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[personal profile] dragonlady7
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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 [profile] 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. 

Date: 2019-11-11 02:19 am (UTC)
harpers_child: melaka fray reading from "Tales of the Slayers". (Default)
From: [personal profile] harpers_child
I really like the idea of a carriage house for the combined needs of this building. Sugaring equipment and dye room downstairs. Heck, put the bathroom downstairs. With a big handmade reminder on the wall about how it's a greywater system and the showers have to be short. (I'd be making a speech to the apprentices about septic systems and short showers if I were your sister. But that's me.)

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.

Date: 2019-11-11 03:56 am (UTC)
harpers_child: melaka fray reading from "Tales of the Slayers". (Default)
From: [personal profile] harpers_child
I have spent way too much time living in beige or pastel boxes. Color in my environment is good. Feel free to poke at any of my other stuff. (I'm assuming you looked at some of the other stuff. But sometimes I've got An Anxiety about stuff so here's blanket permission.)

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.

Date: 2019-11-11 11:34 pm (UTC)
harpers_child: melaka fray reading from "Tales of the Slayers". (Default)
From: [personal profile] harpers_child
I really love the idea of those bed cabinets. They used to be a standard item of furniture in certain cultures. Fantastic for maintaining heat, terrible for air circulation.

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.

Date: 2019-11-12 04:30 am (UTC)
harpers_child: melaka fray reading from "Tales of the Slayers". (Default)
From: [personal profile] harpers_child
The mouse comment was mostly because I've lived in places with mouse and rat problems and just... IF you have an option to live not with mice you do the things that mean less mice.

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.)

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