Absolute Beginners

Hold the phone, though. We're ploughing right ahead on the assumption that everybody knows what a tiny house is, and that may not be the case. Let's start there: what is a tiny house?

Quite simply, a tiny house is a really scaled down home. Technically, the term could be used to describe any diminutive house, but the tiny house we're referring to is built directly onto a trailer. This means you can move your home if you have to relocate. Tiny houses typically have a small bathroom, kitchen, living area, and a sleeping loft bedroom.

Living in tiny homes is fast becoming a movement, a reaction against McMansions, against consumerism, against mortgages. For a generation not expecting to ever be able to own homes, tiny houses provide a loophole—they are far less expensive to build than a conventional home, and their size necessitates a simpler lifestyle, as there isn't the physical space to pile up the possessions. In indirect ways, living in a tiny house gives the home-owner more time and freedom, and reduces their overall impact on the planet. And for those who choose to self-build, as we are doing, it represents the reacquisition of skills we seem to have lost as a population—building our own shelter. 

Here's a little infographic on the subject:  

Alternative housing had always piqued our interest. Hours had gone into researching Earthships, houseboats, cob and strawbale homes, and yurts. Tiny houses, though, seemed immediately like the best fit at this stage in our lives. From our urban apartment, we looked into a number of different houses that had been built by others the world over, on blogs, and video webseries, like Kirsten Dirsken's . These were some of our favourite abodes:

Lucy

The Tiny Project

Vina's Tiny House 

We had our sights set on buying plans from a local designer, not only to help support the local economy, but also because we didn't want to be having to make conversions from imperial to metric (what's up, America? Metric's so easy!)--at this point, we ran into Brett Sutherland's tiny house video tour. 

Not only was Brett local to us, his house was spectacular! The tiny house community seems to be really hooked on gabled roofs, which we found a bit claustrophobic. Here was a house that had its roof space opened right up, leaving ample breathing room in the living area, and plenty of sitting space in the loft. Brett had built the boat he had lived on prior to returning to land, so he had experience in smart design of small spaces. Not wanting to buy sight unseen, we contacted Brett to see if we could visit his house.

NANCY: I have to admit that I was a bit nervous that we'd get to his house and find it suffocatingly narrow. Upon entering the space, however, I fell in love. I was basically inside a boat. Having grown up on sailboats, I instantly felt like I was home. I was ecstatic. We bought the plans on the spot.

STEFF: What a lot of people don't realise about tiny houses, having only seen pictures of them, is that when you're inside the space, it feels plenty big enough. Also, we have a really mild climate in Auckland, and Brett's design allowed for a lot of cross breezes and indoor-outdoor living, as well as for easy catching of rainwater. It was the ideal plan for our build.

This brought us to our next question: how does one actually build a tiny house? To be honest, we had no idea. We had never built anything before. That's not entirely true; we tried to build a wall in New Jersey once, and we almost got divorced over it. But after some consultation with Warren, our extremely tolerant and endlessly valuable builder friend, we were advised to take everything one step at a time. We made a start: we ordered the trailer.

The trailer is the single most expensive component of the build, checking in at approximately $10k. Putting the deposit on our custom trailer, then, was the point where this tiny house whimsy started to become a reality. We chose to buy our trailer from Monoway, having heard good things about them. Their trailer was not only strong and nicely galvanised; they had also positioned the support bars so that our plywood flooring slotted perfectly into place (no trimming necessary, except around the wheel arches).

Also significant for us was moving out of our apartment. We had tried to work out a way to continue living in the city and building part-time, but that would involve a regular commute to our build site, in addition to continuing to pay rent.

NANCY: Having begun our build, I'm so glad that we made the decision to move out, if only because it makes funding the house so much less of a stress, not having the constant threat of rent hanging over our heads. Also, it's so nice to be able to finish a day's building and have a shower straight away. The commute into work is no fun, as Auckland traffic is steadily worsening, but it's a small sacrifice, when put in perspective.

STEFF: Living with family presents its challenges, but it's actually really nice to come home to an intergenerational household. Moving back in with family has immediately increased all of our support networks.

Our last step before trailer delivery was to do a massive shopping trip for the first stage of the build. We bought what came to look like a large heap of plywood, planks of framing timber, and a box of fixings. A few days later, our trailer arrived, and we began:

Levelling the trailer using cinder blocks and ground-treated timber.
The timber is there to spread the weight of the house;
it is ground-treated to prevent it from rotting in the wet conditions.

Creating a vapour barrier between the trailer and the plywood flooring

Destroying a perfectly good pair of scissors with bitumen

Drilling through ply and metal, countersinking, and driving tech screws to fix ply floor to trailer

Sanding off builders' bog, which we used to fill the countersink holes. Also, a bovine photobomb.

This week, during our ongoing process of downsizing belongings, we found this postcard that we sent ourselves from New York, in 2011. Our pertinent past selves just nailed it.

"Hey, Nancy and Steff! By the time you receive this, you'll be home!
Here's something you learned on this trip; don't forget it: so many people, at the end of your trip
brought attention to the fact that the trip was long, arduous, dangerous;
"how did you do it?!" they'd ask. Here's how: you just went ahead and did it.
Remember this for goals you might want to achieve in the future--just go ahead and do it!
Love, Nancy and Steff"

The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.

Just Like Starting Over

At this time four years ago, we were beginning the journey documented earlier in this blog. We were 22 and 23, keen and idealistic, and pulsing with anticipation.

Christmas post-travels 2011

Over the last four years, our lives have shifted fairly drastically, then, in a way, morphed into a more circular narrative: in a sense, we are revisiting and reinventing our lives four years ago. Check it out:

In the post-van, pre-now years, we flew home and immediately engaged in the socially sanctioned things: Steff undertook a Bachelor of Science degree in Ecology, Nancy began her career as a piano tuner, both of us bought cars and dutifully paid our rent fortnightly on a charming (read: undermaintained), overpriced one-bedroom apartment in the city.

We explored our surroundings and tried to approach the space around us openly and inquisitively. We were inspired by our life with less in the van, and by the permaculture farms and homesteads we had WWOOFed at while travelling. 

We did our best to translate this model to city living, learning about our local community, DIYing as much as we could, and simplifying. Auckland is a relatively compact city, which helped us to do things like collect produce directly from farmers. We also honed some kitchen magic skills, learning to make cheese, as well as our own cleaning and personal hygiene products.

The last four years were an experimental phase, where we dabbled in so-called civilised society, trying on preconceived notions of adulthood for size.

During this period, we also observed, evaluated, and refined our ideals. We reflected with our peers and found ourselves, after a while, in a world that was in direct conflict with what we had been told it would be. A university degree would lead to guaranteed work, we had been taught, but all around us was evidence to the contrary: overqualified peers in hospitality and retail, friends in overwhelming debt with no job prospects, hordes of acquaintances abandoning their tertiary qualifications in favour of reskilling in trades. The guidance we were receiving from the Gospel According to Generation Baby Boomer seemed increasingly irrelevant to our experiences, and as a group, we began to feel an uncomfortable mélange of confusion, isolation, guilt, and failure. The markers of success for their generation seemed now to be little more than a direct path to crippling debt. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

Upon introspection, we realised that we have been trained to find happiness in the things we could buy, but that only leaves us suffocating in our possessions. In any case, we can't afford all the things the billboards and bus shelters tell us we need. We can't keep up with the releases of every new iGadget. More importantly, we can't afford the white picket fence house; a lot of us never expect to be able to in our lifetimes.

The question we came to, after deliberation, was “do we even want that?” Sure, some of our friends went to uni, got corporate jobs, and now have houses and mortgages to keep. We totally respect them if that's what keeps them happy, but is it what we want to make of the one shot we get at existence? Is there another way?

In November of 2014, we decided there is. And here is where we come full circle, from one small space to the next. We are building a tiny house.

Let's flesh out this picture a little: Nancy is a piano tuner, Steff is a permaculture practitioner and educator. 

Piano wrangling at the Royal Festival Hall in London, 2014

Getting all up in the terrestrial ecology

These, we are convinced, are the best jobs in the world. We play music in a band called Tweed, and occasionally (bonus!) get paid to do it. This is the best scantily-paid hobby in the world. This is how we sound.

And this is how we look!

We try to create, rather than find, happiness. We don't always succeed, but life is a work-in-progress right up until the end, right?

We are now 25 and 26. The last four years of our lives have been a blossoming of the ideals we set out to explore in the van, a trial-and-error in pursuit of a life that fits. We found conventional consumerism and the career-centric lifestyle left us feeling a bit hollow. We're trying something new. Are we still keen, idealistic, and pulsing with anticipation? You bet. Stay tuned.

The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.