food for your thoughts

food for your thoughts

Climate change is a very talked about subject. What can we do? What should we stop doing? Many people have all kinds of lists as an answer to “stop” or rather slow down the process. But almost everyone thinks that humans can and have to do this alone, because we’re the most intelligent (and maybe also because we caused most of it). I want to share two videos that show in a simple way, that the intelligence of the brain might not be relevant in helping the cause, that it might even be counterproductive: read more

The Great Turning

The Great Turning

A few weeks ago I travelled to the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. where I happened upon a community fair by students of Antioch University Seattle. It was the final project of their class that is called The Great Turning, based on topics covered in a book by Joanna Macy called Coming Back to Life. I had heard of the fair only a week before, after talking to Michael Withey from Micro Community Concepts in Portland, Oregon. Eventhough I didn’t know it before, this place was right where I needed to be. read more

It’s party time!

It’s party time!

As I mentioned in my last entry , I finished my tiny house mostly because I set myself a deadline. Aside from the final result, this really shows how good I work with a deadline and a little pressure ;-). And it wasn’t just a random deadline.. It was the date of my (tiny) house warming party!

Over the years I spent some time with project lifecycles and especially systems like the one in Dragon Dreaming and the natural cycles of the medicine wheel resonated with me. Within Dragon Dreaming, there are four recurring phases in the cycle: read more

Tiny House update – kitchen – bathroom – I’m finished!!

Tiny House update – kitchen – bathroom – I’m finished!!

My tiny house project was hibernating for a while. But when I decided to put a deadline on finishing it, the motivation came back and rebooted everything! The big parts that were missing were the kitchen and the bathroom.

The kitchen

For the kitchen I wanted to have at least a small area where I could cut or otherwise temporarily place ingredients, etc. I had a few different ideas of accomplishing it, most of them needing a lot of building material and time and energy, because I would build most of the rack myself. While thinking about how to get the wood for building it and how this could actually be created, I had an idea that was so much easier. I didn’t have to build anything, just put an existing cupboard, an IKEA rack and some small trays together, and voilà. That’s how it looks now: read more

Home is where my heart is

Home is where my heart is

I’ve been asking myself: When does a house become a home? – Well, I found the answer in an old folk song (probably from the Natives of North America, but I never verified it):

I’ve been travelling a day,
I’ve been travelling a year,
I’ve been travelling a lifetime,
to find my way home.

Home, is where my heart is
Home, is where my heart is
Home, is where my heart is,
My heart is my home.

My heart IS my home, but since I put so much of my heart into my little house, it is now also part of my home. My home also includes people I call family and dear friends, so I’ll probably never be truly homeless, but since I moved in, I do feel like I’ve come home. Being in my tiny house feels like a warm hug by a loved one. Not perfect by outside standards, but perfect in my eyes, including all its imperfections. read more

connecting the dots

connecting the dots

A while ago a friend of mine told me about an interesting method of raising children that was developed by the Hungarian pediatrician Emmi Pikler. One of the main principles is to not “help” the child to get into positions or places that it couldn’t reach on its own. So for example if you put a baby in a sitting position before it can get there on its own, it will feel insecure and won’t know how to get out of that position and probably experience stress. But if you find the patience to wait until it gets there on its own, it will be much more stable and also feel pride to have accepted the challenge and succeeded. read more

(almost) running water

(almost) running water

To get myself some luxury in my tiny house, the next thing on my bucket list was to build a rack for the sink. The idea was to have some kind of canister for water storage connected to a tap, the sink, and a bucket below to catch the greywater. My goal was to produce a system that was as simple as possible while still serving all the needs I had.

This was the enamel sink I found on the internet months ago and fell in love right away. perfect size (38×40 cm), perfect weight, and most importantly: exactly the style that I was looking for. I didn’t want plastic because that’s just cheap, doesn’t look good and … well I don’t really have to list all the reasons why this just isn’t an option. Ceramic would have been okay, but it’s extremely heavy and didn’t fit into my tiny house stylistically. Metal wouldn’t have been perfect, but was the only other option I could live with, but luckily didn’t have to. The funny thing is, that the sink wasn’t only perfect for all the reasons I already mentionned, but it was also the cheapest option, because the guy selling it had a few of them and didn’t know what to do with it. read more

It’s all down the drain… or is it?

Outhouse - Photocredit: unsplash.com/Amy Reed (@amybethreed)

Since I’ve been asked some questions about the composting toilet I built, about how it works and what’s the goal of it, I decided to share some of the research I’ve been doing. Warning: I will not sugarcoat this topic, so if you don’t want to read about shit, just stop reading.

So what’s the difference between the good old outhouse and a composting toilet?

The outhouse was – as the name suggests – outside, so the problem of it being smelly didn’t really exist or at least wasn’t a focus. You just dug a hole, put a “house” over it and used it until it was full. In the early days they probably just dug a different hole at some other place. Later on it was emptied regularly. read more