White Wine Sprizter
Looking for a way to stretch your wine budget? ‘Cause we always are. Here’s how turn a $3 glass of wine into a $2 cocktail in one easy step.
2/3 pinot grigio + 1/3 club soda + fruit
#cheapskate
Month: August 2015
Old School
We’re building a tiny house. Yes, it’s true. And as we do so, we’re living in an old schoolhouse. We left jobs in the big city so we could step back a bit and slow down. We moved from an apartment building that had roughly 70 units to a town that has roughly 70 inhabitants. And it has been great.
One of our neighbors dropped by the other day with a book about the history of the schoolhouse. According to the book, the school district borrowed money from the State Permanent School Fund in 1905 to build the school. It cost $3000.
It’s hard to believe that a 120 square-foot house on wheels will probably end up costing something similar to this two-story brick fortress. We think it’s worth it.
#preservingtheoldways #formeandforyou #oldschool
Flooring 101
It’s super nerdy, but I’m really excited about the floors in this place. We’re planning to have radiant floor heating, and in our climate that means year-round coziness is now possible. Woot woot!
We’ve been working on the decking, creating a build that allows space for the wheels. The Artist also added aluminum sheeting to the bottom of the entire deck to keep moisture and pests out of there for good. Throw in some 2” foam with fiberglass insulation to seal the deal and you’ve got yourself a bona fide floor!
Much later in the build, we’ll add the actual heating elements and flooring. I’ll be sure to add some photos when we get to that stage, too.
#floorsforkings
Cole Slaw/Kohl Slaw
Cole slaw is one of my favorite summer foods. We have cabbage on hand most of the season because it only costs $0.75 at our favorite farmers’ market. I like red cabbage because it’s pretty and it turns the dressing bright pink. And if you add a little raw kohl rabi? You’ve got yourself some Kohl Slaw.
One of the best things about cole slaw is that you can tweak the dressing really easily. This is a little recipe I made up and I get a lot of requests for it. You can skip the dill, add more sugar, leave out the lemon juice. Heck if I care!
Cole Slaw/Kohl Slaw
1/2 head red cabbage. Chop ‘er up.
A carrot or two, shredded
1/2 c. (give or take) raw kohl rabi, shredded
Dressing:
1 c. mayo
1.5 Tbl. white vinegar
1 Tbl. sugar
2 tsp. fresh chopped dill
1 squeeze fresh lemon juice
Salt ‘n’ peppa to taste
Chop up the veg. Mix up the dressing. Pour it over, and let it all hang out in the fridge for a couple hours before serving.
House Bits
We thought we’d share the list of materials The Artist put together for our first round of house bits buying. When we moved recently, we got a whole bunch of unsolicited (but appreciated) coupons. We decided to cash in and, essentially, get 10% off of our house bits since their purchase was inevitable. Here’s a list of the stuff we got to start us off, knowing that we’ll need to go back for more and also not wanting to spend all of our carefully saved cash in one go!
I give you… Le Materials:
8’ 2by4 (6)
14’ 2by6 (3)
10’ 2by4 (6)
12’ 2by6 (10)
11/32 4by8 plywood (19)
15/32 4by8 plywood (4)
2by 6 stud (1)
2by6 Purlin hangers (8)
2” flooring insulation (3)
12”by50’ aluminum sheeting
#ifyoubuildit #theywillcome
Raspberry Haul
The Artist and I picked these from our backyard. What should we do with them? I think they’d make a great ice cream topping…
#dreamingandscheming #raspberrydreams
Drive On
We bought our house! Or at least, the materials to get us going. It was an exciting day, complete with an unexpectedly exciting car ride home.
After several hours of gathering and purchasing, The Artist and I didn’t take the time to balance all of our newly acquired house bits properly. Once on the freeway, our newly refurbed trailer started vibrating and weaving. Then it started fishtailing, which made the whole car rattle uncontrollably.
The drive home was harrowing, truly, and I just knew at one point that we were going into the ditch. Miraculously, we made it without hitting anyone, losing any house bits, or running off the road.
We celebrated by getting out of the death cab and jumping right into a bottle of wine.
Drive on, good sir. Drive on.
#dangersofhomebuilding
Rehabbed and Refabbed: The Trailer
The day before we were planning to purchase a trailer for our tiny home on wheels, my dad announced that he had one and asked if we’d like it. What luck! The trailer he had was far better quality than the one we had planned to buy (and far freer, for the record), but it needed a little love.
We scraped off a lot of the rust and put a little elbow grease into it. We also invested in some paints designed to convert rust into paintable material. We’ll seal it up with a copper finish at the end of it all and have a perfectly beautiful, rehabbed and refabbed trailer for the cost of just a few cans of paint.
Thanks for giving us the foundation of our home, Dad!
#elbowgrease #thanksdad
Tiny House Design: The Wagon
We’ve been noodling designs for our tiny house for about a year-and-a-half. There are a surprising number of designs for tiny homes but we ultimately decided to go with our own. Since our plan is to permanently park our wagon on a plot of land and add an outdoor living space, we don’t need a lot of room inside. When all is said and done we’ll occupy about 120 square feet of roofed, insulated, sealed-in glory.
These are some sketches The Artist drafted after months and months of thinking. You’ll notice a few question marks but we’re excited to move ahead with this layout, which will include a lofted sleeping area, tiny kitchenette, some storage, and a dining booth.
Let the building begin!
Tiny Theory
We hopped on the bandwagon… the tiny bandwagon. The first time I saw a picture of tiny house was in December of 2013. There’s nothing remarkable about that date, except that I remember it. The Artist had pulled up a photo of a tiny house on wheels and asked me to come take a look. Within 24 hours, we had started sketching and spitballing ideas. For so many reasons the idea of tiny homes appealed to us.
We both like the idea of having a smaller impact on this good, green earth.But we drive a car, we buy non-local food when we need to, and we probably use more electricity than we really need. We’re not vegetarians, we’re not aiming for zero impact, and we’re not even committed to the idea of living off grid. In other words, we’re pragmatists that want to be better humans. But with our combined student loans (a burden experienced by almost anyone who has attended college in the U.S. since the 1970s), we didn’t think we could realistically take on a mortgage and not experience resulting heart attacks on a regular basis due to the inevitable surmounting pressure of maintaining a certain level of income.
So, in December of 2013 when we first learned about tiny houses, the path we were on changed in a significant way. Living tiny was a way for us to build a custom, one-of-a-kind home without taking a single penny in loans. Since then, we’ve slowly been downsizing. We went from a 1500 square-foot loft to a 750 square-foot apartment. We’ve stopped buying (for the most part) things we don’t need or use. We’ve sold and donated lots and lots of our stuff, and we know we’ll have to keep doing so until we can live even smaller. The process has, perhaps surprisingly, not been painful. We haven’t felt for one second that we’ve sacrificed any level of comfort in the name of lesser impact. Will that be the case when we live in our completed, DIY, 120 square-foot home? Who knows? But we’re more than willing to find out.
#goodbyesquarefootage #hellofinancialfreedom
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