tiny house

[dragonlady7]

personal, about the author, tw grief, grieving, being sad about dumb shit

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I have barely even wanted to admit this to myself but this is a journal, after all, and I write things down here that I want to work through by writing about them to think about them, so. Here follows a bunch of disorganized whiny bullshit, which, you’ve been warned.

One of the things I was hoping to do with my dad this coming year was to build a tiny house to replace the yurt. We’d begun discussing it this past year, of course, but what with the pandemic and all of the insane bullshit, it got sidelined, and it was fine because while normally I’m at risk of getting kicked out of the guestroom at the farm to make room for some out of town guest, that wasn’t going to happen this year, and in fact never did. So. It wasn’t important and didn’t matter. I’d got a set of blueprints, and Dad looked it over and was like “yes we’ll build that,” and moreover was like “Ah I have salvage windows that I can alter these plans to fit, no problem,” and was even like “I have a list of the lumber we’d need, I can go put in an order for that, and just get that so we can get started in the spring.” and like. I guess I’m glad he didn’t buy any lumber.

And it may well not be important, and not matter next year. But the thing is I’d had that yurt for several years (and dad had spent like four days building me the platform it was on, which then got burnt up, lolsob), and it’s really hard to overstate how much of a sanctuary it was to me. I spent hardly any time in it, I mostly just slept there, but it was somewhere I could leave my shit and it wouldn’t be in someone’s way and nobody would yell at me. (I had to be real careful about how I left it because of rain, ants, mice, wind, spiders, possible raccoons, etc., but no human would touch my shit, at least. Given that Farmsister is slightly OCD and I can’t have things in her house without her piling them in the corner of the guestroom if I leave them for more than a week, that’s no small luxury.) And it was a place I could have weird things that I like, like candles or incense or fairy lights. There’s nowhere in my house I can have those things, really; Dude isn’t going to say no, but he doesn’t like them much, and it’s kind of rude to make the place smell funny, and so on. [he genuinely has like. altar boy ptsd about candles and incense and i respect that.]

(I bought myself a box of fairy lights like three Christmases ago, intending to put it up because I’m a basic bitch who likes fairy lights, and I… I actually got it out a couple of weeks ago and went all around the house and there’s literally no space in it that’s mine, where such a thing wouldn’t be kind of annoying and in the way. My bedroom, you might say– well, I don’t have my own bedroom, of course, we both sleep there. The guest bedroom? That’s dude’s office now. I guess the basement but the wiring down there is not fantastic and I don’t tend to hang out down there. I mean I spend hours down there but not contiguously, and I don’t hang out, I’m just working on things like on the sewing machine or the cutting table or in the washing machine or whatever. It’s not like I would sit down there with a candle and some incense and my Kindle and a glass of wine and the fairy lights, like I would in the yurt.)

So I’ve got this weird little collection of things, like the fairy lights, like a spare cutting board that doesn’t fit in my kitchen, like some extra mugs I like but don’t use, like a spare tiny throw rug, that are things I would put in my tiny house or yurt or whatever, if I had such a thing. And I have all these vague notions, of like, if I had a desk of my own, and what I’d put on it, and I actually bought some weird books that would go on the bookshelves I daydreamed about having in there, where nobody’s gonna judge my shit and it won’t be in the way.

I don’t need a space. I have a house, and it’s full of my stuff. I stay in the guestroom for months on end at the farm and it’s not like anyone’s visiting soon.

but I wanted to do a big project with Dad. I wanted it to be my turn for him to spend time with me, which I know is kind of a goofy little-kid thing to say but I was feeling that, a bit. And i wanted a little space that would be mine, and I had even started thinking about how we’d make it really well (because john kelly never built anything by halves, that thing would’ve been both archival and fucking bulletproof) and it would outlast him because yeah he was going to live to 100 but I’d only be in my 60s by then I’m not a fool I knew I’d likely bury my dad someday, someday, and probably Willa would use the tiny house once i wasn’t anymore, or it would wind up– anyway, who knows. There were a lot of things tied up in it in my mind.

So now I’m like. I should just. Find a shitty old RV and live in that. Or buy a prefab shed. Or a fancy tent. Or something. So I’ve been looking at things like that and I just. They’re either so expensive, or I’d have to be so lucky to find one (BIL did actually spend the entire year with a standing search going on Craigslist and FB Marketplace to find a cheap RV or camper or anything at all– he has cause to buy them for farm reasons and he needs one for staff but also he was looking for one for me). Or. Whatever.

Anyway I’m like. Stupidly, weirdly grieving the concept of a house when I already live in a house. (It belongs to Dude, not me, and the few times I’ve mentioned that I feel a little weird I’m not on the deed at all he was like oh but it would be trivial to add you, but he hasn’t. He makes a point of discussing all the proposed renovations and such with me, and like yeah sure it’s coming out of our joint account but let’s be real I made four figures this year in actual earned income and he made six, let’s not delude ourselves about that. I know it upsets him that he tells me about renovations he’s researched and I’m always like honey whatever sounds good to you it’s your house, and he’s always like it’s our house and I’m like, so you say, verbally, but like. It’s not, and it’s hard for me to make myself believe that. ANYWAY.)

Anyway.

I spent a while daydreaming my way through the Jamaica Cottage Co’s https://jamaicacottageshop.com/ inventory but those largely come as precut assemble-it-yourself kits (they have some preassembled ones but 1) mostly just the tiniest ones and 2) hoo that is super out of my price range) and bitch I can barely operate an electric screw gun, I am not going to be able to do that on my own. And my dad was the only person I was ever going to feel comfortable asking to do something so ambitious and complex just for me (even him, I’d feel guilty about, but I had a pretty solid 41 years of data including some pretty formative shit that he was probably not gonna secretly be mad at me for stuff). Anyone else, even if they offer freely, I’m not going to be able to take them up on it because I would feel like I owed them so much of a favor I’d never be able to repay it. Nobody else loves me like that, that I could just believe they didn’t mind and like I could possibly deserve that kind of attention.

(Note, I’m not saying nobody does love me that much, I’m just saying i dont’ think I could ever believe that somebody else loved me that much, yes I’m including my mother, no I know damn well that doesn’t make sense how many fucking sweaters has that woman knit me let alone how she bore the brunt of my entire fucking adolescence and never even attempted to murder me once.)

So anyway. It’s sort of no longer soothing to daydream about tiny houses and yet I keep poking it like a sore tooth. God I just want somewhere I can be like. Alone for a minute. Where I can feel like I’m out of the way. I constantly feel like I’m in the way, in every other place in my entire life, because I am, and I’m just so tired of always being in the way, and I’m too big and my clutter is too much and my sense of aesthetics is weird as hell and I just– want– to not have that matter, in one single context, and I don’t have that and won’t have that.

And I know it doesn’t help that this is clearly partly tied up in some weird bullshit about me and Dude that I don’t know how to unpick! I tried to discuss the basic framework of this essay with him and I know that every time he talks about fixing up this house and I am supportive but vague, and every time I talk about getting a tiny house to live on the farm more, he is slightly upset but denies being such, and that’s not a useful thing to crosstalk about but I do not have the slightest bit of capacity to sort any of that out at the moment because I am too fucking busy being really fucking sad about a thing I am not going to get to do with my dad and a sanctuary I am not going to have that would have been like a direct lasting connection to the person I have always loved the most in this world etc etc blah blah blah.

Oh man I’m just so fucking sad. But it’s so dumb, of all the fucking things to be sad about I’m sad he didn’t do a big complicated difficult thing for me because I’m too much of a weenie to figure out any other way of doing something that difficult! Wahh wahh, Christ almighty.

(I really wish I did have a space to myself in this house, i can’t even really cry about it because I feel too awkward crying in front of Dude and there’s not really anywhere I can do that without it being awkward. I’ve cried briefly in the shower but that kind of echoes, it’s no good. At the moment he’s on the other side of the sectional politely pretending I’m not typing furiously and blowing my nose every three seconds.)

Hoo. Okay. IDK if writing that down actually helped but well, I did it, there it is.

(For the record, this one https://jamaicacottageshop.com/shop/10x16-hobby-house-living/ is the closest to the one I’d given the plans for to Dad.) (Your picture was not posted)