Recent Posts
Hooray for Family Day
There’s much delayed gratification when building a mortgage-free home. We live in a tiny house and sometimes long for more space. All we have to do is look up the hill to know…it’s coming. Maybe not as fast as we’d hope. I said not too long ago, “We can’t do another winter in this tiny house.” But maybe we will find ourselves here this Christmas. If all this rain has anything to say about it, it will be longer than we thought. While we are delaying gratification, the rest of our lives happen. Family Day to the rescue. Family Day has gotten us through many difficult times. During the time of our restaurant, New Day Cafe, we closed...
Read MoreBuilding a Family Seat and Cultivating a Sense of Place
In my last post I introduced you to Virginia, a dear reader and correspondent. In her letter she didn’t just talk about setting the day in your mind, she also talked about how we are creating a family seat here on our land. That term intrigued me. Here is a bit of her letter: My family seat is down below Sparta, NC. I say family seat, but I don’t even live there. It is home to my family since 1773 . That is what you all are building on your land. Family seat is an old English term. Not just a house or home but hopefully a seat for your family to have and come to for generations to come. You can be so proud of what you are doing and how you all are...
Read MoreSet the Day in Your Mind
It’s been one week since Sarah Beth Jones said “I think writing a daily blog post might be easier because it becomes a habit.” I got up the next day and decided to give daily posting a shot. She was right. A daily post forms a habit, a practice, a ritual. I’m loving this morning habit. I did miss yesterday, but that’s okay. A dear reader and correspondent, Virginia, (high school teacher for 40 years) wrote to me a few days ago in response to Idea Flow: Your blogs will be just fine. Just write what you see, what you feel, what you are thinking about. For example, if I were blogging this morning, I would say that I lay in...
Read MoreSuper Sheds Support our Tiny House
We recently had visitors who were on a whirlwind tiny house tour, and it was super-fun to be included on their tour. One thing they noticed about our house was that we had more stuff than most tiny house folks. I guess we aren’t totally minimalistic, or kids mean more stuff. I don’t know. But I do know that managing stuff is a constant job in our home. Yesterday I finished pulling out my spring wardrobe, then I carried all the storage bins of winter clothes to the shed. I often walk up and down the hill carrying stuff–loads of laundry from the washer to the clothesline, bins of clothes, empty mason jars, full mason jars, canning supplies, food, garden...
Read MoreHappy Mother’s Day
A prayer for all the mothers and children. Be well. Be present. Enjoy each other. Share this:EmailStumbleUponFacebookDigg
Read MoreGreat Clothing Roundup
In order to fit four wardrobes into our 8′ x 21′ tiny house, twice a year I hold the great clothing roundup. Yesterday was the day. This is the time when I switch out our seasonal wardrobes. Ideally, no one is home, but if they are, the weather has to be nice, so we can be outside. During the great clothing roundup, I pull everything out of the cabinets one wardrobe at a time. The house is unlivable for a few hours since I stack clothes on all surfaces including the deck. I sort them into piles: Clothes that are out of season, but still useful. These go into storage bins which we keep in the shed. Clothes that we’ve either out grown or worn out. This...
Read MoreMy Love Affair with Cardboard
Thank you for keeping my mother-in-law in your thoughts and prayers. She had surgery yesterday and is in recovery. Knowing so many of your thoughts are with her means a lot to us. Since MIL loves to garden, I’m writing about the garden today. This whole tiny house journey started as part of a much bigger plan. We wanted to live as free as we could from the confines of mortgage and corporate food. As we’ve lived on our land, we’ve been growing a homestead. Slowly, our virgin garden is showing signs of fertility–earthworms wiggle out as I am transplanting the seedlings, the shovel sinks in with little effort, there are less and less rocks to remove....
Read MoreIdea Flow
Right now, the big house is full of water since it’s been raining for days. Karl drilled a few holes in the sub-floor, so it will drain. I’ve been going up to sweep the water toward the holes, and it’s taking a while for it to all drain out. My ideas are a bit like that water. They are all there, but I can only deliver a little at a time. I can trickle them out to you, but I have to keep the flow, so I am recommitting to the blog. I met with Sarah Beth Jones of Nary Ordinary Business Solutions yesterday for a fun conversation about TinyHouseFamily.com and where to go with it now that I’ve finished my first book, Coming Home: Letters from a Tiny...
Read MoreHooray for Progress!
Thank you so much for supporting my work by buying my book! I am enjoying this feeling of accomplishment, and your encouraging words fill me with joy. I am also grateful for the support of other bloggers. Here are links to reviews of my book on Tiny House Blog and Tiny House Talk as well as some link love from Rowdy Kittens. Thanks, guys! Ella was sitting in the garden planting seeds when she said, “Mommy, remember when we didn’t have a fence around the garden?” I smiled at her sitting there in the purple hat she found at a Roanoke yard sale. She is so good at keeping me present and helping me appreciate my life. “Yeah, I remember that. The...
Read MoreMy Book is on Amazon! Coming Home: Letters from a Tiny House
Today is April 3rd. I marked this day on my calendar a couple of months ago as the day I would launch my book. I picked April 3rd because it is an auspicious day for our family. I birthed our first child, Ella, on this day 10 years ago, and 6 years ago on this day, we opened our dream restaurant, New Day Cafe. April 3rd is a good day for new beginnings like birth, New Days and new books. In late February, when there was snow on the ground, I slipped on the ice moving laundry from the washing machine in the shed up the hill to the dryer in the shed behind the tiny house. As I lay there staring at the starts, that voice–you know the one–that crusty inner...
Read MoreAnd We’re Legal! A Certificate of Occupancy for our Tiny House
This is the third and last post in my series about our interactions with our local building inspector and the steps we took to get a Certificate of Occupancy thereby making our tiny house a legal single-family dwelling. Read the first post here and the second post here. Andrew and Crystal Odom are seeking legal status in their North Carolina home. Good news over there, too! Finding an engineer was like a scavenger hunt. I like those. We started by asking for referrals from everyone we know who is remotely connected with building and design. We called folks who gave us more referrals. Since it was the week between Christmas and New Year’s, we left a lot of...
Read MoreOur Path to a Legal Tiny House
This the second post in my series about our interactions with our local building inspector and the steps we took to get a Certificate of Occupancy thereby making our tiny house a legal single-family dwelling. Read the first part of the story here. This post is a compilation of excerpts from my weekly letters on December 23, 2012 and December 30, 2012. “It takes courage to put ourselves out on the page, but it is better to be in reality than in denial. Reality is a place to start something. Denial is a place where something is already going on that we do not want to see and be a part of even though we are.” - Julia Cameron, The Sound of...
Read MoreMy Worst Tiny House Fear: Being Told I Can’t Legally Live Here
This post is a compilation of excerpts from my weekly letters during the time between December 2, 2012 and January 27, 2013. I’ve been quiet on the blog lately, because the past six weeks have been scary and hard. I am sharing publicly now, because we’ve made it through and everything is okay. Thanks to my weekly letter subscribers, I had a safe place to share these feelings while they were raw. I’m not one to keep you hanging in worry, so I’ll spoil the story now: We were found in violation of the Universal Statewide Building Code because we didn’t get a building permit to build our tiny house. The code in Virginia puts any...
Read MoreEmotional Learning Helps Children and Parents Get to the Heart of Connection
Please help me help keep Social Emotional Learning in my local community. There’s no denying it; living tiny with kids is challenging. But isn’t challenge what forces us to grow? We have grown tremendously as the tight quarters challenge us to find a way to thrive in this space. Social Emotional Learning (SEL) has been the key to our success. I’ve shared about my friend Kari’s SEL music program at Ella and Archer’s school before. We are blessed to have her guidance as we learn this way of connecting with each other. In order for Kari to continue bringing this much-needed program to our rural community, she’s turned to crowd funding....
Read MoreMerry Christmas
What an amazing journey 2012 has been—from the darkness and depression I experienced in January to flying to New York City to share our tiny house with a national TV audience in April, to a summer full of planting, harvesting, and canning to a glorious fall and a leap of faith. Even though so much has changed in 2012, one thing has been consistent: every Sunday, I sat down to reflect on my week, synthesized my experience into some sort of lesson, and sent an email to my letter subscribers. I have been working on my first e-book–a compilation of these weekly letters and photographs. It is exciting and scary to think about sending these words out into the world,...
Read MoreMy book is now available on Amazon! Click the image to learn more. We appreciate your support!
Want a tiny home?
Contact us to start the journey!
Recent Comments