Tom and I are not the only residents of the Mustard Yellow House. With us are our two little dogs, Connor and Phoebe. Life for them, in the past 10 months, has been continual change.
Phoebe and Connor have claimed our new couch as their favourite place.
But you’d hardly know it. The happiest surprise of this whole tiny-house enterprise has been how well Connor and Phoebe have taken it in their tiny stride.
On my first night in our tiny house on wheels, I had a nightmare.
Like a lot of my weirdest dreams, it was set in a rundown house we lived in about a decade ago (though the house in the dreams never looks much like the actual house). In the dream, a woman had broken into the house and surprised Tom and me. Then other intruders emerged from cupboards and wardrobes and began saying mean things. I quarrelled with these people and grew angry.
Then I woke up in pain. The nightmare had made me lash out with my foot, and stub my toe on the ceiling.
(Actually the second toe. Tip: never Google images for “stubbed toe”. You will faint.
How often do you get to say that? Well, if you regularly stub your toe on the ceiling I don’t want to know the details, the point I’m making is that living in the tiny space of the Mustard Yellow House is testing my body in unusual ways. As it was bound to do — yet not as much as I feared.
Through the miracle of solar power our fridge now runs all the time, we can charge our devices, and our plugged-in modem gives us the internet.
Other things too, and we’re exploring the possibilities. This is only the second full day of solar power, after all.
One important thing I can do is run the PC during the day, which means I can write and work (and look for more work). Tonight we might try watching a movie, and see what that does to the battery.
Because our lives are now rather tied to the battery and the little percentage figure it sends to a monitor installed next to the bathroom door. Right now the percentage is 100, which is a nice figure, but of course it falls as we use more power and rises the next day with the sun. (more…)
I type this blog post from the Mustard Yellow House, where Tom and I now reside. Yes! We’ve moved in! What a week it was, leading up to moving-in day. … Continue reading The Week Of Our Lives
It’s an obvious question, if wordy: Why would Tom and I shed our books and microwave and 50-inch TV along with most of our possessions and our connection to modern sewerage in order to live in a 23-square-metre house-on-wheels in a New Zealand paddock?
One reason why I haven’t explained this yet is that I thought you, my 19 gentle readers, would prefer to see pictures of the house. Another reason is that I lost track, because for at least a year, I have NOT asked myself this question.
I’ve been signed up to the plan, certain through all the unpredictabilities that this was a good and smart thing to do. I’ve done the thinking, made my peace with it and put all my heart into it.
So to explain our motivations, I have to step back and remember the reasons. Here they are, in no reliable kind of order. (more…)
Our tiny house on wheels was in place. The next step was to take away its wobble. Because there it was, standing only on its wheels, and if you moved … Continue reading Stilling The Tiny House Wobble
Yesterday I waited by State Highway 1 at the entrance to Makahuri for a special moment: my first glimpse of our tiny house on the move, and its arrival at its (and our) new home.
The house and its towing Mazda BT-50, with Jack at the wheel, left Carterton at 2.30pm. At the foot of the Rimutaka range, Jack stopped for a safety check before crossing the mountains…
Then he followed this route — the blue line from Carterton but then the route that’s marked as 1 minute faster (the alternative would have been impossibly narrow and winding)…
