About the Builders

Thanksgiving

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The idea of Thanksgiving is so beautiful. Spending the day with loved ones, thinking about the things we’re grateful for and eating wonderful food makes me a better person. We’ll be spending Thanksgiving with The Artist’s side of the family, enjoying a huge amount of home cooked food, games, and wonderful nieces. I try to spend time everyday being grateful for the many things that make my life whole: a fabulous job, the cute little roof over our heads, The Dog, and mostly our generous, loving and supportive friends and family. It’s a veritable cornucopia of blessings.

This time of year is an especially good time to cultivate those moments of thankfulness. Thank you for taking the time to read our story, share in our tiny victories and be a part of our lives.

With Gratitude,

The Chef, The Artist and The Dog

 

All-Inclusive Resort

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We’ve got some news! We found a place to spend the winter. Our schoolhouse has been a wonderful home for us, but it’s a summer home that isn’t quite sealed up enough for year-round comfort. So, we’re moving to an all-inclusive resort. Except all the meals are covered by us and we won’t be on vacation.

Here’s a little sneak peek of our brand new digs. We’ll be trying out a tiny space (180 sq. ft.) for a while to see how it functions and what we can do to make living in a small space as manageable as possible. We’re thrilled to have found this little cabin on the lake and we’ll keep the tiny house progress coming! Fingers crossed we can get it sealed in before the snow… Wish us luck!

resort

How We Got Here: The Chef

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I’m not really a chef. Not even close. But I’m an avid eater and I think that’s good enough.

My adult life has been a series of moves. After high school (technically, before high school) I moved away from my hometown and started about a decade worth of global travel. Until my mid-twenties, I could fit my life into two well-packed suitcases. It’s been a beautiful life.

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I’ve lived a lot of different types of places, and that means a lot of different housing styles, too. I spent a summer living in a beautifully crumbling English cottage, I had an efficiency in Japan with a bathroom roughly the size of your typical aircraft bathroom (but much cleaner), and I’ve lived in artists lofts tall enough to fit two African elephants standing on top of each other. We never tested that theory, but it would work if National Geographic’s statistics about African Elephants are accurate.

In my early twenties, I got one of those “real jobs” and started accumulating stuff. Then I got married, and inherited even more stuff. Stuff, for me, is not very gratifying to own. I get stressed out when there’s too much stuff. But as soon as I had money to burn, I found that I pretty quickly gave into the idea that stuff equals happiness. It’s been awesome to take a step back and analyze the purchases I’ve made over the last few years. I really can’t believe how much stuff I’ve justified buying, and I’m finding as we start the minimizing process that I’m already feeling lighter and more free. Psychological? Yes. But I think there’s a large practical element at work here, too.

One of the biggest draws of building a tiny house, for me, was the idea of having income that isn’t going to pay rent or a mortgage. It means we’ll have the ability to pay off our student loan debts more quickly, and eventually be debt-free. It also means we’ll have the funds available to travel more often. And we won’t have all that stuff to keep us weighed down. And let’s be completely honest… with 120 square feet, we’re not going to have room for stuff we don’t absolutely need.

I can’t wait to pare back down, reanalyze, and get started on our next big adventures!

How We Got Here: The Good Enough Guide

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Our approach, generally, is experimental. Whether it’s cooking, working, or building a house, we don’t generally approach new ideas with much rigidity and we really like it that way.

The Artist, in a previous life, worked in construction and helped build homes. One of his (in)famous coworkers used to say, in reference to his own handiwork, “Good enough for the girls we go out with.” From time to time, The Artist will take a step back, nod, and say, “Good enough for the girl I married.” It’s in honor of that noble, if not half-assed philosophy, that we have named our noble-if-not-half-assed blog.

how we got here the good enough guide

As we’re going along, we’re tweaking design elements, filling in some blanks, and learning a lot along the way, always with the mantra that it’s good enough for us. We hope that if you’re following along you’re enjoying watching the process unfold. Thanks for experimenting with us!

How We Got Here: The Artist

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We’ve met a lot of people since we moved to this neck of the woods. Correction: we’ve met a lot of fascinating people since we moved here. We now know several published authors, lots of painters and artists, and even a former engineer that worked for a certain unnamed federal government entity. Like I said, fascinating.

One of the first questions we always get when we meet new people is how we got here. The area we live in is pretty rural and the town we live is in very, very small. We had jobs that you usually associate with bigger, more cosmopolitan areas. So I think it seems odd to a lot of people that we moved here of our own volition.

For The Artist, the road here has been seasoned with that wonderful spice of life, variety. He’s that math/physics/engineering major gone musician. He’s that musician gone filmmaker. He’s that filmmaker gone grants administrator. He’s that grants administrator gone set designer. Oh, and he’s also had experience building houses. The first time I went to his apartment, there happened to be a shipwreck set (see below) in the middle of the living room. You know, that guy.

shipwreck

bookstore

What we’re finding is that this tiny house project is sort of the perfect culmination of those skills. He’s got the engineering background that lends itself to things like numbers and calculations… things that make my head spin just thinking about them. But he’s also got that wonderfully creative side, so that when he says things like, “I’m going to build a skylight that hinges on the side, so we can open it and stand out of the top of our house” – I actually believe him.

interior design

One of my favorite parts of this whole process has been watching The Artist think of ways to make our house unique, and then executing those ideas to perfection. When all is said and done, we’ll have a one-of-a-kind dwelling that screams of his talents, passions, and abilities. And I can’t wait to see it come to life!