My Interview with Ethan of the Tiny House Lifestyle Podcast

Ethan Waldman did me the honor of interviewing me. I had followed Ethan for some time as he devolped his informative blogging about the many flavors of tiny house living. So when he asked for stories from people who had bought a partially built rig and what the advantages of outfitting a tiny house at this stage offered, I wrote to him my answer and offered to give an interview. We did not end up focusing on this aspect of my tiny house experience, but on other aspects I had created that was unique to my set-up. It was interesting to see what such an expert on the lifestyle found unique in mine. He also gave a very nice presentation on his podcast page with pictures he chose from this blog. Have a look and listen. https://www.thetinyhouse.net/amanda-kovattana/

Power and Refrigeration

My solar power system has stood me in good stead for three years now, though the battery pack is fading. If the sun doesn’t shine I may not have power the next day. I had to replace both the inverter and the controller along the way. I got the exact same components as I had before, but when the inverter died again, after a little over two years, I decided to look for something better. My freezer had also died the month before causing me to question why. My old inverter was a modified sine wave model and this might have had an impact on shortening the life of the freezer, so I went looking for a pure sine wave model among all the cheaper Chinese imports. It took me an entire evening until midnight to read all the reviews and watch YouTubers give their opinion until I found and settled on a beefy looking Xijia 3200 watt inverter with four sockets. Thank you to all the geek brothers out there reviewing equipment in such detail.

My next project will be replacing the battery pack. I am reluctant to go to lithium even though they are supposed to last longer. I worry about all the lithium being strip mined in Africa. We, at least, seem to have lots of lead which can be recovered. I do have a couple of portable lithium battery packs to tide me over and a couple of strings of Christmas lights I plug into the packs for on board lighting. As long as I have power for my computer and modem I can remain in residence, it doesn’t matter if the freezer isn’t running for a night. It just becomes a fridge temporarily. I can’t keep ice-cream in it, but otherwise can live with it. I am still able to get ice from it for my cooler. 

In the summer when I eat more salads I keep lettuce and other veggies in a vegibag that I keep wet. This is basically a Terry cloth bag that is meant to be used in the fridge, but it will keep food fine if hung inside the tiny house or kept hanging up in a net shopping bag.

I’ve become a lot more relaxed about storing food. As long as the temperature in the cooler is 50° or less its cool enough to keep food from going bad, despite the dire warning on my temperature gage. In the past people kept their food cool by floating containers such as mason jars full of food in a stream. They would also dig underground chambers called root cellars to store food longterm. I have has containers of yogurt grow a bit of mold in the summer and the cheese too, but otherwise no serious food harm was manifested.

Heating and Cooling

One of the reasons I wanted to live in a tiny house was to find out what such a lifestyle would teach me. What I learned is that we don’t ask much of ourselves when it comes to external temperatures. We are used to a controlled household temperature of 68°. I heat my house with my buddy heater only when I really feel the cold. I upgraded from the (Little Buddy because the button on the Little Buddy was so hard to hold down with just my thumb.) By waiting until this point I have taught myself how to keep warm by putting on more clothes, by always wearing a warm hat, by drinking hot tea and insulating my hammock. My body also becomes acclimated to the cold and I find that I don’t have to heat the house until the temperature drops down to the mid ‘50s. And when I’m sleeping I’m fine under the covers down to 49°. 

I have also kept up with using my flower pot heater. It dries out the air, is a nice hand warmer, offers a warm glow as a night light and seems to keep the temperature from dropping as quickly once I turn off my buddy heater. I just let the candles burn all night. I made my own jar candles in my solar oven, melting down my collection of used candles that clients and friends would give me. When I finally exhausted this source, I upgraded to buying bags of soy wax. The soy wax burns nicely with much less soot so it keeps the house from getting so dusty. The homemade candles stay lit better than the votives I could buy because the wick I use is thicker. I can make candles during the summer in my solar oven or by boiling water on the stove at my support house. 

In the summer, temperatures have gotten hotter too. I got myself a little fan and a spray bottle. Also a large polyester scarf I use when traveling worked very well to turn myself into a swamp cooler. I just got it wet, wrung it out and threw it over my head. The fan blowing on me created the cooling effect.

Off-Grid Laundry

During the pandemic lockdown, I had limited access to a support house, so I developed my tiny house laundry facility. It is fun to do laundry on a hot day. Plus you can reuse the water for thirsty plants. I tried a lot of different clothes washing equipment before I found what worked for hand washing. The hand crank tumbling washer called a WonderWash did not impress me though it looked good in the catalog. It was too complicated to get water hot enough to create pressure in the chamber The lid had to be screwed on and off which was not really worth the effort for this supposed pressurized effect. It didn’t hold very much and had to be emptied carefully so water wouldn’t run all over the counter. I also tried a washboard, but that was time consuming to apply to every item individually so I keep a small glass one for collars and cuffs. What did work was the plunger style hand washer made from galvanized metal, but the metal would rust if it wasn’t dried carefully and mine would fall off the handle regularly. Finally someone thought to make a plastic version with a firmly attached handle and that is what I use for agitation in a five gallon bucket. I mostly soak the clothes in half a bucket of water with the soap and give it a plunge or two every time I walk by as I’m doing other things. I save that water for another load and transfer the clothes to another five gallon bucket to rinse in a bit more water so the clothes can move freely. I do about three rinses.

For wringing out wet clothes, I loved the hand crank vintage rolling dryers that pressed the water from your clothes, but it’s hard to use. It really takes two pairs of hands. One to feed the clothes into the mangler and one to crank the clothes through, plus it took quite a bit of strength and didn’t really wring the clothes out as much as I would’ve liked for the effort. I sold mine back to bay.

As I browsed for ideas I tried the double bucket system for the DIY savvy. One bucket I drilled full of holes. That’s where you put your dripping wet clothes. Then the second bucket is put into the first bucket and by sitting on this second bucket I could squeeze quite a lot of water from the clothes. I had a shallow garden trug to put the bucket in so I could keep the bucket clean and save the water that was wrung out.

I also found that the Asian market really had this down for apartment dwellers with a hand crank spin dryer. It works a lot like a salad spinner. I got myself one of these nifty machines and got my workout pulling on the handles to operate the spinning mechanism. The clothes came out dryer than they did from the old washing machine at my mothers. 

A vintage style drying rack was my go to for many years, but when I set it up outside a strong wind could blow it over. I could weight it down, but I found something else. A bungee corded cargo net for strapping luggage onto the roof of your car could be stretched from tree limbs and weighted down with lengths of pipe. Then I just hung my socks and underwear in the holes of the netting. Shirts and pants I dried on hangers I could hang in the tree. It was easier to store than a folding rack too. All the equipment could be stashed in a big storage box.

I could also iron clothes inside the tiny house with a small ironing board I could lay on top of my pull out cutting table. I used a travel iron. When you have to go to this much trouble to clean your clothes you tend to wear the same clothes quite a bit more. Thus having one's own labor invested automatically reduced the tendency to use water and energy. 

The Dtao of Poop Update

Of all the aspects of my tiny house living that people are most curious about, longterm, is my composting toilet. Yes, I am still using the Bokashi fermenting system to process my poop. It works great. I really only have to process it every six weeks or so. I have devised a routine and have set up a poop processing station here at my current location.

The usual practice is to bury the contents in a trench in the ground. Curiously one of the effects of this burial is that for a month or so nothing grows where it was buried. Thus it is an effective weed killer. I think the acidity of the fermentation is what does it. Nowadays I seldom dig a trench because I’ve run out of places where I can dig as I have more of my garden laid out. Also in the summer months the ground is so dried out, it is too hard to dig into the ground. So I get help from the gophers. Every week I collect the soil from their mounds in a bucket and take it to my composting station to use as a cover. 

For processing the poop I use an old plastic tub, the kind with rope handles. I made a few holes in the bottom and put it under an oak tree where any liquid can drain into the ground and into the leaf litter. In fact the contents of the bucket is mostly liquid so I pour off the liquid first into a large planting pot which allows the liquid to flow though the drainage holes in several different directions at once. What is left in the bottom is a sludge I put into the tub. But first I cover the bottom of the tub with a layer of the gopher soil to give the sludge something to work with. As I pour I stop to add more soil until the sludge is totally mixed with soil and is no longer visible to the eye. 

All that is left to do is to rinse out the bucket. I also have a dedicated brush to scrub the inside a bit so I have a nice clean bucket to take back into the house. I put two gallons of rainwater from my rain catchment system into the bucket and I’m back in business. 

I leave the poop in the processing tub alone for a couple of weeks at least. The resulting soil is very nutritious for plants. You cannot detect any poop in it all. I use it to refresh the soil in my planter boxes between seasons or spread it over the hillside on top of the grass during the late summer when all the grass is dead and cut down. In terms of soil restoration I am doing what a herd of cows would be doing as they graze a pasture. 

I also add urine to the soil on a regular basis. The urine tank needs to be emptied every two or three days. I empty the tank into a three gallon bucket inside the house. Then I pour some into a watering can and dilute it with three or four times the water. In the summer months this is how I water my plants. I don’t use any urine water where I’ve planted radishes as it keeps the radishes from forming a bulb. I learned this from another off-grid homesteader. The rest of the garden does great with this ongoing drink of nutrients. 

For the winter months during heavy rains I have dug a trench alongside my garden beds. I filled the trench with manure from the pile across the street where my neighbor, who keeps a horse, has helpfully created such a pile to offer to gardeners. This trench is where I pour undiluted urine and diswhashing water when it rains or I have excess water. Storing water in the soil is what we want to do to contribute to the rain cycle and soil restoration. 

I also ferment urine for it has many uses as a cleaner when it becomes ammonia. This ammonia works for cleaning the shower pan in my tiny house. I have also used it to soak my clothes when doing laundry. It helps to lift the ring around the collar when I go to scrub it with Dr. Bronner’s liquid soap. I have even washed out a paintbrush with urine and liquid soap. A paintbrush I use with wood preservative. To find out more about my discoveries with urine and it’s many uses for healing and personal care, check out my book The Girls' Guide To Off Grid Living. 

My Off Grid Living Memoir Published!

During the pandemic lockdown I lived in my tiny house full time which allowed me to explore more options in tiny house living such as doing laundry, showering or more to the point not showering, gardening and cooking in my one burner kitchen. I was surprised at how self-sufficient I could be. I even had entertainment using my laptop to play DVDs onto a larger external monitor that I could view while lying in my hammock. But most of all the lockdown year was an opportunity to finish my book. 

I hadn’t intended to write another memoir, my first, Diamonds In My Pocket having been well received by friends and colleagues if not fully appreciated by family (except for my mother who was very proud of the book). I was thinking to write a pamphlet about how to make your own composting toilet and manage the composting part of it, but YouTube was best for such DIY projects. I didn’t want to give up entirely on writing a book and it occurred to me that a more interesting story could be written about why a woman would want to design a life around living with a composting toilet. When a favorite teacher announced she was going to give a memoir writing class, I signed up and thus had the help of a supportive group of women who let me know if my topics were compelling enough to merit a book.

Once I got started I found that the desire to go off-grid was an incremental journey that brought forth stories going back to my first consciousness of my own thoughts as a largely free range child growing up in Thailand when it was not quite a fully industrialized country. The influences of a culture that sustained itself on so much less consumption than the one I would immigrate to, helped me retain this knowledge of how things could be done much more simply well into my adult life. The journey also offered a chance to investigate parts of my life I had refused to touch until now as society itself nudged me off the mainstream and into the American gay subculture. So much did my sexuality inform my life along with my spiritual quests and my thirst to understand how the world worked, that eventually every aspect of my life had veered off the conventional way of doing things. Moving into a tiny house tipped it over the edge completely and provided more details and practical aspects of my unconventional life.

It took me until the middle of 2022 to finish the book and publish it independently which was an off-grid project in itself and required that I learn how to use book publishing software. This took months and prompted a computer upgrade. I still had my graphic design skills to help me design the book and get a dynamic cover on it. I didn’t fuss with it too much. It didn’t have to be the best designed book. It just had to look professional. I also had a great deal of help proofreading the book which will spare the reader the distraction of my negligent punctuation. I was very pleased that I had come so far and having accomplished such a feat, I could envision many more books I wanted to produce just to leave a legacy of all that I had learned. It made me quite proud, too, that having witnessed so much history of the Bay Area, the emerging gay culture and the technological changes that took place I had captured a piece of local history. My love of film and movie theaters, in particular, as I worked as a projectionist during the transitional years when home video impacted this industry was also a significant part of my story.

The tiny house thus became the perfect writing retreat, sheltering me from the demands of the outside world. I named my publishing company after this blog, Tiny Red Desk Publishing. There are, now many accounts of people going off-grid mostly about logistics and the build, but rather short on character development. I often felt short changed; I was sure that there must be particular traits that would lead someone to seek such a life. My book is a long view with a deep dive into questioning how we live. It is also a woman’s journey, indirect, serendipitous and non-linear, with lots of tangents influenced by the people I met and loved. My early readers have found it to be a satisfying read and some have been quite moved by it. I am confident it will find its audience. You can buy the book in both hard copy and digital at https://www.amazon.com/dp/1093980893?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860

Hardscaping and Homesteading

My new site presented a lot of challenges in that it was a virgin hillside full of weeds. And in the winter the mud. So my first order of business was to lay stepping stones and provide cement blocks as boot scrapers. I then discovered a pile of shredded wood chips at the bottom of the property that I was free to use. Pushing them up the steep hill provided me with leg strengthening exercise.

I also wanted to create a garden and had seeded a semi-circle of fava beans just to see what would happen to them. Those that survived the slugs provided a row of beans that was also in effect a fence. The gophers bit through one bean stalk and left the rest alone. The deer didn't seem to like them either. I also had plants I brought from my previous space, agave succulents mostly and a bucket of soil in which I had mixed bokashi poop mix. This bucket provided me with a brace of tomato seedlings and I decided to build a planter of the scrap redwood cut-offs I had been saving from the rebuilding of my mother's deck a few years ago.

The planter was a mathematical challenge so I eyeballed it and was pleased with the resulting planter tower reinforced with hardware cloth on the bottom to ward off gophers. Having fended off the gophers I also put up netting to fend off the deer. As the fava beans came to maturity I seeded some scarlet runner beans which are barely making it through the slug fest. In my hopes I took out some landscaping poles I had long had in storage and lashed together a bean teepee.

My gardening attempts were proving to be a wonderful pastime during this stay at home quarantine, giving me something to look forward to checking on every morning as I monitored the gopher activity and collected the soil they mounded up. It took over ten buckets of this collected soil to fill my planter. I filled the planter with tomato seedlings and had more bean seedlings of another variety and assorted other seedlings in my homemade newspaper pots.

These pots turned out to be a good choice. The seedlings thrived in them and their roots easily found their way out of the bottom of the bots so were not root bound.

I disassembled the toilet after months of looking at it as a discarded toilet as a note of irony from living with a composting toilet. It had come out of my landlord's bathroom when he remodeled.

The upturned toilet had a certain sculptural kneeling temple elephant look to it.

Before the ground could dry up much more I decided to mulch the patio area in front of the tiny house where my battery bank lived thinking to plant camomile between the pavers, but the ground was already too hard for much more than one.










I also got it into my head that I would recycle all the tree clippings from my fire maintenance chores last fall by incorporating them into a hugelklutur bed which I dug out on contour just above the incline of my field. Cutting up all the little branches was time consuming, but was a meditative activity and it was done in a couple of days. This activity also allowed me to get to know the neighbors as they walked by with their dogs on this busy corner. One even remembered he'd seen me on TV. And another complemented me on my homebuilt planter tower. Just about everybody has made me feel at home in this mountain retreat full of DIY homesteading sorts.

With all this activity I was exhausted, but happy wth my plant companions.