A "Lived In" Tiny House

One thing I have heard several times is that many of you appreciate seeing a tiny house actually being lived in, not just photos of it looking like a showroom. Well I do actually live in mine. And I do actually like keeping everything neat and tidy. But life does happen and things don't always stay that way. Here are some of the messiest shots I have of my house. Or at least the ones that show activities going on in my house during day to day life. Like getting ready for dinner above. Or hanging out with my friend Seth (who due to a back injury doesn't do much typical sitting right now ;) and watching fishing clips on youtube.

There's sometimes food cooling on my porch along with the snow shovels, grill, and ski polls that reside there most of the time.

Working out can happen. The loft edge seems to work for doing pull ups if you are strong enough. And there is usually food on the stove.

Hanging out on the couch while browsing the internet, and making plans for the backpacking and fishing trips this summer.

Items get dropped on the chair or floor when I come home sometimes and the sink drainer seems to have dishes piled up most of the time thanks to cooking a lot.

Some construction projects happen and the house gets totally disorganized, tools are everywhere, and sawdust covers the floor. 

More dishes and dish washing, and just the random coats, laptops, and cameras laying around. Just in case you thought my house always looked perfect, you are now disillusioned. Though I do really find having much clutter around stressful, so most of the time my place really is tidy. ;)

New backup heater

Especially after the weekend when my heater when out, it seemed like a backup heater would be a good plan, especially in my climate. On the recommendation of the gentleman who fixed my heater, I purchased this model. It's a Camco Wave 6 radiant heater. It burns propane, but without a flame. I don't know enough about the catalytic process to tell you more than that. But we installed it on my wall yesterday and it seems to be working quite well.

 It does not use any electricity, a serious advantage over my other heater. And the radiant heat, while not quite so even as the other heater, feels really nice. Kinda like the feeling of sitting in front of a wood stove. My little brown chair is right across the room and sitting in it to read with my feet propped in front of this is really nice!

 Left on medium, it kept my house at 65 all night long with the outside temp around 7 degrees. And since it does not use any electricity, this kept my other heater from kicking on and therefore my house used very little power in the last day. I think this is going to be a very good thing for my off grid setup. As I still have the other one, they can also back each other up and I'm much less likely to spend a weekend without heat. We'll see if it changes with longer term use, but so far I am really liking this little thing.

Podcast

I just participated in my first podcast interview ever! It'll be up sometime in March and I'll link to it as soon as it's available for listening. We'll be one of the first three guests on a new podcast dedicated to tiny houses.

Couch Covers

After hoping that letting the fabric and the foam cushions sit near each other for a while (months) would somehow result in the covers sewing themselves, I finally decided that was not working. I can sew. I grew up sewing all my own clothing. And I hate sewing. I genuinely enjoy many household chores like cooking and don't mind many of the others. But sewing I have never enjoyed. However, after getting tired of looking at the ugly shade of green foam sitting there and getting a quote that someone else would sew them for me for about $400, I decided I'd better just do it. 

Thanks to a friend letting me use his sewing machine and a few evening of work, they are finally completed. Not the most professional job I know, but I am satisfied with the way they turned out. There are zippers in each one so the covers can be removed for washing or to replace the foam eventually. 

I am now much happier with the appearance of my couch for sure!

Tiny House camping

My excuse for not writing much here for a bit is a camping trip a little south of here. While we are having an unseasonably warm winter in the mountains where I live, just a few hours away in the desert, it was really warm last week. Like tee shirt and shorts and a sunburn warm. Very nice. We got to take my new-to-me van on it's first camping trip and while I still like backpacking more, it's pretty sweet for car camping. So this is my tinier house while on the road. 

For the middle of February, this is crazy warm!

And we got to see lots of stuff like this...

Not having to carry everything on your back does allow some touches to a breakfast that would be too heavy for a backpacking trip. We enjoyed the sunshine, the area, and the comfy camping and plan on getting that van out on a lot more trips soon.

Photos?

A little while ago I asked what you all had the most questions about. I'm still working on writing posts on all of those things. But I'd also like to know, what do you all most want to see photos of? I enjoy photography as a hobby and would do my best to show you what ever you'd find helpful or interesting.

Worms and toilets

So, if you don't want to hear details about poop and stuff, don't read this post. Otherwise, here's my latest experiment going on in Fy Nyth! I have a composting toilet (a Natures Head, see my post with detail about that here) and one day wondered what would happen if I added composting worms to it?

 Some background, I have had composting worms as "pets" for a while. They eat my biodegradable kitchen scraps and turn it into great fertilizer. And they turn big piles of stuff into little piles. It occurred to me that would be a helpful trait if I don't want to empty the solids bin in my toilet as frequently. (So far it has been in use about three months and has yet to be emptied once.) And the worm castings would make a more compleatly composted material much faster.

Over my move into my new place, my old batch of worms got mad at me for neglecting them I think, and decided to all die on me. So I ordered some new ones. These are red wigglers, they are tiny and reproduce rapidly. They arrived healthy and live as you can see below. I added some water as soon as the arrived so they could start to recover from being shipped and then added them to the solids bin.

This is what the compost looks like inside my toilet after more than two months of use. Below is just after adding my worms to the mix. Now they are all burrowed down into it, and harder to see. I'm curious to see if they like it there and stay happy. I'll update this info once they and I have some time to decide how it's going. 

In case you are interested in a similar set up for your tiny house or RV, following are links to some of the items I use and describe in this post. If you buy them through my link, you will be helping me pay the bills here in my tiny house!

   

Internet when you are off grid

So when you live disconnected from the grid, how do you get internet access? Many people, myself included, like being free from dependance on the main power system for multiple reasons. The main one for me is location and the fact that I am in a remote location with no other option. But that doesn't mean that everyone wants to loose access to all the benefits of internet access with it's wealth of information. So I looked at a lot of options when I was preparing to make that move off grid. There are few options when there is no cable or other hard line connection and all of them have issues.

 Satellite tends to be very expensive and can be affected by weather making it unreliable especially if you live in a little pocket in the mountains surrounded by trees. 

Wireless hotspots through a cell provider are the main viable option at the moment. But they tend to be pricy and come with a limited amount of data use. This makes it tough to do things like watch movies or up and download large photo files. Verizon has the best coverage in my area but 10 gigabytes of data which is about my average use per month costs over $100. AT+T's and Sprint's plans are similar. That's pretty pricy especially if you are trying to keep your living expenses low. 

There are several pay as you go providers that basically resell space on the larger networks. I have used one of these (Page Plus) for my cell phone needs for years now and been very happy with them. They don't provide a data option that works for use with a laptop though. 

First I tried Flashwireless. They offer data plans with approved use of laptops, tablets, and other devices. And they offer an unlimited plan, their most expensive one, with an extra charge per month to allow you to use things like your laptop with it. This added up to about $85 a month. Still pricy, but seemed worth it to me to have internet and not have a strict data cap. They offered a two week trial period and during that time, the service performed perfectly. I tested everything, loading photos to my blog, watching movies, browsing in general, etc. A few days later however, the company slowed the speed down so much that loading a simple web page would take 10 minuets. I contacted them because the difference was so drastic it was clearly something that had changed on their end. After much very frustrating discussion back and fourth I got nowhere. Flashwireless does have an acceptable use policy and it specifies lot of things you can't do. They all make a lot of sense, below is copied directly from their web site.

 (Examples of prohibited data uses: Flash Wireless data Services are provided solely for purposes of web surfing, sending and receiving email, photographs and other similar messaging activities, and the non-continuous streaming of videos, downloading of files or on line gaming. Our data Services may not be used: (i) to generate excessive amounts of Internet traffic through the continuous, unattended streaming, downloading or uploading of videos or other files or to operate hosting services including, but not limited to, web or gaming hosting; (ii) to maintain continuous active network connections to the Internet such as through a web camera or machine-to-machine connections that do not involve active participation by a person; (iii) to disrupt email use by others using automated or manual routines, including, but not limited to "auto-responders" or cancel bots or other similar routines; (iv) to transmit or facilitate any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, telemarketing, promotional materials, "junk mail", unsolicited commercial or bulk email, or fax; (v) for activities adversely affecting the ability of other people or systems to use either the Services or other parties' Internet-based resources, including, but not limited to, "denial of service" attacks against another network host or individual user; )

 There is also a disclaimer that says they also have the discretion to determine other prohibited uses, but it seems reasonable to assume that would not be out of line with the things listed above. However what I was told was that I had already used 3.5 gigabytes of data that month, (this is only about a third of the data Verizon would sell you on a limited plan with no claim to be unlimited for a similar price) and this use was just too high (on a plan marketed as unlimited, remember) so they had to slow down the date use for the rest of the month. I was also told that if I had a problem with the service or wanted any refund, I had the two weeks trial period to change my mind. Of course, everything worked fine during that period and only after it ended did they slow down the connection. No matter who I talked to or how reasonable I tried to be, no one would budge on either turning the service back up or refunding anything. I finally told them I would be giving them a very negative review and asked them to please disconnect my service. 

Next I tried a small local provider in my area, Silverstar and they have been terrific. Their date plan is not unlimited, but does come with 30 gigabytes of data for about $60 with an additional 30 only costing $10 more. They let you take a hotspot (which is just on loan, but costs you nothing if you return it whenever you discontinue service) home for a few days to test the service in your home since mountains do create small dead areas. Everyone at the company has been extremely helpful and I am very satisfied with their service. So I would recommend checking out small local providers in your area for their wireless hotspots. For me this seems to be the best option for internet at my house.

My generator

I do have solar panels, but it's winter here for much of the year. And I live pretty far north. This means there are very few hours of direct sun, even if it's not snowing or cloudy that day. So for me, having a generator to recharge my batteries and back up my solar panels is essential. It usually ends up running somewhere between 4 and 10 hours a day depending on how cold it is and how much power I have used for other activities. 

 Above you can see my generator. At the bottom of the post is a link to the one I have. It is not a Honda and while those are generally agreed to be the best, the Champion's are a  fraction of the cost and still had very good reviews. That is why I chose this model, and I am very happy with it. It does run a little louder than a Honda, but I don't object to that if I can save $600+. And I happen to live a long way from anyone else so I only have to worry about bothering my neighborhood of squirrels, moose, elk, etc.

It is just barely large enough for my needs, but that also means it is extremely fuel efficient. I can usually run it for 7 to 10 hours on one tank of gas. If you read other's reviews of this model, you will see a lot of discrepancy in run times. I am guessing that is because you can fill it and empty it well above and below the marks on the gauge. So if you only fill and empty the tank by the markings, you will get a very different amount of running hours than if you go from truly empty to truly full. I haven't measured it myself, but the tank is supposed to be 0.7 gallons and this seems pretty close. Getting up to ten hours of run time from that amount of gas is a pretty good deal for me. And it is able to run my charger which dumps up to 25 amps into my battery bank as well as a handful of other things in the house at the same time. If the charger is not using power, it is more than capable of running the whole house directly.

It's been very reliable other than the issues described below which have little to do with the generator it's self. The one thing that seems to be made poorly is the pull cord. Mine snapped after about a month of use and has been replaced. Something inside seems to be catching and chewing up the cord, but I don't know what. If they would have used a more sturdy pull cord, I would have not a single complaint about this generator. 

Below you can see it sitting inside it's own tiny house. That came about after learning that covering it with a tarp didn't work real well. It could not be covered while it was running, so if it was snowing while it ran, that would melt and the water would run down into little crannies. I didn't become aware of the problems that would cause until the temps dropped into the -20 F range. Then what happened was some of that earlier snow melt iced up in the oil chamber, causing it to pressurize, then blow all the oil out, and then shut off, thanks to the low oil safety switch. It did not seem to damage the generator, but you don't want that happening.

So now it has a tiny house of it's own. If it is super cold, the generator runs just fine with the lid shut because there is plenty of ventilation out the open end. And this seems to have totally solved any problems with things icing up. If it's a bit warmer out, it seems best to prop the lid up so it does not overheat. That flap keeps snow from being able to drift inside even when the lid is propped up. 

The other thing I have learned is that when it is well below zero, it is hard to start a generator. The solution for that seems to be sitting it in my house for a little to thaw it out, and then putting it back outside and starting it up.

It also seems a good idea to have a backup for something mechanical that I depend on this much. I am blessed to have access to this little Honda as well for the days were we've been figuring out the issues described above with my Champion. Little Red is a very nice piece of equipment as well and if you have the cash, I'd recommend getting one like that. But overall, I think my Champion has be a fantastic deal.

In case you are interested in a similar set up for your tiny house or RV, following are links to some of the items I use and describe in this post. If you buy them through my link, you will be helping me pay the bills here in my tiny house!

Butcher block cutting board

Since part of my countertop had to be cut out to install my new sink, we ended up with two nice chunks of wood. One of them has now been turned into a lovely cutting board by a kind friend. So even though I didn't build my house my self I'm getting to do some reusing and recycling.

Check out that gorgeous wood grain!

Off grid laundry in a tiny house

So how do I do laundry? I have a tiny house, and am off grid, so space, water, and power are all limited. I think my parent's laundry room is larger than my whole house. How do I get clean clothes without lots of all those things?

There are several options for a tiny house. The closest to a "normal" washing machine would be any of the combination washer/driers that are designed for apartments and are non vented. I do have a good friend who has one and he has been using it happily for years. You can put your laundry in, turn it on, and forget about it. And I hear they are very gentle on clothing and generally a good deal. But, they do take up some space and still use power. On the other end of the spectrum, you can just wash things totally by hand. I suppose I could even get a washboard out and walk down to the creek beside my house to do my laundry. I did not go with either of these options however.

I have an hand crank washing machine, a Wonderwash, which I am very happy with.  It probably falls somewhere in the middle of the options listed above. It is pictured above, set up ready to drain into my sink. I was actually using this while I lived in a hotel before moving into Fy Nyth so I have had a while to obtain experience with this set up. I really like it, but it is not an electric washing machine that requires no involvement or thought. If that is want you are expecting, you will not like it. Using it also requires at least some turning, and for me lifting and carrying of water (due to my off grid water set up, when I was still living on grid, I just filled it in the tub and did not have to carry any water), all things within a basic level of physical ability, but if you have a hard time with any of those tasks, again, it's probably not for you. I'll explain further how I use it below.

For laundry detergent, I use soap nuts. They are totally natural (and work just fine in a regular washing machine as well, I have been using them for years now), biodegradable (important for my grey water's health), and non toxic. I've always had sensitive skin and most soaps really irritate it, but soap nuts are terrific. You can even eat them or the liquid, though you'll probably get a slightly upset stomach, so I don't recommend this. 

Most of the time I just put 5 or 6 nuts in a little bag like this, and toss them into my washing machine with my clothing. You can also make liquid soap with them however. Below you can see about 15 nuts boiling in a quart of water (you end up with less due to evaporation). I just boil them till the water had turned pretty brown and no more seems to be leaching out of the nuts. About 45 minutes? Then I strain out the pieces of nuts, and I have liquid detergent.

As the liquid cools, some solids will settle out like as you can see below. This is totally normal. The liquid soap will create some bubbles, but is not a bubbly as a commercial detergent. The liquid soap is a little more effective if you are using cold water to do your laundry. It's also great for washing dishes or anything else. The one thing to be aware of is that since this it totally natural and has no preservatives, it will spoil unlike a standard bottle of soap. I've found if I just leave it on the counter for about three weeks, it will start to mold on top. Usually this is no problem as I use it up faster than that. I'm planning to experiment with making the liquid into a shampoo at some point too...

Back to the washing machine. It's basically a large (well kinda small) barrel on a frame with a handle. Above you can see the drain spout inserted so the dirty water can drain into my sink. (Or your shower, or outside, or anywhere you want the water, like watering plants, especially if you are using no chemicals in your laundry.)

 You do have to do a small load, but at my house it's just me, so I can take time to do maybe two loads some afternoon every two weeks or so and that's sufficient. I can get a pair of jeans, cotton pants, and handful of tee shirts, and some socks and underwear all into one load. I am also not a terribly large person, so realistically there is just less fabric in my clothing than some people will have. If you are larger, you'll have to do more loads I imagine.

Here's my laundry pile at the start. Obviously you can separate colors, but since pretty much all my clothing is dark, I don't bother. I usually add some water to the bottom of the barrel first along with my bag of soap nuts. Then add clothing till it's just over half full, and finish filling with enough water to cover my clothing. If you stuff it too full, there is not enough room for the clothes to agitate and they will not end up as clean.

Now you turn the lid on and use the small handle to screw it down tight. This give you an air and water tight seal. Now you can start to spin your machine. I usually sit mine on the counter so it can drain into the sink and this also makes it a nice hight for me to turn comfortably. When I was using it in the hotel, I did the same thing in the bathtub and just sat on the edge to turn it. Also fairly comfortable. I think the instructions say something like 200 turns in each directions. What I actually do is this. I turn it maybe 20 times each way, and then I go do something else for a little. Often I am cooking at the same time so this works well. A few (5-15 minutes) later, I come back and give it another 20 turns each way. It seems that repeating this 4 or 5 times gives it plenty of time to soak, and enough agitation. 

Now I insert the drain and walk off to do something else while the dirty water drains down the sink. Usually catching some to water all my house plants first. When I was using it in a bathtub, I found it faster to just take the lid off and spin the whole tub upside down and drain it that way. 

Next I add more water and repeat the above process to rinse everything well. This sounds like a long list of stuff involved, but really, the way I do it while doing other projects around the house only involves a few minuets of actual attention. And everything really does get clean. Gym clothes, hiking clothing, everything I've tried comes out clean.

Now we go to my Nina Soft Spin Drier. This is electrical. It's not a drier that blows hot air, it's more like a giant salad spinner. And it really does spin out a ton of water. You can certainly wring everything out by hand but when I tried a side by side test, one sock from a pair in the spin drier, one by hand, etc, I found the items in the spin drier were totally dry about 10 hours sooner than the stuff I had wrung out by hand and that made it worth it for me to have the drier around taking up space. The stuff from the drier actually feels almost dry enough to wear when it comes out unless it is a very heavy fabric. 

You fill the drier with your dripping wet laundry and drop that pink thingy on the top. This keeps little stuff like a sock from spinning out and getting stuck between the spinner and the main body. I've  done this when I forgot to use the pink thing, and getting stuff out of that little gap is tough. You also want to be sure you stack the things into there in a balanced way of it will have a really hard time spinning smoothly. When turned on, it spins about 1200 rpm, and gets and amazing amount of water out of the clothing.

Before you start it, make sure you put some kind of container under the drain. Again, if you are able to use it in your tub or shower you can just let it drain right there. My bowl from my kitchen aid fits perfectly under there and holds the amount of water I generally get from a full drier of laundry. 

Next comes my handy rack. I find the fastest spot for drying everything is to put the whole rack in my bathroom since one third of all the heat is venting into that little space, plus it's out of my way. And then I can hang items I want on hangers on the shower curtain rod. It makes a full little bathroom for sure, but it works!

If I have a huge pile of stuff to dry (say you accidentally turn your shower on and soak all your clothing that is hanging in there...) I can extend my old curtain rod across the whole house, and hang everything in the living room. Much more in the way, but this works as well. 

So far I am very happy with this set up. But if I ever change my mind, or have more power, I could choose to install one of those apartment combo washer/driers and have a more conventional system.

In case you are interested in a similar set up for your tiny house or RV, following are links to some of the items I use and describe in this post. If you buy them through my link, you will be helping me pay the bills here in my tiny house!