The Knife In The Shower The Dishes On Grass

The first months of living in the tiny house was a work in progress. Dishwashing continued to be a challenge as my dish rack did not quite hold utensils. And the drying mat it was attached to was looking a little grubby plus I didn't like the way it flopped over the toaster oven. 

Then at a thrift store I came across one of those European racks that look like a patch of grass. People mostly use such a design to dry baby bottles or small items, but for so little money I could give it a try. I pulled out my slide out extension to try it out, but later realized that it fit perfectly on top of my toaster oven and there it lives. 

I found I had a use for the slide out extension when I used my crock pot to cook up a batch of beans. I freeze them in containers that will fit easily into my cooler. In this picture you can also see where I hung my cast iron frying pan on the wall close to my stove which is in a drawer right beneath the crock pot pull out.

Tiny house designers like to put things on the wall with lots of brushed steel and magnets, but I didn't have that much wall space as it was taken up by shelving for my dishes. I put my cooking utensils into a mason jar and I was happy with my tray for eating utensils which lay at the back of the counter. I still needed a place to put my chef's knife. I spent some time thinking of nifty ways I could mount a single knife holder to my wall, but it didn't look right to have just one utensil on the wall so I grabbed my available magnets and temporarily attached the knife to the shower wall. The effect was somewhat macabre, but had a certain witty presence. I still haven't got around to gluing the magnets in place, but the arrangement would suffice.

Due to my diligence in measuring everything I planned to have in my kitchen I couldn't be happier with the shelving and storage. I did have my doubts about the storage cabinet where I kept my pots and pans because it was at floor level, but after several months of squatting to get at them I realized when I got to my karate studio that my leg strength had improved. Later I came across the books of Katy Bowman, a biomechanist, who pointed out how our lives were movement starved and I thanked my inner genius for having provided myself with extra movement nutrition!

Likewise the ladder to the loft gave my body a climbing exercise and I did not concern myself anymore with aging out of my tiny house due to this ladder. The five steps or so I must climb down in the middle of the night did not seem as daunting since there was plenty of ambient light from outside lights on the property and from the street. And as Katy Bowman pointed out the cliff dwellers who lived in their adobe dwellings could only access their houses via a ladder and continued to do so long into old age.

For a while I had a TV in my loft and my loft became my living room. I covered the bed with a queen size comforter I had on hand that had a nice homey pattern. I didn't like looking at all the noise of my clothes on hangers and wanted to hang a curtain across the rod. Then in a simplifying moment I realized the comforter was so much bigger than my mattress there was probably enough of it to reach up to the closet pole so I hung a couple of bulldog clips from the hangers at each end and clipped the comforter to the pole. As a final touch a client offered me her framed poster of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapter. It amused me to affix it to my ceiling and was just the right distance for studying this work of art.

This living space deeply comforted me now that I could entertain myself with free DVDs from the library. Then the TV broke and before I could buy another one I asked my ex if I could watch my movies at her house the nights she was gone. Eventually we started watching our favorite shows together and I offered to cook dinner, the more complex dishes I could not cook so easily in the tiny house. Soon I did not think about having my own TV anymore and my ex and I became better friends.

There were still problems with storage and access. When I sat at my desk my knees were crammed between my rolling file crate, which was also serving to hold my scanner, and the ottoman file box which also served as a purse podium. My scanner wasn't working with the new operating system and then I realized I didn't use it very much anyway so I moved it up into the loft and parked it in my closet. That allowed me to get rid of the rolling cart; the files I moved into smaller file boxes that I could store way at the back up against the wall under the desk. So the demands of space forced me to rethink my original desire to have the same desk I had in my old house.

And once I built my table for two I found I no longer needed to sit at my desk and simply left the chair on top of the desk and sat at my new table to use my laptop. One day I parked my laptop on the seat of the chair and realized I had made a standing desk. So I got rid of my external monitor and keyboard. This also solved the problem of getting by the chair all the time since it was now off the floor full time. And the area under the desk I could now store the shoes I wore everyday. I also spent a lot more time lying in my hammock as I wrote on my laptop.

As my life in the tiny house evolved I solved these small design problems, but sometimes the tiny house pushed me to other arrangements. It was too dark inside to really feel inviting for sewing plus it was cumbersome to move the sewing table out form under the stairs. So I didn't do any sewing. Then my ex who had been searching for months got a job which meant that her house was now available during the day so I moved my sewing machine back to her house. I was already walking our dogs half the week and now five days a week. By doing my sewing there too I could now keep the dogs company hanging out with them while sewing. I was doing the tiny house thing of improvising and finding through my network other places to do what I wanted to do. In this vein tiny house living is a kind of share economy. If you have something useful to offer you can trade for what you need.

House Beautiful?

After my dry run with Sheilagh putting the tiny house through its paces and living in it I realized I needed to address seating. Not just seating for dining, but for lounging around and entertaining. In my planning stage I was thinking hanging chairs and hammocks for their versatility. But now that I had been showing the house to visitors who were curious about my tiny house I acquired a desire to make the house more conventional in the sense that strangers looking in the door could see that it was a home and not a fishing shack. Something that would read "house" in the sense of cultural icons that represented what people could identify as a home in a magazine spread. This was the first time in my life that I had had so conventional a thought process. 

My conception of interior space and decor had run through more bohemian territory with witty references to convention. I had at one time lived with a housemate who brought with him an iron bathtub set up on pieces of lumber that we filled with cushions and used as a place to lie in and read. It was the most comfortable piece of furniture any of us had experienced. When he moved into his own house taking his "couch" with him, I recreated the bathtub couch and being unable to find claw feet set it up on galvanized plumbing pipe connectors which I painted to look like elephant feet.

Our house in Thailand had a wide bench with Danish modern legs. Upholstered in turquoise Chiangmai cotton and furnished with throw pillows it had been my mother's idea of seating. When I took possession of it I just had to replace the worn out cushions. In the same house we also had one of those hanging rattan basket chairs popular in the '60s. My father designed built-in counter height cabinets that ran along one wall and served as a workspace while my mother had another cabinet that served as a sewing table. These were built by the carpentry shop on the corner and made up in teak. There was also a bar with two swiveling teak wood stools. Along with the marble coffee table on tapered legs that matched the couch this was our hip mid-century modern living room. The apple does not fall far from the tree in this arena of house decor I realized.

A couch would offer a place to lie down that would not entail climbing up to the loft or crawling into a hammock. And of course it would be good if whatever I built would serve more than one function. I had already decided that the cooler would sit against the wall opposite of the kitchen and serve as seating. This led me to design a bench to slide over the cooler paired with another one for storage for my sewing machine. I made cushions from the leftover memory foam I had cut off the topper of my minimalist mattress and bought good quality upholstery fabric to go with the blue green of the kitchen. Frugal style is knowing where to spend your money.

As for a dining room table, there were plenty of drop down tables built in tiny houses and that Ikea roll around table with two folding leaves and drawers in the center was also popular with tiny house people. The engineering of the drop down table was quite complex. I could do it given the wall space I had, but the legs were a problem with benches. After much drawing and research I realized that I already had a table I liked perfectly well. It had been a utility table for a computer printer that I had rescued from an office move. The polished blond wood and chrome legs were pleasing to the eye. The legs had wheels and a storage shelf at the bottom. I'd been using it for my sewing table. I could add fold down leaves to it and make it into a dining room table. And it would roll into the space under the stairs where I had originally planned to put the cooler. I could postpone adding the drop down leaves since it would not be a built in so I would not have to build it before moving the house.

With the bench and cushion covers in the works I turned my attention to shelving. I wanted as much footage as I could fit for my book collection. I was not a minimalist Kindle person. I had amassed a book collection in preparation for a collapse of the electrical grid. I had books to help me homestead an off grid life, build shelter and grow food. Books for home maintenance and fixing things for clients. Plus all my shamanic books and autobiographies of interesting lives that I hadn't read yet. I was after all a writer. I needed books. 

It was easy enough to make shelving from doors, but what to use for shelf supports? I could make wood farmer style supports, but that was too much work. Shelf supports were a decorative fashion thing I noted, but also a bonafide piece of hardware. I could indulge in buying shelf supports. I chose some plain iron ones that looked like a blacksmith might have hewn them. There were also some inexpensive hyper modern ones I'd never seen before that functioned like the hinge on a fold out desk holding the shelves at both ends. These were clever and minimalist with the added feature of serving as book ends. They came in white and the shelves were white which picked up the white of the window frames. When I installed all the shelves things finally began to look like a house. It was not just a couch then that makes it a house. Shelves and the ownership of things to put on them added significantly to the iconography that says here is a house.

On the kitchen side I had long planned to make shelves out of the strip of desktop I had cut off when I made my kitchen counter. I made two shelves of different lengths to accommodate my Berkey Filter that would serve as my water dispenser for drinking water. The rounded edges of the shelves matched the kitchen counter top in a very satisfying way. When adorned with my gold rimmed cocktail glasses I had saved from a client this definitely said house beautiful.

Speaking of client gifts, I had a number of such gifts from clients who were eager to contribute to my tiny house. I now had a rather butch quilt made by a client's grandmother from mens shirts and pants in a plain pattern of simple squares. The client had gone to the trouble of washing it several times to rid it of its musty smell just so she could offer it for my use. I was touched by this. I'd also been given a folding travel iron, a mirror, silverware, bachelor casserole dishes and most interesting a velvet curtain that had gone over the door of a client's therapist's office to muffle sound.

After discussion with Sheilagh over matters of privacy in the tiny house we decided that the loo needed a privacy curtain, but the shower did not since such an act of bathing would not be shared with guests in the house unless a lover in which case the act of bathing would be willingly shared. And since I would not be spraying water over me I would not have to contain shower spray with a curtain. Pouring water was a much more controlled use of water. Thus the burgundy curtain became the privacy curtain for the loo adding a luxurious touch of class. Fishing shacks most definitely did not have velvet curtains.

Satisfied that I had firmly established that this was a house with all the functions of a house I was ready to move.