Tiny Houses in Portland

Tiny Houses in Portland

As I mentioned in my last post, I was in the Pacific Northwest at the end of last year. One of the stops was to Portland, Oregon, which is widely known for its big Tiny House community. But when I heard that there are about 6000 Tiny Houses in that area, I was really surprised about the number. Before I had come to Portland, I wasn’t aware, of how big that Tiny House Movement in the U.S. really is. There are two or three different regular shows on TV covering that topic, from following a person or family in their journey to get their very custom-fit amazing Tiny House, to realtors specialized in “Tiny”, looking for tiny and small houses to buy. 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.

(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

Move your ass!

Move your ass!

Even though I wrote before that I needed the toilet to be fully functioning for me to move in, the whole process of building my toilet overlapped with moving in, since I just couldn’t wait any longer. So the big question was: What do you really need to live?

Well, “need” is defined a little different by each person at each point in time. But since I experienced that being too radical or fast in certain steps of a transformation can turn me off the path completely, I did “allow” myself to stretch the meaning of “need”. read more