Today is April 11 which means that it has officially been two years since we moved our tiny house onto the farm!! We made it! Two years was always our minimum goal to reach and we are so happy to celebrate this milestone today.
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A nasty virus has been going through my school and I've been knocked down by it for over a week. I had hoped to get out two posts this week, this one and my final "changes" post that I've been teasing you with. That one will have to wait until next week. I just haven't had the energy to write it yet. Hopefully I'm on my way to healing and getting back on my feet!
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For the last half of 2016, Jordan and I worked on the tiny house to make adjustments and improvements to help us have a better, happier winter season. This year we enjoyed the most drawn-out, warm, beautiful fall ever. We delighted in keeping our windows open til late in the season, being outside more often longer in the year, and having Lil Blue continue to crawl with bugs....oh wait. We hated that last part. Living on a farm and in a tiny space means that we share our 160 square feet with lots and lots of bugs! Spiders, mosquitoes, flies, Lady Asian Beetles, and unidentifiable insects crawl along our ceiling (which slopes to inches above our faces at night), form webs over all of our windows and alongside our house, and form little pulsing hives to thrive during the winter in our shed.
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In the last half of 2016, I decided I wanted to finally pick a path for myself. It has plagued me throughout my early adulthood that I have not been able to figure out what I want to do with my life. I am interested in many different things but that always seemed to cloud my vision rather than set me up for making a decision. I'm good at many things but don't feel like I excel in any one area--again, not helping me pick a path. But I was not happy in my job and was tired of feeling like I was floundering, so I did some soul-searching and finally felt ready to make a decision.
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We have had some amazing thunderstorms this week in Iowa. It has been beautiful! Last summer, as we were just getting settled into Lil Blue, we seemed to have much more extreme weather. We had severe thunderstorms, tornado watches and warnings, rain and high winds all the time. That, as well as high heat and humidity---and no air conditioner! It was not fun. This year, the storms seem much more mellow, which is nice because then we aren't worried about blowing away! And we still get to enjoy the beauty of them. For this week's Friday Inspiration, I just want to show you some pictures of the beauty we've seen on the farm in these storms. We even had the most remarkable double rainbow!
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just finished a project I've been wanting to do for a long time and it wasn't hard at all! Originally, we painted a chalkboard on our bathroom sliding door when we moved in to Lil Blue. I loved the idea of having a chalkboard. I wanted to write out our weekly meal plan on it, or write notes and grocery lists, or just have fun with drawings and designs. But shortly after we moved in we realized we had no other spot in the whole house to hang our mirror other than on that door....covering up the chalkboard.
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I've got some shit to talk about. Literally.
In all my research for tiny houses, it looks like the majority of dwellers use some kind of a composting toilet. Which makes sense because then you don't need to worry about plumbing, having extra water, and hooking into some kind of sewer or septic tank. If you Google "composting toilet", you will see loads of different options for composting toilets. Ones that reduce mess or possible smell by using multiple compartments or turn cranks; ones that require electricity so it can heat up waste and condense it; and varying sizes including huge (and I mean giant!) thrones. These all range in price but can be up to over a thousand dollars!
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It's already Friday again! This has been a busy week leading up to an even busier next week! We had a bit of an emergency bathroom situation today in Lil Blue. It will create a project for us to work on this weekend--you can look for that post next week. But for today's Friday Inspiration I thought I would share both a funny thing and a beautiful thing.
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I think every Friday should have an inspiration post. Whether it's funny or beautiful, it's always nice to start the weekend off with something inspirational.
Today I had a friend visit me at Lil Blue. The past three days we've been under a heat advisory. Yesterday, with the heat index, it got up to 115 degrees! Today, my friend and I sat in the coolness of my home (thanks to our small AC window unit!) and chatted together while being entertained by Foxy Brown. Then we headed out into the scorching Iowa heat and humidity so she could see and pet the farm animals.
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I have posted quite a few pictures on this blog of the exterior of our tiny house but have posted hardly any of the inside (other than my messy house post). I've had a lot of people ask to see the interior and are really curious about it. I've put it off for a year because I kept telling myself I was going to take better pictures. I figure I may as well stop procrastinating. Some things have changed since these photos were taken but it's better to give you all an idea of what it looks like in general and then give updates as we change things.
So here it is, finally, a tiny house tour of Lil Blue...
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It's official. We have been living tiny for over ONE YEAR!!!!!! I can't believe we are already at that mark. In some ways it seems like our journey from how it all began til now started forever ago. And in other ways it feels like it JUST happened. We have now experienced every season in this house and on the farm, making us officially out of the transition period now that we have a better idea of what to expect throughout the year.
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Well, I have really dropped-the-ball lately on blogging. Not that I was that consistent before but now I haven't written anything in six weeks. We've had a crazy couple of months and my mind just hasn't been on writing.
April kept us busy with our awesome vacation to New York and Washington DC. Things with work amped-up for both of us and the rest of the month flew by! I was especially preoccupied with recreating the look of the farm's booth for the farmers' market.
Read MoreJordan and I recently went on a ten day vacation to New York City and to Washington DC. We had the best time and experienced so much! It was wonderful to have some time away together and even better, we rented a huge house with a group of my friends from college, and all had a long weekend together. It was just what we needed! It was restoring to be with people we care for so much and who know me so deeply. It was wonderful to get away, see and do and eat new things, and take a break from our everyday lives. We weren't ready to return when we did, and the day we came back, we realized we had made one very stupid mistake.
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Jordan and I recently went on a ten day vacation to New York City and to Washington DC. We had the best time and experienced so much! It was wonderful to have some time away together and even better, we rented a huge house with a group of my friends from college, and all had a long weekend together. It was just what we needed! It was restoring to be with people we care for so much and who know me so deeply. It was wonderful to get away, see and do and eat new things, and take a break from our everyday lives. We weren't ready to return when we did, and the day we came back, we realized we had made one very stupid mistake.
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Though winter was kind of rough for us in the tiny house, spring came early! We have enjoyed a major thaw the past month or so with warmer temperatures and happier living. We no longer are in fear of our water freezing or quite as concerned with our heat sources. We've already packed away our winter coats (though it may still be a bit premature for that) and are looking forward to a season of enjoying tiny living without constantly being in survival mode.
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Well, I wouldn't necessarily say that this winter has been a particularly hard one. We have had worse winters in the past with lower temperatures and a lot more snow. But it also definitely has not been an easy first winter in the tiny house. Every day feels like WINTER VS. TINY HOUSE and we are constantly losing the battle.
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The biggest difficulty and the hardest transition for us living tiny has been our constant challenge of getting water. Our house is hook-up ready which means we have a spigot on the outside of the house that we can connect a hose to in order to have instantly running water. However, where we are parked, there is no water source to connect to in that way. We knew this when we decided to park here and realized that that would be a big learning curve to work through.
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I made a few different things to use for my Christmas decorations this year. The easiest and most fun was my felt tree that I hung on our curtains. I thought I took more pictures of the process than I actually did...but I will post what I did do and hopefully that will help anyone who wants to make their own.
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I wrote my Christmas Part 1 post in November and promised to have another part to show all that we did to decorate Lil Blue for the holidays. Even though Christmas and New Years have both passed, it's never too late to enjoy the season and some decorations.
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We have had such a warm start to winter here in Iowa, it's basically been a long long fall. Which has been nice and kind of a relief as we are nervous for tiny house living and what that entails during a rough and cold winter. Even though we have enjoyed the warmth and greenery, I was longing for a white Christmas and was certain it was not going to happen. Then we woke up on Christmas Eve day to the perfect big-flake snowfall and a couple of inches covering the ground. It was gorgeous!
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