Goodbye, Tiny House

We loved living in the Tiny House. It was our snug hide away, John and I in the 200-square foot space with our tiny stove wood burning stove (which only fit logs 6-inches long), a panini maker and an electric kettle. The composting toilet (if any of you are wondering) worked amazingly well, a slight odor occurring only once in the six months of full time use when a screen to the outside got blocked with dust. And our loft bed unusually comfortable, the small "eating nook" table just the perfect size.

And yet, two people in a 200-square foot room with a loft for the winter can wear on your nerves, as many of you who have been quarantined for more than a month can now well imagine. There are days when nothing either of you says makes any sense to the other, when the way he puts his dirty clothes on the couch drives you bananas, when you hear yourself whining about another dirty plate you have to clean after he ate cereal (you traded doing the dishes in the tiny house for taking out the pee and poop, a fair trade until washing dishes without running water got really old).

As soon as there was running water and a kitchen in the new-old farmhouse this past week, I was ready to move in, the thought of simply putting dirty dishes into a dish washer too enticing to resist. After showering at John's sister's house for close to a year, our new shower is an oasis - the floor actually cut from slate roofing John took off someone's abandoned house in the '80s. And did I mention the wood floors? They were milled from ash trees that died on the farm from the ash borer. They are amazing.

The old stove has a new life

But the pièce de rèsistance of the house is without a doubt the stove. A solid steel O'Keefe and Merrit from the 1950s, heavier than our old Smart Car. I found the stove on Craigslist in San Francisco for $200 and we lugged it all the way here. Now finally it has a new home in this 100-year old house and cooking on it is dreamy.

The outside of the house still looks like crap and so I am not including it here. As I sit here I can hear the wind howl through the rickety porch and Tyvec flaps wildly against the house. The siding should show up in the next week or so, requiring another intense amount of time we don't have. There is no trim on any of the windows and only one interior door in the whole house. Many of the light switches are hanging off the wall like they themselves were electrocuted and we are still waiting for the countertops to go in.

But home is where the heart is, and mine is now here. We are just two miles down the dirt road from the farm, a nice distance for getting away from the endless "to-do" list that lingers there always. We had John's family over for our first meal, and it felt like old times again, all of us gathered around our giant butcher block table in the middle of the kitchen. Except that we miss so many of you.