Life: 10 x 10

Happy New Year! Rather than make new resolutions, I’ve decided to scrutinize the ones I’ve accumulated over the past year. Matt and I are about to go on “vacation” (more on that later) for a week and this seems like a good time. It’s been about two months since my first blog post, and I find myself wanting to know where I stand. What have I accomplished since my initial, fiery resolve?

Shelter/Tumbleweed

We ran up against some obstacles, to say the least. The legal loopholes that usually allow for Tumbleweeds simply do not exist in New Hampshire. After a conversation with a very nice building inspector, I learned that it’s not just illegal to live in an “accessory structure” of less than a few hundred feet, but it is also illegal to live full-time in an RV. I suspect this has something to do our cold-weather climate mixed with NH’s generally high standard of living. As we work out a solution to this problem, we’ve resolved to move to a much smaller apartment when our current lease ends in June.

Finances

More importantly, however, Matt and I realized we simply can’t afford a house right now. Even a Tumbleweed. School loans put us in the red, which is a poor foundation for our new lifestyle. So after many a late-night conversation we decided to make debt our first priority. (I’m pretty sure we made an oath swearing off mortgages somewhere in there.) For us, this means delaying our dreams of part-time employment and spending the next few years earning our academic degrees all over again – this time in the financial sense. This may seem like a setback, but I believe the mental footwork is progress in the right direction.

Stuff

This is the category in which I shine. I’ve learned that it’s very easy to throw things away, but much harder to avoid the ever-vacuous landfill. I wince whenever I toss something in the trash. I’m not mad at myself for impulse-buys of the past, but I am a fan of atonement. This means a lot of cleaning, sorting and selling. A great number of books have gone to the local library. I’ve reduced the clothing I actually wear to about half of what it used to be. The other half is in stasis, but will soon be finding its way out the door. As for the knick knacks, the sentimental papers, and the “I’ll-get-to-it-someday-craft-supplies,” progress is slower, but apparent. I’m not getting rid of all of my high school papers/correspondences, but the vetting process has gotten a lot stricter. And many things are being scanned and gotten rid of.

Computers

Matt and I recently did the unthinkable. We decided to share a computer. Gasp! What?? Whoa, now, hold on there kiddies, don’t get carried away. We share a desktop. We still have one laptop each (er… in my case, a laptop and a netbook). But it’s better than it used to be. At our peak, we had no less than 7 computers in the apartment. And yes, I realize this is absolutely ridiculous.

It wasn’t like we bought the latest and greatest every few months. It came from an inability to get rid of the old. I mean, what if I need an extra computer? Or what if my still-functioning Windows 3.11 laptop is worth something some day? These were the anxieties that kept them close, move after move. And we haven’t completely fixed the problem… yet. Most of them are still sitting around collecting dust. But slowly, we’re finding responsible ways to dispose/disperse. We’d like to get it down to three total. One desktop to share for intensive tasks and one laptop each so we can both read/write at the same time. It still sounds excessive, I know… but we’ll re-evaluate the situation when we get there.

Exercise

I’d give myself an “E” for effort here. Or maybe an “E minus” for feeling the urge to make an effort. I went to the gym one morning in November when I couldn’t sleep. We recently set up our DDR pads and played for about a week… and then… fail. The end-of-year crunch at work put an end to that regimen, but hopefully we can rectify this situation soon.

Food

Yay, another thing we’ve been good at… mostly. Though exercise is lacking, our diet has seriously improved. We recently… acquired… a GABA rice maker. OK fine, so we bought a new thing. No, I do not regret it. Check out the health benefits here, here and here. Plus, we can throw in rice before work and come home to a delicious dinner, making us that much more likely to eat something that’s good for us.

In general, we’ve been aiming for a higher-fiber diet with lots of grains and veggies while phasing out large portions of meat, sugars and salts. When we do buy animal products, we try to find them ethically-raised. A-Market is a wonderful source, but the ethical and natural trends are finding their roots even in the mainstream grocery stores.

We were eating lots of fish, but we’ve had to belay that habit for reasons I will explain in another blog post. All in all, I feel our diets are improving.

Conclusion

Not bad at all. I’m feeling very inspired about getting rid of things, so I’m going to ride that wave for now. Hopefully vacation will be a jump-start to our pitiful exercise routine. But I’m not worried about reaching my goals instantaneously. As long as progress is made, I’m happy. And heaven save me from the day that I’ve reached the end of all my goals with nothing left to strive for.

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!

Well, actually more like 8 x 14, but these houses are 100 sq. ft. or less! That’s tiny, but there are a growing handful of people living comfortably in them, and I’d like to become one!

http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/

The above is a company building and selling tiny houses. You can get the basic idea by looking at their designs.

Here’s another site with resources and plans:

http://www.tinyhousedesign.com/

Wouldn’t it be lovely to live without a mortgage, quite possibly in a house that can move with you whenever you happen to feel the wanderlust? Esp. for someone in theater, a highly mobile profession, the idea of taking one’s house along for short stays is very appealing.

No mortgage, and so much less stuff! After all, Campbell’s Law of Storage states:

Ones possessions will expand to fill whatever storage space is available.

With a tiny house your storage space goes way down. Since there’s no room to put new stuff, you are almost guaranteed to get less of it! There needs to be a place for everything, and everything needs to be in its place… else you won’t be able to move.

Why do we need so much space inside when we can move around outside, or do the things we do inside in a lot less space? Most of my inside work is office-type stuff. I do research, I write, I read. All these things can be done in a very small space.

Living in a tiny house is inexpensive in general (no debt, low heating and lighting costs), and I imagine that the mindset of a tiny house dweller tends towards lower cost living in all areas. I look forward to being able to support myself on an actor’s limited income.