people who’ve expressed enthusiasm for assisting with this project. My dad’s an experienced carpenter, and my BIL has done a bunch of construction work (got his start working in a family concrete biz, built a barn last year), and then a ton of people affiliated with the farm community have building experience, while a separate ton of people want building experience, and altogether I figure if I come up with a charming enough project, there’ll be a bunch of people who’d want to help, and that’d be great because I’m not in any way experienced at building shit. So the less boring a project I come up with, the more interest I’ll be able to garner, and the fine line to balance there is making it cool without making it too complicated to actually manage. Also people are interested in helping, not in donating money, so I need to keep it affordable, too.
SO, here’s the results of what I’ve researched this week.
There are three ways this thing could go. 1) a tiny house with no kitchen or bathroom, just a bedroom and lounge space, just for me. 2) a slightly larger tiny house with a bathroom in it, which i could then share with the apprentices whose cabin farther back on the farm has no bathing facilities, which would involve some engineering but is not unfeasible. 3) an apartment built into a multi-purpose utility shed meant for maple sugaring and other farm purposes. (This would be a separate building in the cases of #1 or #2.)
So for possibility #1, I was thinking of something like this [https://www.pinuphouses.com/elevated-cabin-plans-virginia/], which is all one room plus a loft, has great little windows, and something of a porch. I’d face it toward the creek, of course. And I could probably build it on skids so it was movable. It’s basically 11x11x11, though the roof slopes to only 8′ high on the lower side. (Which is also super nice.) That’d be so perfect! And it looks easy enough to build, but cute enough to be interesting and attract help.
Possibility #2: if I took this floorplan and reversed the rooms on the first storey, so that the bathroom was near the entrance, I could then feasibly share the bathroom with apprentices without it being super weird or awkward. [https://www.pinuphouses.com/cabin-plans-with-loft-bedroom-mia/] (I’m using pinuphouses for floor plan ideas because they’ve got nice little pages for each of them with drawings and renderings.) So then the lower storey could be more or less shared space, and then the bedroom would be pretty private. I could surely cram in a couch that Farmkid could sleep on, and she’d love that.
And then sort of halfway between the two is this one, where I could either omit the bathroom, or do the same as above where I consider the lower storey more or less shared space, and the upper to be private– that one would allow for a separate guest-bedroom/lounge area that could intermittently host Farmkid or other visitors, perhaps even adults, so it’s a bit more flexible. However there’d be basically no room for any kind of kitchenette, which I don’t need but would make the space more useful if they used it for apprentices in the future.
I like the first one for cuteness; the second two share the feature of a porch I could screen in, because it’d be nice to be able to sit outside but it’s super buggy in the spring and I had to huddle in my mosquito net in the yurt for most of last summer, which was so wet.
Possibility #3, pinuphouses dot com lets me down because none of their floorplans are anything like this. But I have started looking at carriage house plans. Here’s a screenshot of one I saw on Pinterest [h/t tos_leary for the great bunkhouse pinboard]:
Like, wouldn’t that be darling?? Something like that makes perfect sense. And perhaps maybe even the bathroom could go on the lower floor. Like, whatever man. I haven’t strategized that as much.
Also the bathroom idea is mostly mine; my sister hates having the apprentices take over her downstairs bathroom constantly but hasn’t actually made any plans to alleviate that, and that’s all my idea, and may not be feasible– a gray water waste system is fine for showers, everyone says, but possibly not if two to four apprentices are all going to take extremely long showers every single day, which seems to be what the last couple of batches of them have been doing. In that case they’d wind up eroding away the whole fucking peninsula the new cabin is going to be on, and it wouldn’t work out, rather than just overloading the sceptic system until we had to get it pumped out this year.
There was a good article in the Washington Post (I think?) about the downsides of tiny houses– basically, the Tiny House people are so caught up in all the excitement of An Eco-Friendly Tiny Home that they’ve forgotten how expensive and wasteful it is to not have any storage space. Excellent point as well about how if you cram into a small space, your furniture will wear out faster too.
That’s the thing, as I’m looking at tiny house stuff. People are so enamored of it, and it all feeds into the same unsustainable trendiness as Expensive White-People Minimalism, which relies heavily on a dieting sort of mentality, where you’re Going To Become A Different Person This Time, so you throw out all your shit and buy new shit that’s Different Somehow, and eventually realize you’re still the same person you were (gain the weight back / gain the clutter back) and instead of noticing that it’s because the idea was ill-considered, you blame yourself for not having successfully been Remade, and in the end it’s way more wasteful than if you’d just kept living your life the way you had been.
So anyway. That’s a bit wearing, to have to sift through all that. I’m looking at tiny houses because it’s a fun way to consider the problem that my yurt is destroyed and I need somewhere else to stay part-time. And I’ve contemplated it, and yeah I could probably stay in a guest room either at my sister’s, my other sister’s, or my parents’, but that’s not sustainable and will lead to them getting cranky with me, me getting cranky with them, and a lot more miles on my car in the case of having to stay off the farm while their sole guest room is otherwise in use (and in fact, that’s how it was, before I built the yurt, and it was very frustrating all around). So… I can approach this with a pretty clear conscience that while it’s a bit extravagant to build a whole-ass cabin just for me, it’s not really that extravagant, and all the inherent wastefulness of a tiny house doesn’t really apply since i’m not making a separate kitchen or anything and I certainly don’t need storage space.
Although, for maximum flexibility– they’ve discussed having more apprentices on the farm, in the future, and if I stopped coming they could use my cabin for apprentices if it had a kitchenette, so it’d be nice if there was at least room to add one in future. (There is already a cabin on the property for apprentices, but it’s already full with two bedrooms and really can’t be expanded much if at all.)
As a side consideration, there are a number of people who’ve expressed enthusiasm for assisting with this project. My dad’s an experienced carpenter, and my BIL has done a bunch of construction work (got his start working in a family concrete biz, built a barn last year), and then a ton of people affiliated with the farm community have building experience, while a separate ton of people want building experience, and altogether I figure if I come up with a charming enough project, there’ll be a bunch of people who’d want to help, and that’d be great because I’m not in any way experienced at building shit. So the less boring a project I come up with, the more interest I’ll be able to garner, and the fine line to balance there is making it cool without making it too complicated to actually manage. Also people are interested in helping, not in donating money, so I need to keep it affordable, too.
SO, here’s the results of what I’ve researched this week.
There are three ways this thing could go. 1) a tiny house with no kitchen or bathroom, just a bedroom and lounge space, just for me. 2) a slightly larger tiny house with a bathroom in it, which i could then share with the apprentices whose cabin farther back on the farm has no bathing facilities, which would involve some engineering but is not unfeasible. 3) an apartment built into a multi-purpose utility shed meant for maple sugaring and other farm purposes. (This would be a separate building in the cases of #1 or #2.)
So for possibility #1, I was thinking of something like this [https://www.pinuphouses.com/elevated-cabin-plans-virginia/], which is all one room plus a loft, has great little windows, and something of a porch. I’d face it toward the creek, of course. And I could probably build it on skids so it was movable. It’s basically 11x11x11, though the roof slopes to only 8′ high on the lower side. (Which is also super nice.) That’d be so perfect! And it looks easy enough to build, but cute enough to be interesting and attract help.
Possibility #2: if I took this floorplan and reversed the rooms on the first storey, so that the bathroom was near the entrance, I could then feasibly share the bathroom with apprentices without it being super weird or awkward. [https://www.pinuphouses.com/cabin-plans-with-loft-bedroom-mia/] (I’m using pinuphouses for floor plan ideas because they’ve got nice little pages for each of them with drawings and renderings.) So then the lower storey could be more or less shared space, and then the bedroom would be pretty private. I could surely cram in a couch that Farmkid could sleep on, and she’d love that.
And then sort of halfway between the two is this one, where I could either omit the bathroom, or do the same as above where I consider the lower storey more or less shared space, and the upper to be private– that one would allow for a separate guest-bedroom/lounge area that could intermittently host Farmkid or other visitors, perhaps even adults, so it’s a bit more flexible. However there’d be basically no room for any kind of kitchenette, which I don’t need but would make the space more useful if they used it for apprentices in the future.
I like the first one for cuteness; the second two share the feature of a porch I could screen in, because it’d be nice to be able to sit outside but it’s super buggy in the spring and I had to huddle in my mosquito net in the yurt for most of last summer, which was so wet.
Possibility #3, pinuphouses dot com lets me down because none of their floorplans are anything like this. But I have started looking at carriage house plans. Here’s a screenshot of one I saw on Pinterest [h/t to
s_leary for the great bunkhouse pinboard]: Like, wouldn’t that be darling?? Something like that makes perfect sense. And perhaps maybe even the bathroom could go on the lower floor. Like, whatever man. I haven’t strategized that as much.
Also the bathroom idea is mostly mine; my sister hates having the apprentices take over her downstairs bathroom constantly but hasn’t actually made any plans to alleviate that, and that’s all my idea, and may not be feasible– a gray water waste system is fine for showers, everyone says, but possibly not if two to four apprentices are all going to take extremely long showers every single day, which seems to be what the last couple of batches of them have been doing. In that case they’d wind up eroding away the whole fucking peninsula the new cabin is going to be on, and it wouldn’t work out, rather than just overloading the sceptic system until we had to get it pumped out this year.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-11 02:19 am (UTC)Separate bedroom and living room for you or a guest upstairs. A nice screened in balcony. A countertop for like a hotplate or a place to make sandwiches. A nice table or desk for you to write at.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-11 02:50 am (UTC)I like to make a sign to make sure that people do know stuff.
And then I get mad when nobody reads the sign, but sometimes that doesn't happen.
I've been working on increasing the signage around the place, especially this season, when we had an apprentice work a short season and another come in just for the end-- no way was she gonna know stuff, c'mon!
Sometimes my sister makes signs too and they're not, uh. Aesthetic. There's one in the slaughterhouse that is just angry Sharpie on the white wall and it says IF YOU TAKE OUT THE HOSE YOU PUT AWAY THE HOSE with lots of underlines, because people were taking the forty-foot hose out of the water closet and leaving it all over the fucking floor.
During slaughter once I looked at it and one of the Overqualified Moms and I started discussing how to make a decorative vinyl version of it, a la a Live Laugh Love sign, and we decided it definitely had to have a graphical depiction of a hose shaped like a heart at the end-- with a frowny face in the middle of the heart.
The real questions about this Cabin of Maximum Coze is whether it's going to have electricity and wifi. But that's not even crucial...
Your Pinterest board is so colorful!! I'm delighted.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-11 03:56 am (UTC)Electricity and wifi would be nice, but not a deal breaker. The primary purpose is place to unwind and sleep. So a place for a bed is vital. A chair or sofa or bench or something would be nice. And you know, you can always lay in basic wiring for the future when an electrical line in run out that way. Or not worry about it and plan to use a variety of lamps and lanterns for forever.
As posited by the existence of that "cabin" board, I've been thinking about a small place of coze myself for some time. I've acknowledged that "cottage" is more my speed than "tiny house" if only for accessibility reasons.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-11 12:40 pm (UTC)I am thinking that next week when I go back to the farm, I'm going to spend some time out in the existing intern cabin cleaning it, reorganizing it, and taking notes on what's good and what's bad. It's not specifically a Tiny House but really it is one. It's quite nice, and very cozy, with a ton of windows that were salvaged from somewhere and so are much nicer than the building quite deserves, but the problem is that it's totally uninsulated and in fact has air gaps. Which is fine the whole summer, but the season starts April 1 and ends Nov 1 so the beginning and end are uhh less pleasant. It's also absolutely rotten with mice, but we know that's largely because the one apprentice who was there the whole summer was horribly careless with food garbage, and like... there were mice when you got there, there are always some mice, why on earth would you be careless with food garbage when there are already mice? but she was, and so they would just. Watch the mice running around, there were so many.
Best believe I'm contemplating that as I design a cabin in the woods too-- mouseproof storage. Nothing stops mice but dryer sheets and sheet metal. All those tiny house cute built-in storage solutions, I'm envisioning as being entirely riddled with mice in three months unless you consider mice from the beginning. I'm even thinking about mice with the grey water stuff-- there are some specific measures you can take, if you're putting kitchen sink water out, to keep vermin from tunneling for food scraps, and I'm figuring those measures have to be implemented from the first moment.
Anyway. Color! I'm so delighted about the color. And the idea of cozy nooks, that's really what I'm after. I love the one with the built-in bed that has little half-doors so you can shut yourself in or not. I have my woodstove salvaged, so I'm going to put it into whatever I build next, but as we've learned, there are times when you just can't light a stove-- maybe it's too windy, even, it's cold and miserable but so windy it's too dangerous, and those are the times when you need maximum coze, you need your shelter to be windproof, and you need your bed to be in a tiny little nook. I've been contemplating building a canopy bed just for this, surely someone's done it. Especially if you've got a safe little shelf to put a tiny olive oil lamp or tealight in there with you... Surely someone has invented this, and I will be looking into it.
(Have you looked at Lehmann's? They're a store that caters to the Amish, but they've got an online presence and they have tons of super-keen old-fashioned off-grid shit, including fantastic lanterns and things. Hanging oil lamps! The pressurized lamps with the mantles that are like the Eye of Sauron on your kitchen table during power outages, I love those goddamn things. Beautiful shades for your oil lamps. That sort of thing.)
I also am contemplating a little solar installation; they've talked about one for the cabin but it's not something they'd do without knowing the apprentices would actually maintain it.
Something that's been huge for me is battery-powered fans. In the summer there is nothing worse than being too hot to sleep, and just a little fan helps so much. And now they make USB-rechargeable ones. I lost both of mine in the fire; both of them just had little lithium-ion batteries in them and would run for four or five hours on a charge, and I used the one everywhere, brought it traveling with me-- just oh my gosh, what a difference it made. It saved my bacon in Istanbul when the hotel room was poorly-ventilated. And there were some nights it made all the difference in the yurt. But I tell you, the biggest luxury was when I had the extension cord and could just... plug in a box fan, holy shit. And like. Just being able to turn on a lamp without fumbling for lighters or whatever. Yeah....
no subject
Date: 2019-11-11 11:34 pm (UTC)Having lived in places with mouse problems, how the hell do you just live with mice?
Planned storage for the hypothetical family cabin is all furniture and no closets. A few cabinets for dishes and pots. But no closets for blankets and sheets. Those are going into heavy duty plastic bins that are at least a challenge for mice to get into.
We've been talking about doing solar for our house. A lot of houses in this neighborhood have some panels. We don't have any large trees that would shade them out and we get a good amount of sun. My sister is planning on buying a small camper soon and is thinking about getting one of those small camping panel setups so she can recharge her phone and lights and yes plug in a fan.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-12 12:43 am (UTC)Just living with mice mostly entails having a lot of things in metal boxes and stuffing the edges with dryer sheets.
Every time I left the yurt for the week, or longer, I completely stripped the bed (down to the waterproof mattress cover), and either hung the bedding from the rafters (with no bunching or folds that anything could be comfortable in) or packed it tightly into plastic or wooden containers. For very long-term storage, I know plastic or wood aren't mouse-proof, but for a week or two it sufficed.
The main thing was that I never had food in the yurt in the first place, so there was nothing for them to get into but the blankets, which mostly weren't in a configuration that would tempt them. Once I left a blanket folded on a shelf, and they gnawed the edge, but didn't have time to make more of a nest.
Mice are a real danger when you're not around. It's the stuff in storage that they go to town and destroy. Even a good well-packed bin, they'll chew through given enough time. But generally, they won't in a house where someone actually lives. On the farm, we once lost a truck to mouse activity. Yes! They built a nest in the fucking air filter, and then the next time the truck was started, the nest got sucked into the ventilation system and caught some part of the engine on fire, which I'm sure the mice weren't thrilled with, but it actually killed the truck, permanently.
There were mice in the walls of my childhood home, and they'd eat any food we left out on the counter, but so would the cats, so. (The cats never ate the mice, apparently.) IDK, I grew up just sort of dealing with mice.
I have been wanting to do a little solar thing for a while. The price keeps coming down on the portable units. Oh man for a bit my workplace was a dealer for one of them, goalzero maybe, but I just looked and I don't think we are anymore. oh well.
I also really want to try to do micro-hydro power, since there's a creek right there, but there aren't convenient DIY kits for those, so I don't know that I could hack it. I'm not a gifted inventor, exactly. But it would be super rad.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-12 04:30 am (UTC)And the stuff in storage. We just finished emptying out my parents shed and hoo boy. None of the people who were doing the actual pulling stuff out* are entirely sure how many rodentia bodies they found. Which is really gross.
(*) as opposed to me and mom who put boxes on a table and went through them. So many facemasks. So many gloves.
The worst I've lived with was squirrels in the wall. And of course the ex-slave quarters uptown where we had rats who would come inside when if rained. (Couldn't figure out where they were getting in.)