Life: 10 x 10

Stupid dishes. How I hate them and their affinity for piling up and smelling bad.

So, on the advice of Glenn Campbell, we’re tossing over half of our dishes into “storage” (a.k.a. boxes in the closet) and NOT using our dishwasher. We will keep some extras around for the purpose of feeding our friends. But we think the wash-as-you-go idea has a lot of merit. Just requires a little discipline.

This one is really cool, but at $498, a bit too expensive for us.

I’ve also been doing some hunting for wall-mounted dish racks. I’d really like one that hangs over the sink – that way, when you set the dishes in to dry, you’re also putting them away. Here are some neat ones from Apartment Therapy.

Two problems: 1) They’re notoriously hard to find/kinda expensive. 2) We can’t mount things on our apartment drywall.

So, I’m thinking of building a free-standing frame to hold a regular dish drainer instead. If it works, I’ll include instructions on our soon-to-debut wiki.

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The one thing that Katy and I constantly bicker about is lights. I have very good low-light vision, and hers is almost non-existent. As such, when the lights are good for her, they’re usually too bright for me, and when they’re good for me, she’s essentially blind. Add on top of it the fact that I have a different visible spectrum than her, and it’s a constant struggle to find the lighting that makes us both happy. The answer has been sunlight. We both see great in sunlight, and it’s never too bright for me. Unfortunately, when the sun sets, the struggle resumes.

In our current (too huge) apartment, there’s some halogen track lighting. We agree it looks great, but they draw a total of 450W, making them one of the highest-draw devices in the apartment. I noticed that some of the reflected light from them has UV in it, and came up with the hypothesis that what makes lights pleasing to people isn’t just the visible spectrum, but also the UV.

In order to test this, I picked up a few RGB (red, green, blue combo) LEDs. I already have a few UV ones. I’m building a simple, variable-brightness control panel to drive the four colors adjustably, since if it works, it’ll be VERY efficient, custom-tunable lighting for the tiny house. I can picture three or four knobs, each adjusting a color channel. People could adjust the lights to whatever looks best to them. And Katy and I could finally have energy-efficient lighting that doesn’t bother either of us.

Also, last time I was in Home Depot browsing around, I found some christmas lights with a solar panel, as a kit. It was about a 4×6 panel and 50 simple LED lights. Seeing that many lights driven from a teensy little panel makes me think of tiny house lighting, so we could have low-impact, pseudo-full-spectrum lights in tiny houses, adjustable to each person’s tastes. Now I just need to find my box of resistors and try this out…

A lot’s happened in the past week. Apologies for the saturated nature of this post, but there’s so much to tell!

Matt and I have done quite a bit of budget research on our tiny house. We’ve found that the Tumbleweed Company cost estimates assume you’re using downright luxurious building materials. For example: Tumbleweed estimates $1,100 for counter tops… we found cheap-yet-functional formica for $200.

This was all very encouraging, so we decided it was time to “come out” to Matt’s parents about our plans. We’ve been hoping to use their land and tools for building our house, and wanted to offer rent in exchange for parking through the first winter. So we invited them to dinner and I made stir-fry.

Things… did not go over so well. At first they thought we were having money problems, then they thought we were trying to reject money completely. Then they deduced that we must be afraid of success, or maybe we just miss the country scenery…? No matter how we tried to explain the appeal of the lifestyle itself, they simply didn’t believe us. They thought we should wait a couple of years and “get it out of our system” then.

The entire conversation was very frustrating. But it was also illuminating. Talking to them made me realize just how tied people are to their real-estate, and just how much I don’t want a house mortgage. The phrases “that’s just the way life is,” and “too frugal,” came up a lot, but it’s not a matter of frugality for me. It’s about striving for efficiency and ingenuity as virtues. It’s about banking on my value to society rather than inflation and interest. But then, that’s another fundamental disagreement: I don’t think the American economy will return to growth-as-usual anytime soon.

I am planning on “the new normal” (also known as “the way things are in the rest of the world”). American markets may have an upward swing in the next couple years from investors trying to recoup their losses, but things are too globally transparent for us to get away with a debt-based economy much longer. Bless Washington (Dems and Repubs alike) for trying to save us the pain, but I see no easy way out. I plan to hunker down and start paying what I can of this bill by consuming little and producing much. The generations before ours have handed down a lot of debt, but they’ve also given us one of the more progressive and imaginative countries in the world. Loans have enabled upward mobility for people who otherwise would have had little opportunity, and that has made us examine centuries-old economic and ethnic prejudices. I’m not angry about the way things are now. I’m just trying to do what I think is the next best step.

Andrew's brother standing outside the Lusby

So, that was the first half of the weekend. Thank goodness for daylight savings time, because we needed that extra hour of sleep. Sunday morning we dragged ourselves into the sunlight to meet Andrew and Angie and visit a partially-finished “Lusby Class Tumbleweed” (as Andrew put it), right in our very own southern NH!

We found its owner, Elaine, through the Tumbleweed Company blog. We were so excited to find someone local that we had to connect. She graciously allowed us to step into her Lusby-in-progress and see if we felt any horrible gut-reactions to the small space. The unanimous response? “We can so totally do this.” I know I can’t communicate how the space felt via this blog, but the overall area reminded me very much of my dorm room minus the bed.

The Lusby was very cute, with a lot of thought put into it. We all agreed we would design our own houses differently, as the second bedroom seems too space-costly for a couple. Matt and I still have our sights set on the Fencl plan. We talked to Elaine about her experiences, and she said the hardest part is finding a place to park. RV parks aren’t fans of these things (yet), and a lot of towns have ordinances against living in RVs. We’re all mulling the idea of blazing the way for a Tumbleweed Park.

Matt & Andrew check out the interior

Angie & Katy are excited!

Matt and Katy's Books: the ones circled in red are the ones we actually "need".

Like Turtle and Phoenix, one of my biggest concerns is books. So Matt and I went through our collection.

The image on the left is what we had remaining after a first-pass weeding. Pretty intimidating. So rather than thinking: “what can we get rid of?” we went at it from the angle of: “what do we really want to keep?” That made it much easier.

Some will go to BookMooch, some (like our old dusty textbooks) will fetch a pretty penny on Amazon, and others may end up in the Great Library in the Sky… there are some books that even Goodwill doesn’t want.

It’s hard to get rid of the old favorites, but being a librarian has taught me that information flows everywhere. You can dip into the stream at any given point and usually pull out the book that you’re after.

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When I was introduced to the idea of Tumbleweeds I immediately dismissed them as “too small.” Matt (my significant other) and I work in high-paying fields with desirable degrees under our belts. “We ought to be able to afford a REAL house,” I thought. But after a couple months of soul-crunching and number-searching, the realities of owning a house set in and I gave it a second thought.

As we live now, my workplace is closer to our apartment, so I get home first. I usually end up cooking dinner for time reasons. I enjoy cooking, but when free time is scarce you’re painfully aware of what else you COULD be doing. I’m a pack-rat, yet clutter bothers me on a quasi-spiritual level. So as I cook, I think about all the stuff that I should be cleaning and putting away. I’ll organize my thoughts by room, devise a plan of attack, and mentally rehearse so I can put things away faster and have a little time leftover for myself before bed.

This drives ME crazy. And if I’m driving myself crazy I can only imagine how pleasant others must find me in this state. It was about this point in the thought process that I realized I have far more objections to the way I live now than I do to trying to change it.

The Easiest Part: Making the decision. It’s exhilarating and simple, like stepping onto a roller coaster. The right neurons fired and set off a chain reaction of fantastic mental planning.

The Hardest Part: The childhood dinosaur toys that have been sitting in the back of a closet for 10+ years. Giving them away feels like chopping off a limb. But it’s a dead, plastic limb that doesn’t serve any purpose. And maybe I can keep just one velociraptor.

There are also bigger reasons than my own happiness. Instead of paying $250k in interest for a $200k mortgage (do the math, it’s true!), we could do something really useful with that money. 1.4 billion people make less than $1.25/day… so why do I need a house that costs $22/day in interest alone? And what for? So I can fret about organizing my masses of stuff?

So I’ve talked myself into it. Matt has too, and he’s as excited as I am. This winter will be spent designing our new home and “practising” in our apartment: figuring out exactly how many dishes we really need, how to use BookMooch, and how to file our stacks of documents digitally. In the mean time, I’ll get to work on cleaning those dinosaur skeletons out of my closet.

-Katy

“Filling to fullness is not as good as stopping at the right moment.
Oversharpening a blade causes its edge to be lost.
Line your home with treasures and you won’t be able to defend it.
Amass possessions, establish positions, display your pride: Soon enough disaster drives you to your knees.
This is the way of heaven: do your work, then quietly step back.”
-Section 9 of the Tao Te Ching (as translated by Brian Browne Walker)

Helga Steppan is a Swedish artist who has created an installation piece that is either called All My Things, Be long apart, Belongings Apart, or See-through (I can’t determine what the whole darn thing is called). She has sorted all of her belongings according to color. Clothes, dishes, pencils, furniture – it looks like she’s got almost all of it (though she did publish a list of things she forgot).  The Man and Eve website has pictures of all the color groupings.

Probably a much more creative, fulfilling and gentle way to realize how much stuff you have compared to our move-out fiasco. Almost wish we’d packed by color. It would at least make unpacking somewhere down the road much more aesthetically pleasing.

♣

Angela

We need to simplify. There’s too much stuff hanging around our lives. Even if we don’t see it, it’s taking up psychic space. This blog is going to be about our quest to reduce the amount of stuff in our lives.

For a taste of how we realized that we needed to do this, view the following images.

These are our books, spread out on the floor before we moved. Well organized, but so many!

At least books don't take up very much space. That's 531 books there.

This is our storage unit after we moved. Packed to the gills.