More Snow

It snowed more! Last year was an unusually low snow year so it's fun to see how deep the snow piles are getting this year around my house. Last night added about 10 new inches.

The views out two of my windows. Above, you can see the snow piled up a little ways above the base of the window it's self. I did shovel the top of that pile off since I do want to be able to see out my windows!

Manipi seems to really enjoy the sunshine on the porch.

Last night was rather warm for this area so the snow stuck to everything. Making the whole area look like a winter wonderland as the sun came up this morning.

The sun is quite stunning as it bursts through the trees. And it is gradually getting higher in the sky again too.

Manipi also likes to follow me around like a puppy while I work outside. Pretty much no matter what I am doing, he trots along at my heels. Including the whole time I am shoveling snow.

In places, these snow piles are now higher than my head. My pathways are becoming tunnels. I am really curious to see what it looks like around here by the time all the snow stops in the spring. We probably have at least three months of snowfall yet to go!

Mini Wood Stove!

I got a wood stove! Here is is freshly unpacked after arrival. It's a Grey Stove built by Lloyd Grey and his team. Yes, I can pick it up, but it's heavy. 120 pounds.

Below you can see how really tiny it is, even with my tiny house for a sense of scale. Like my friend said, "It's so cute, we could just sit here and look at it. That would probably keep us warm even without hooking it up!"

Here you can see a glimpse of the inside right after I unpacked it. 

And here it sits in it's corner patiently waiting for all the parts and pieces needed to finish installation. Thanks to living in the middle of no where, I could not source all the pipes etc. that I need locally. So they are all in the mail. Depending on all the carriers bringing them, I hope to have everything I need by the beginning of February.

I think Manipi may even enjoy curling up beside it every now and then once it's firing. A full report and review will follow once it is installed and being used. I can't wait! 

Frozen Pipes

It's my cat's fault. No, really! My pipes froze, and it's all because of my cat. 

First, before you get too worried, nothing is broken and my water is flowing again. Now this is my second winter in my house, so I do have some experience at this point living off grid and in this cold weather. And I've never had frozen pipes before. So here's what happened.

 My water system starts will filling an internal tank. I carry water to it from a neighboring well, so there are no external pieces on that end of the system that could freeze. Unless my whole house froze inside. The water runs from that tank, again all inside, to my faucet. From there, water drains down the sink, down through the bottom of the trailer, to the outside. The then pipe turns and runs over to the edge of the trailer. Here, the water leave the pipe and drains along a channel cut in the dirt. Gradually seeping down the hillside behind my house and watering the trees and berry bushes that grow there. And yes, I am very careful to use nothing toxic in any way in that water.

 As I said, this is not my first winter of using this setup. Last winter there was a stretch of days that hit -30F. and I was a bit concerned about things freezing up then, but never had an issue. The water was always warm leaving the house and so did not have a chance to freeze until after leaving the pipe and hitting the ground. Everything worked fine. This meant that when temps dove into the -20's a few weeks ago, I was no longer worried about this being an issue.

So imagine my surprise when I glanced into my sink one morning while brushing my teeth and saw water backing up in the drain! The lows during the preceding days had all be around -26 to -28, and the highs barely reached zero, so immediately I decided my drain must have frozen. But why? With the same setup as I had with slightly colder temps the year before, why would it have frozen this time? It only took me a few minutes of thought to arrive at an answer, my cat.

 If you've read my recent posts, you know Manipi's story. Well he is still surviving and regaining health while living outside. His safe spot is under the house, where there is only one small cat sized hole open through the snow skirting. Otherwise, the base is sealed off with snow and ice, meaning that getting to the end of that drain was going to be a pain now! The rest of his free time he spends snoozing in his bed on the porch, especially if it's sunny, or relaxing in his cozy igloo crate house. But since he's almost always outside, his water bowl freezes up regularly. I'm home a lot, so this is fine. I just melt it out and put warm water back in every few hours so he always has something to drink. This is where the problem with my drain started though.

Before Manipi, water going down my drain was almost always from one of three things. Dishwashing, cooking, or hair washing and toothbrushing. Now all of these things tend to involve water somewhere between above room temperature to scalding hot. So, the water and all the pipes carrying it tended to stay hot or at least warm as it drained. Sometimes it would even melt a hole up through the snow several feet away from the end of the pipe, so I know it was moving a little ways before cooling to the point of freezing. But now I was doing something different. 

I was often in a hurry or just being lazy, so when I'd pop one ice block out of Manipi's bowl to refill it with warmer water, I'd just let that chunk of ice sit there in the sink. No problem, right? As it melts, it'll just run down the drain. Well you can probably see where this is going already. A slow trickle of ice water does not flow several feet from the drain before freezing up when the outside temps are nearly 60 degrees below freezing! Instead, that trickle started icing up inside my pipe and I didn't realize this until the entire pipe was plugged and water was visibly backing up in my drain. Thankfully, because this happened slowly from that drip, nothing broke when it did freeze the whole way. Had the pipe been full of water and then froze, the expanding water would have split everything apart.

Remember my snow/ice skirting? It was now in the way of getting to the end of that drain pipe to do anything about the freeze up. Fortunately, I have a strong and handy friend who come over and busted a hole through my skirting and opened up the bottom of the house. Then he put a space heater under there and baby sat it when I had to head off to work. After about 5 hours the backed up water started flowing again. He even built me a little wood cover for my drain so that snow could be packed around it for insulation without plugging up the drain, filled the hole in the skirting back in, and left every thing in perfect order before I got home from work. It really is amazing to have a friend like that around!

So problem solved. Well, not quite. I had decided to be sure I didn't put any ice blocks in the drain and was very careful to only run very hot water down it. But I was still busy, working everyday and some double shifts. I wasn't home long enough to do much of anything there except sleep a little. Meaning only very small amounts of water of any temp were going down the drain. And, the temps were still well below zero. Two days later, what do you know? There was water backing up in the sink again.

 I, being very brilliant, decided the drain must have re-frozen. In retrospect, I doubt it had ever thawed the whole way out. I think the space heater had thawed the edges of the ice blockage out enough for water to drain, but left a core of ice in the center. And over the next few days of continued cold temps and only running a little water down the drain, the core of ice refroze the whole thing.

Since I felt kinda stupid to be in this predicament to start with, I didn't want to bother my friend for help again. So, I re-dug out my skirting myself. Much easier than the first time around thanks to the ice already being broken up. As I crawled down to peer through the hole and try to decide what to do next, I had an idea. When my house arrived after purchase, the pipes were wrapped in heat tape. I've never used it because my drain had never had a problem before, and I do not have enough electricity to power it adequately with my off grid setup. I figured that the heat tape might be the best way to thaw the pipes the whole way out though. So I used my generator to plug the heat tape directly into and turned it on. After letting this run for almost nine hours, I could not feel any ice in the drain any more when I reached into if from the bottom to check.

I'm not sure if you quite get the picture of what is going on here if you have never tried to reach plumbing underneath a snowed in trailer yourself. Imagine laying down full length on a pile of snow and ice. Now stretch out and twist you shoulder so you can reach up and under the trailer frame. This puts your cheek right on the ice and you can feel whats going on, but not see anything at all because your face has to be turned the other direction in order to reach the drain. It was rather comical looking I'm sure had anyone been watching!

Now the water was flowing again. The heat tape did quite a good job. However, I was concerned about  there still being an ice core in the center that would freeze everything up again, like the first time around. So I capped off the drain and boiled two large pots of water. I poured them down the drain till I could see the hot water backing up in the sink. I left everything sit this way for about fifteen minutes to give the hot water plenty of time to dissolve any remaining ice. Followed by repeating that crawling sideways under the trailer edge maneuver to un-cap the the drain. All the hot water flowed out and there seemed to be no evidence of remaining ice.

This seems to have been totally effective. Nothing has refrozen. I am very careful to not leave ice blocks melting in the sink for any reason now. Hopefully my experience with this will help someone else avoid this problem with their house. Because while nothing was damaged and things could have been worse, it was a real pain, and I don't recommend doing this to yourself if you can avoid it! And I suppose it really was my thoughtlessness, not my cat's fault that I had the issue in the first place. I hope all your houses are handling whatever winter weather you have right now!

Quiet Evening

A quiet candlelit evening at my house. I need to take some time to reply to comments and questions from everyone, but yes, I am still here. I've just been busy with work and switching jobs (still waiting tables, just at a different restaurant). Now I'm curled up on the couch, typing this, sipping a glass of red wine, and enjoying a few pieces of ginger dark chocolate while listening to the Enya station on my Amazon Prime radio.

I worked at the restaurant today and made it home late after a busy day. It's been snowing a little off and on for the last few days. The mountains are reporting 212 inches so far, so we are a little behind our average. But everything is pretty and white and the temps are in the teens and twenties above zero, so this is nearly perfect winter weather as far as I am concerned. 

Manipi is almost getting really heavy! He loves coming in for brief periods of petting and chin scratching, and has even recovered and become comfortable enough to venture out on one walk down the lane and back. That being the only time I've seen him more than a few yards from the house since he first returned near death. 

Moose have been all over the area lately. There are more healthy cow calf pairs than I've ever seen at once. Several of them with twins! And several that seem to enjoy walking around and bedding down behind my house. I also got to see a fox scampering up the lane on a recent evening. Most of the rest of the wildlife have been staying curled up somewhere, or just not choosing to come by my house. 

In other news, Fy Nyth has several new features that I need to write posts about soon. As well as some really neat gifts from a few friends. My youngest sister is coming out here for a visit at the end of this month and it will be fun to spend some more time with her as well as show her the area in the middle of winter. I'm missing my best friend Seth who's still holed up in a cabin in the south working on his book this winter. I've finally made the time to get back into Crossfit for the first since last spring, so I'm sore all over, but generally feel good.

I hope you are all having enjoyable winter evenings where ever you are!

Merry Christmas from Fy Nyth!

Merry Christmas from my cozy little house. It's certainly a white Christmas here! I hope you are all having equally cozy and beautiful days. Here's what has been happening around here over the last few days.

Right now, the sides of my paths have walls that come nearly to my shoulders! Here's a short clip that will give you an idea of how thickly it was coming down. More than an inch an hour for a while!

I never have really celebrated Christmas and never had a tree, but I do enjoy flower arranging. So I made quite a few winter pine arrangements for myself and some friends. And since I've never liked most bright colors, winter colors to me are always whites, greens, blues, and silver. Not red and green.

Over the last week, the snow has just piled up deeper and deeper around here. 

But inside is still warm and cozy! Many people who see the snow photos wonder about the inside temp. Well it's between 65 and 70 F depending where I set the thermostat. I leave it turned down a bit  when I'm gone and turn it up when I'm home for a while. 

I also made several pine swags for the sides of my door, and the entrance to my lane.

If it keeps snowing like this all winter, I won't be able to see out the windows before long! Though the forecast for almost the next month now is calling for very little snow and lots of cold clear weather. Down into the -20's F. If that is what happens, I will be very happy to have all this snow around to insulate everything.

I really do love this cozy little spot and living here.

Manipi seems to be recovering quite well from his near death by starvation. He's getting heavy and seems to be quite happy to stay here. Every time I get home he comes running for some petting and attention and often watches the world from his spot curled up on the porch.

I also made swags and arrangements for several friends. It is fun for me to get the chance to do some arranging like this again. It's a relaxing hobby. I forgot to take photos of several of them before giving them away, but here are a few examples.

The swags stay fresh for a long time outside as long as the weather doesn't get warm. And the basket arrangements will stay fresh for weeks as long as you keep the floral foam in the base wet.

Now I am planning to enjoy a quiet day of cooking, writing, and reading here and hope you all have a lovely Christmas with whatever you are doing as well!

My Tiny House Loan

Lets talk about loans. This is how I bought Fy Nyth. I've had several requests for details on how that whole process worked for me, and while I've mentioned some of it several times, I realized I never did a post just dedicated to that topic. So this is that post.

When I decided I was going to buy a tiny house in the summer of 2014, I had only a few hundred dollars in savings. Not enough to buy a house, no matter how tiny. Well maybe a doghouse... I also had no credit. Not bad credit mind you, just none at all. I generally do not like debt. I prefer to not owe anyone anything. So I have always paid for everything in my life with cash and do not have a credit card. This translates into not having a credit score.

I was looking for a loan however. Sure, I could have kept renting for years and saved up for a house. And generally that is the route I would have gone. But I live in an area where rents have sky rocketed in the last few years and this is what was making me choose to go tiny to start with. Sure, I could have moved, but this place is home to me. It's where my friends, community, and jobs are. And I didn't want to leave if I could avoid it. Paying rent around $1100 for a bedroom, on my income, would not have left me much of anything to save. There is a 400 square foot house for sale in the area right now on a small lot listed at $1,100,000.00. Yup, that's the land value here. I was clearly never going to buy a "normal" home in this area.

I chose to buy a prebuilt tiny house for several reasons. Mostly that I needed a new place to live in about a month thanks to my long term rental being sold and the above mentioned current rental prices for anything else. And that while I am pretty sure I could learn how to build a house, that is not a set of skills I currently posses. So after thinking about it, I decided that paying some interest on a loan would actually come out ahead in the end compared to my other options. So I shopped the limited number of builders that existed at the time (there are quite a few more now), settled on Tumbleweed and now I was looking for a way to get an RV loan since they are certified as RV manufacturers.

First I gave my local bank of many years a try even though I knew most regular banks didn't do RV loans on tinys. They basically were not interested and said so. After have read up on the topic a bit, I decided to try our local credit union. We only have one credit union operating in this little town and they accepted me as a member thanks to one of my employers being part of their pool. And they gave me a loan for almost the whole total. And as a side note, the credit union now gets almost all my business rather than my old bank!

When I first talked to them about a loan, I warned the lady about my total lack of credit history and said my sister had agreed to cosign if needed. This was very generous on the part of my one younger sister with a high paying nursing job and her computer programer husband. First my loan officer said she'd check to see if I could qualify on my own, but it only took her a few seconds on the computer to come back to the cosigner idea! Generally I do not like the idea of a cosigner or tangling up other people in money affairs. And while money issues can come between even the closest of friends or family members, my sister is someone I really trust. And I was pretty confident that paying it back without it ever becoming a bother to them would be well within my capabilities. After all my loan payment was going to be just over half of what I had been paying in rent for years. So we went with that option. 

My loan officer was a terrific lady who really went to bat for me on an idea that was pretty unfamiliar to the whole company. I am so thankful for her. I don't think she or anyone working at the credit union had really even heard of tiny houses before, much less been asked for a loan for one. After doing a lot of her own reading and talking to Tumbleweed multiple times, she said she'd do it! Perfect. In the mean time while waiting to hear that news, I'd got my house plans all worked out with Tumbleweed and they were ready to go. 

I borrowed what to a never-go-in-debt-or-owe-anyone person seemed like a huge amount! $74,010. I also paid a down payment, the delivery charge, sales tax to the DMV (6% here, which ends up being a lot of money on that total!) as well as buying my solar setup all in cash. Total for everything came to right around $88,500. That was for a fully finished home customized home with all the appliances etc and a large kitchen built in. This is a lot of money, and I'm sure some of you live in areas where you can buy a small farm for that amount. But for the reasons discussed earlier, I still think it was a good choice for me in my situation. Remember that small house on a tiny lot for sale here for $1,100,000.00? 

Also, if you are going to ask how I paid for all that stuff in cash when I said at the start that I had only a few hundred in savings, this is the answer. I sold a ton of stuff I owned as I rapidly downsized all my stuff to fit in a tiny house. Some of those costs were spread over two months so I worked a ton during that time and saved every penny. When my rental lease ran out, I got back my deposit on that place which was substantial. All that gave me the cash for a down payment, the delivery charge, sales tax, and my solar setup.

What I ended up with was a 15 year RV loan at 4.75% interest. There are none of those mortgage type write-offs and benefits that you get when buying a "normal" house when you get an RV loan, so be aware of that if you are thinking about going this route. My payments came out to $576 a month. About half of what renting a bedroom in this area would cost, so that seemed very doable to me. If I took a full 15 years to pay this off, I'd spend about $29,600 in interest on top of my total purchase price. Much better than your average mortgage where by the time you pay it off you will have paid nearly double the amount the house was bought for. Think paying a total of $375,000 for a house that was sold for $200,000. So while much better than a traditional mortgage, that is still a ton of money to spend on interest! It is more than fair to pay interest on someone else's money since they are letting me use it and I didn't have it on my own. But I don't care to pay any more in interest than I absolutely have to. 

So I have been paying a lot of extra to the principle every month. If you do get a loan, make sure they will let you pay down the principle without extra charges to do so. Every extra penny you can throw at a loan right from the start will save you a LOT of interest over the whole life of the loan since you start by paying most of the interest and by the end most of your money is actually going to the principle anyway. My current payment rate for example will save me over $20,000 in interest verse. just paying the required amount every month over the full 15 years. That's huge! In the first year, I paid about a quarter of the whole total off. 

I've also worked a lot in the last year to make this happen. I picked up several new odds and ends of jobs to help raise my income. I spent almost no time backpacking, reading, or doing some of my other favorite leisure activities. I pretty much only buy gas, propane, groceries, and pay down my loan right now. I have a very cheap prepaid flip phone. I drive a 21 year old van with well over 200,000 miles on it and only carry liability insurance since it's nearly worthless anyway. I don't go out to eat or watch movies unless someone else wants to take me out, (I know, I'm a woman, this probably means no dinners or movies ever if you are a guy, but they are pretty rare even for me - I'm working all the time.). I don't pay for TV. I don't buy new clothes. I grow most of my own food. I barter food and work for other things I want like maintenance, plowing, and a gym membership. I  buy almost no alcohol/coffee/anything liquid that's not water to drink. At this rate I will be debt free again in less than three years though! 

And while to some of you, that above list of things may sound like a terrible amount of hardship, it's really not for me. In fact, much of it was the way I chose to live long before going tiny. Those choices are what allowed me to do low paying jobs that I loved and not be in debt. I like my flip phone, smart phones confuse me. I love my old van that has AWD and can go through massive amounts of snow, all while holding most of my outdoor gear and two full length beds. Generally I enjoy cooking my own dinner and reading a book much more than a dinner out and a movie though that's nice every now and then. I prefer not to watch TV,  because I feel like it's killing my brain cells ever time I do. Usually I'm more likely to find clothes I like at a thrift store than a new stuff store. I love gardening. 

Plus in about three years I expect to be debt free again, own my own tiny house, and virtually not be paying anything for my housing. That is huge! I do trade work for my house parking, but that does not cost me money. Imagine what you could do if your expenses did not include any debt, rent, or house payments! What portion of your take home income do those things use up for you? People are drawn to tiny houses for many reasons, but this is a pretty big one for many of us. Since I will own my own home, and it's on wheels, I am also free to decide I no longer want to live here after all and hitch up and go where ever else. Or sell it. Or whatever else. All these things are pretty sweet.

I actually now plan to "retire" in three years. Something I never thought about before going tiny. No I don't mean go sit on a beach or play golf or something. I don't enjoy those things anyway. I mean generally, not longer doing work I don't enjoy, work at times I don't like (5am? No way. I'm naturally a night owl even though I've done early mornings for years now.) or work for people I do not enjoy being around. In fact I plan to still work hard, just doing things I do like. Like gardening for myself and some others. Some general maintenance or cleaning for a few good people, both of which are kind of satisfying projects for me. Chopping firewood which I really enjoy. Maybe cooking for more people or selling produce. Maybe pursuing photography and even selling photos in some form. And so on. 

Nope. I won't ever get rich this way. But what does being rich get anyone other than the time and resources to do what they want? To do work I find fulfilling, to watch things grow, to prepare beautiful, tasty, and nutritious food, to read a good book, to watch a sunset or a baby coyote, to go backpack in the mountains for a week or more, to sit by a fire and talk to a good friend: these are the things I want. I guess I am a real case of "That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest." - Thoreau. None of this may sound good to you at all, but this is what I enjoy so why would I want to spend my life working at other things I don't enjoy? For what? If I have a house to live in, food, and clothing, and some leisure, I'm pretty sure I am in the wealthiest one percent of humans that have ever lived on this planet. If I can keep a modest income flowing from some of these pleasurable activities, have enough for myself and a little to share, what would I want with more? 

Please note that I am not saying no one else should want other things or that people who have more of those things than me are bad. I have a sister and bro-in-law who make way more than I ever will and they are so generous with others. Doing and buying things for them like homes and cars that I will likely never be able to do. I admire what they do, but I'm also content with what I do.

I am not trying to tell anyone how to go about their own tiny house, just sharing my experience with my loan in case it's helpful to someone else. I know this post has a lot of numbers in it. To the best of my ability I got them all correct. My thoughts on why I made the choices I have, I shared in case that helps one of you think about what you really want or value in life and how that can be achieved possibly in a more out-of-the-box way than you had previously thought, even if your dreams and future do not include a tiny house.

I have now lived here in Fy Nyth for over a year and love it. For the record, I would do exactly the same thing again if I had that choice to make.

P.S. If you are exploring this whole issue of needing a loan, you might also want to check out www.tinyhouselending.com. I have personally met Kai the man behind this, and he's a great guy, but I have no affiliation with his site. I have not worked with him on a loan since I already had mine, so I do not have personal experience with that. He does not personally give loans, but works with lenders to familiarize them with this market and connect people in need of a loan to businesses willing to to lend. I understand he now has several lenders who understand this whole tiny house thing and are willing to work with us. I think at least some of them work with houses that are not being built buy RV certified builders and with DYI ones. This is pretty cool and I would have probably pursued this option had it existed when I bought my house.