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.

Karl contemplates the size of this Granddaddy.

Family Day has gotten us through many difficult times. During the time of our restaurant, New Day Cafe, we closed on Mondays and  made a point to do something fun every Monday–Family Day.

Operating a restaurant was grueling. Karl worked 80 hour weeks. I tried to keep up with the house and kids and manage the restaurant. I would not look at it as a great time for our family, but yesterday on Family Day, Ella said, “We had so much fun in Florida. We had Family Day every week and did such fun things.” She didn’t remember the long hours or the dirty house or the stressed out parents. She remembered the fun we had on Family Day.

It was a light bulb moment for me. We can navigate the hardest of times and still keep a sense of joy when we have traditions like Family Day or family dinner or family tickle fights. These are the moments that stick.

Yesterday, we climbed rocks and watched water rush down a mountain creek. We wound our way down Hwy 8 to a little Mexican Restaurant and ate too much. We laughed and managed to spend the entire day in the company of each other.

That’s what sticks.

Now that's a creek!

Super Twin Powers Activate

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 working so hard to make it happen.

I wrote her back and told her the term family seat intrigued me. I told her that I find many folks have lost touch with the sense of place. Her response was:

I never realized so many people have lost a sense of place .  A lot of the kids growing up today have never really truly experienced a sense of place and with so much divorce and moving about they just do not know what it is. I read a lot of genealogy and I kept coming across that word. I used to remember a great-aunt using the term family seat. She was adamant that we never sell our land, and I’m glad we listened. Another thing she always used to say is your land is your wealth–always keep it. I really never knew what she meant ’til I  was much older. It made great sense with this economy. Like you guys are doing you picked up and came to a piece of land. You live small in a small house, but the land is your home. You can grow part of your food,  live and build your house.

I share this bit of correspondence with you because what Virginia brings up is so important. Knowing our place is important. It gives meaning to our lives and instills a deep care for the land.

I hope we can keep our family seat right here. I want my kids and their kids and their kids to sink their fingers into this soil I cultivate. I want them to taste the fruits of our labor.

Where is your family seat? Where would it be if you chose the spot? Any tradition you build to create a bond with the land is a good start. Maybe camping in the same spot every year, or hiking the same trails, or learning the names of the trees in your yard–maybe you already have a deep sense of place–tell us, what does that mean to you?

I’m one of the kids Virginia talked about. I moved a lot growing up and didn’t have a clear sense of place, but I’m building it now. My friend and fellow blogger, Fred First said in his recent TEDx talk, “Home is a place where you consciously choose to grow your roots.” So even though I’ve lived in many places. I’m home now.

Maybe we’re even building a family seat.

Second floor on the big house

The Brassica are growing fast

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 bed for little while watching the light of daybreak. I told a friend that it was most definitely a summer daybreak, and then I came down and went off the deck and the back porch and smelled the air and looked around and one could tell it was going to be a great morning –maybe a storm in the afternoon. There are millions of people who never pay attention to something like that and the really sad part: these same people are not teaching their children to pay attention to something like that. My mother taught me that ritual as a way to set the day in your mind. Get your flow and you will be just fine.

The rooster crows as I move seedlings out of the shed. I write in my head as I walk the path to let the chickens and ducks out for the day. The words flow out of my hose as I water the garden and the sun dances through the new green leaves. The wind wakes the forest. I want to slow the morning down to a slow nothing and walk quietly into my day. I hear bird songs that I can’t name. Back in my office, chickadee wings flutter off from the window feeder. The tasks of the day arrive and I try to ease into the work, to hold onto this rustling wind of daybreak.

Daybreak from Our Future Bedroom

The sheds are an important part of our daily lives, making our tiny home function and giving us a place to keep stuff we still use but don’t need in the house.

If you wonder how on earth we can live in this way, then the answer is “the sheds.”

Pictured below are the sheds that support our tiny house. The second photo is a collage I made over a year ago, but the sheds are the same. The shed up the hill is sided with local hemlock and is 10′x 10′. It houses our washing machine and pressure tank for the well as well as camping gear, tools, canned goods, canning tools, potatoes, chicken feed, and Christmas decorations. It even housed our chicks, ducklings and seedlings this winter. The shed behind the house is a salvaged walk-in cooler. It houses the dryer (which we use in winter) as well as baking pans, large pots, a vacuum cleaner, and arts and craft supplies. You will notice that the big house is missing from the image on the bottom right. Amazing changes have happened on our property in a year and a half!

Be well. Be present. Enjoy each other.

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:

1. Clothes that are out of season, but still useful. These go into storage bins which we keep in the shed.
2. Clothes that we’ve either out grown or worn out. This pile gets separated again:
• Clothes still suitable for donation. I take these to our local thrift store or hang on to them for clothing swaps.
• Clothes not suitable for donation become napkins, dish rags or fabric for other projects.

This is Ella's lunch bag. I made it from her old clothes that were too stained for donation.

Switching over our seasonal wardrobes is something I dread, but once it’s done I’m really glad. I relabel all clothing bins, and everything is super-organized. It always feels good to get rid of stuff we don’t need.

The whole house takes a deep breath. We are ready for the warm weather!

New labels--all ready for spring and summer.

Great Clothing Roundup--spring

]]> http://tinyhousefamily.com/2013/05/11/great-clothing-roundup/feed/ 7 http://tinyhousefamily.com/2013/05/10/my-love-affair-with-cardboard/ http://tinyhousefamily.com/2013/05/10/my-love-affair-with-cardboard/#comments Fri, 10 May 2013 15:04:28 +0000 Mama http://tinyhousefamily.com/?p=1015

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. Oh joy! You might laugh at me, but I stopped everything and took pictures the first time I saw earthworms in the garden.

This brings me to cardboard. I’ve recently fallen in love with this free and plentiful resource for use in gardening and landscaping.

Last year, I injured my fingers yanking at weeds all summer. My pathways and then my beds exploded with weeds. It got so bad, and my fingers hurt so much, that I stopped pulling them altogether.

This year, I decided to put major effort into a new (to me) approach that was working in my friends’ gardens–sheet mulch, a popular permaculture gardening technique. It’s so easy and effective, I wish I’d thought of it a long time ago.

How I Sheet Mulch My Garden Paths (The article I linked to above has more technical details.)

1. Lay cardboard on the pathway. Remove all tape from the cardboard.
2. Weigh it down with rocks. If you are going to immediately cover it with mulch, then skip this step.
3. Cover cardboard with four or more inches of mulch.  I’ve used free wood chips from Asplundh, a company that clears trees from the power lines. They dump the chips and allow the community to load it up for free. Check your local recycling center or landfill to see about free mulch. I also use leaves which decompose into a lovely black layer.
4. The cardboard breaks down and becomes easy to puncture, so you can poke holes to insert plants where ever you want.
5. My plan is to let the pathways breakdown and then incorporate that matter into the beds.

• There are more steps to this process, if you want to create a bed right off. I’ll get to those as time goes on.

1. Earthworms started showing up last year, and this year they are so plentiful that one crawled into my sandal when I was working out there yesterday. Freaky, but exciting!
2. The soil under the sheet mulch is amazingly fluffy–those earthworms have been busy.
3. The garden is retaining more moisture. Since the paths are covered in such thick mulch, the moisture is also staying in the beds.
4. There are no weeds in my pathways.
5. Places where I spread wood chips without first laying down cardboard are already growing weeds–so the cardboard is a very effective weed barrier.

Here’s to free and effective renewable resources! Cardboard, I love you.

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 House. We did a big brain-dump and it dislodged some great ideas. I certainly see the value of having a coach. It’s so easy to get lost in the trees or be like the water in the big house–not able to find the drain-hole. Having someone to bounce ideas off is invaluable. Among many other suggestions, she said, “I think it’s actually easier to commit to a more regular schedule with a blog. Maybe even every day because it becomes a habit.” For a blogger who is lucky to get a post out every two weeks–this is huge!

My mind and heart see everything as inner-connected. Because of that, I want to deliver the entire universe as I see it, but I can’t get it out the drain hole.

So, what if I start today with a commitment to writing on the blog everyday!? The trickle will keep the ideas flowing, and help me learn about and deliver the information you seek. I’m making this commitment public as a personal challenge.

A request…

My mother-in-law is in the hospital.

We are asking for you to keep her and our family in your thoughts and prayers.

Thank you.

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 deer came in and ate my peas and sweet potatoes. We went straight to tractor supply and bought the fence material.”

Archer was on the other side of the fence totally in love with his chicks and ducks. One by one he picked them up and held them to his chest, then held his hands out and let them flutter off. I never imagined we’d have 19 chickens and 6 ducks but we do. Archer says he wants to farm. It’s heartwarming to see him with his animals.

Last week, in the snow, Karl and I walked up into the woods and looked down on the little homestead. He grabbed my shoulders and pointed me at the big house. “Look what we’re doing. Look how far we’ve come.” He remembered his Dad. “That’s one thing my dad taught me. Sometimes, you gotta step back and admire your work.”

We were under the giant white oak–I looked up to take in the season–still no sign of leaves, but somewhere in there she’s doing the inner work–getting ready to leaf out.

I snapped a picture and then got a text. It was from my cousin, Danny. “I love the book so far. Super proud, for sure.”

“Karl, I did it! I really launched my book.”

“Of course you did.”

On Sunday we measured and cut the second story floor joists for the big house. Karl put them up (on his own–let’s hear it for Latvian ingenuity!) while I spread mulch and planted seeds.

We are moving  toward our dreams–one board, one seed, one book launch at a time.

It’s important to acknowledge how far you’ve come, even if it’s only a few inches. And, of course, the true mark of success is standing present and aware for the moments of your life.

What are you moving toward? What small signs of progress can you detect? Share in the comment section!

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 critic–spoke loudly, what do you think you are doing? Why would anyone want to read about your mundane life? I sat frozen, and I’m sure you could tell.

The blog has been silent for a while now, but I haven’t been totally still. I’ve been editing and birthing this book into the world. It is here–just in time for spring and the letting go I see all around me–the chicks emerge from their eggs, the seedlings crack out of their seed pods, and the ground thaws. We are so much a part of the nature around us. Never have I known this so intimately as I do now, after spending this cold and dark winter in the tiny house. But alas! It’s spring.

I imagine my book flying through the air like these sweet birds who’ve returned to my window to eat sunflower seeds. I’m awed by and grateful for this opportunity we all have to share honestly person to person. Who would have imagined that one could publish like this even 10 years ago!? This opportunity we have to really help each other inspires me. So, I’m asking you to help my family by buying my book, Coming Home: Letters from a Tiny House. In turn, I hope it inspires you to come home to your best life!

Thank you thank you thank you for the love and encouragement. WE really can build a new world with the choices we make every day. So much love. xo

Here is a little excerpt from the book’s introduction:

Through my letters, I expose my own vulnerabilities, fears, desires, and dreams. I don’t pretend to have the answers, although reading my letters may lead you to your own answers.

Life in the tiny house is still life and full of mundane activities like washing dishes, doing laundry, scrubbing the toilet, cooking, eating, entertaining, caring for kids, and sleeping. It’s true; there’s an outward requirement to fitting in a tiny house: downsize your belongings to only the most necessary. That’s clear at the onset. We all know how to get rid of stuff. Most likely, you’ve done that your whole adult life.

What wasn’t clear at the onset was the internal requirement to fitting in to a tiny house; the mechanics of emotion, self-acceptance, and communication were something I didn’t fully anticipate.

Our family has gained much from our time in the tiny house: namely a deep connection to ourselves and each other. We’re a stubborn bunch. There are loud moments when we’re neither listening to nor respecting each other. There have been awful moments when we didn’t think we could take another minute of living in such close quarters, but those moments served to propel us into a study of nonviolent communication and mindfulness practice. Archer said it best after closing his eyes and listening to a chime while breathing deep. “I feel a lot of space.” There is infinite space available to us if we know how to turn within to find home.

I present my weekly letters as a study of one family’s journey to understand our basic needs—how we stripped away everything else and found joy.