Floating Home FAQ has just written a useful article on floating home utilities and details.  In particular, he details how the sewage system works (or sometimes doesn’t).

If you’re interested in the nitty-gritty details on how you get services to these types of homes, I encourage you to check out this article.

Moreover, I’d rather tickled to discover another floating home blogger in the area.

A few weekends ago I had the opportunity to attend Jay Shafer’s Tumbleweed Tiny House Building and Small Space Design workshops. It was an interesting experience. I came home with most of a notepad full of notes.

Jay Shafer is soft-spoken, down to earth, and very approachable. I really enjoyed having a chance to chat with him in person and ask boatloads of questions. I have to say, though, that after spending two days with him, I understand better now why he has a business partner. (grin)  Jay is very much an artist interested in things such as ideals and aesthetics. He has a tendency to go off in three directions at once, can easily be derailed by an interesting tangent, and I suspect he might give his designs away for free if someone more practically-minded wasn’t on top of the day-to-day realities of trying to run a business at a profit. But Jay is passionate about his work and fascinating to listen to. Honestly, he reminded me strongly of some of my favorite professors from college.

Saturday’s class focused on the mechanics of building one of the Tumbleweed Tiny Houses from the ground up. For anyone who’s planning on attending this workshop, I’d suggest buying a set of plans and doing your homework in advance. Think about the construction process and make a list of questions you’d like to address during the workshop. Jay was highly responsive to what people in the class wanted to discuss. Those who came armed with a list of things they wanted to learn pretty much drove the flow of the class for a good part of the day. (For what it’s worth, If something you really want to know doesn’t get addressed during the lectures, Jay was also good about being approached during breaks or lunch.)

The path was a bit circuitous, but, by the end of Saturday, Jay had hit on all the major elements of constructing a Tumbleweed. Due to time constraints and getting derailed on some lengthy discussions on particular construction points, we didn’t get into quite as much detail on the water and electrical systems and finish work as I would of liked. (Although, to be fair, I was also one of the culprits who contributed to some of the tangents.)

I made plans to go to Orlando primarily for Sunday’s design workshop. Although, I actually ended up getting more out of Saturday’s, so I was glad I attended both. (For whatever reason, everyone who attended the Saturday workshop also attended Sunday.  I guess most people figured that if they were going to spend the money and effort to travel for a workshop, they might as well do both.)

One of the things that really appeals to me about the Tumbleweed homes is the very clever use of interior space. They feel like well-thought-out ship cabins to me. I was hoping to glean some ideas from Jay about how he developed these designs with the hope of applying some of the concepts to my own place. But the class pretty much focused on the design of the broader structure. The point of the class was to encourage people to really think about what were the essential items and elements for them to be happy in their home. And, once this list was compiled, to design their own small space.

Jay lectured about design elements for roughly three hours, drawing a lot of concepts from Christopher Alexander’s writing. The rest of the day was spent working individually on home designs and then reviewing the designs at the end of the day with the whole class. I probably didn’t get as much out of this exercise as the rest of the class in that I already had my own small house and it was over the size limit for the exercise. So I spent the afternoon tinkering with the floor plan of a fantasy Tumbleweed geared for my lifestyle (including a 6 foot 7 inch boyfriend which is somewhat problematic in that the standard Tumbleweed ceiling hits at 6 foot 3 inches). It was an interesting exercise but not directly applicable to my real-life situation.

Where I saw a lot of value in the class was that Jay spent the afternoon consulting with any of the students who were having issues with their designs. He spent more than an hour apiece with some of the students and was sketching out fresh designs left and right. Considering most of the Tumbleweed home plans run around $500 and Jay gets paid $100 an hour when he consults, I would say most of the students got more than their money’s worth out of the class.

One thing I didn’t anticipate was just how much I would enjoy and learn from my fellow classmates. It was quite exciting to be in a room full of people who were interested enough in tiny homes to be seriously considering one of their own. Most of the time when I talk about the small home movement with friends, they look at me like I’m out of mind. These people were just as geeked about the subject as me and knew a lot of the same sites and people that I did. Better still, several of them knew about sites and products, I didn’t. We spent the better part of both days trading names and links back and forth. By the end of the weekend, I was ready to take 3 or 4 of them home with me and build out very own Lilliput-scale commune of eco-friendly Tumbleweeds.

Two people in particular proved to be extremely useful in the class. One couple who was going to get started on building their home as soon as they got back from Orlando, brought their contractor, Steve, along. Another member of the class, Paul, has lived in trailers a significant portion of his life and is also quite handy when it came to construction. Steve and Paul frequently elaborated on points Jay made about construction or, in some cases, actually suggested potential improvements to what Jay has been doing. I think several of us were glad to have them both in the class.

All in all, I was glad I attended and it was great fun to actually get to meet Jay Shafer in person after admiring his creations for several years. If you’re serious about building your own Tumbleweed Tiny House, I would say the workshops are well worth the effort of attending before you get down to work.

In the most recent chapter of the Floating Folly renovation saga, we left our poor heroine (i.e. me) chewing her nails to the quick because: 1) her contractor had a seriously broken leg; 2) her house was currently without siding or a roof; and 3) the rainy season was about that start…

Well, since then, Portland has received an unprecedented amount of rain–yes, even for Portland–with some snow thrown in for good measure. I’m talking forecasts with 100% chance of precipitation for weeks at a time. And on the rare days it hasn’t been raining, it’s been too cold to cut lengths of siding outside.

Kenny has been receiving biweekly messages from me asking for assurances that he’s worked some sort of magic to keep the place water-tight. I didn’t care if he shrink-wrapped the whole damn house. I just didn’t want water getting into the new insulation or mold ending up growing in my walls.

Needless to say, I breathed a small sigh of relief this morning when I received word that the last of the siding is going on today. The new stairway to the rooftop deck gets built tomorrow. And then, once Kenny gets the siding on around the deck wall, the new roof can go on. Glory be.

I’m hoping they can get the stairway and deck siding on before the next onslaught of weather, which looks to be arriving Thursday. Then I just have to pray for one more break in the weather long enough for the new roof to go on.

Any who’s been following my entries probably knows that I am fascinated with Jay Shafer’s Tumbleweed Tiny Houses. This probably makes less sense than it might otherwise due to the fact I already own a tiny home and have absolute zero need for another.

So, I was happy when I discovered a constructive way to channel this obsession of mine–I am now part of Tumbleweed Tiny Houses newly-launched affiliate program to sell their books and house plans. My hope is to live vicariously through others who are planning to build a Tumbleweed Tiny Home.

But that’s enough of a sales pitch for one day. More than anything, I’m just excited to be able to offer the plans through my site. I like the idea of fostering the small house habit.

Rima Staines is a remarkably talented artist who spends her time in the U.K. and Scotland. Her work reminds me greatly of two of my favorite artists, Arthur Rackham and Brian Froud. I fortuitously stumbled across her website one day while running queries for work.

To my delight, I discovered Rima is a kindred spirit who is charmed by little homes on wheels. She now lives out of an old van that was remodeled by her partner Tui and herself. Their little place, the Hermitage, makes me think of a hobbit-hole on wheels. It has a quirky kind of warmth and bohemian beauty that I suspect is a close reflection of her inhabitants.

Rima and Tui have recently been traveling in their little home through Scotland, and recent posts on her blog show some fantastic countryside. If you’ve ever wondered what modern-day gypsies might look like, here they are.

Rima has a fascinating blog. I encourage you to check it out both for more photos of the Hermitage and to see a lot of examples of her lovely artwork. (Two prints of which are on their way to me now.)

Calliope started life as a 1973 Compact Junior travel trailer. She was purchased this past Christmas by Hillary and is in the process of being extensively renovated by Hillary and her partner Michael.

They’ve pretty much stripped her to the bare bones (no more quilted walls) and are in the process of building her back up. The little home has already been taken on several trips and the thought seems to be to make her a full-time liveaboard once all the renovations are complete.

You can read more about this little home and her adventures at Hillary’s blog This Tiny House .

Ladies, forget about sea-salt scrubs and other expensive spa treatments for your skin. Have I got the cutting edge thing for you in skin care… Scotch-Brite pads!

Actually, that’s just my goofy way of introducing the story of how I came to find myself in the shower last Sunday night trying to take off the top couple of layers of my skin with a Scotch-Brite pad. Let me try to explain…

The stratagems to keep me from moving into my place in Portland seem to have reached a full-court press. I first clued in to this fact when Charlie’s friend Ben showed up on our doorstep to visit this weekend and the first words out of his mouth were that he had a friend in Portland who would like to buy my house. I tend to be a little slow on the touchy-feely, intuitive stuff but I get the feeling that means Ben has decided it’d be okay if I kept hanging out with his buddy for the time being.

It gets better, though. When I first came to crash at Charlie’s until the work on my house is complete, I set up a temporary office in his guest room. Every time someone has come to visit, I’ve ended up moving my little electronic shop to either the dining room table or the master bedroom bed.

By way of background, Charlie is enormously house-proud and quite particular about his house, as only a male who hasn’t owned his own place until his mid-thirties can be. He and I have very different preferences when it comes to interior colors. He favors strong colors in cool hues. For example, the his bedroom is a dark burgundy. I tend to steer towards lots of earthtones and warmer blues and greens.

So, needless to say, I was surprised when he came to me a few weeks back and offered to give me the now empty Room for Wayward Boys to use for my office space… and told me, with a minimal number of facial ticks, that I could paint and decorate it however I wished.

The Room for Wayward Boys, as I have affectionately dubbed it, is where a revolving progression of Charlie’s male friends have stayed for various intervals of time when they’ve found themselves in need of a place to live and no funds. It is one of two remaining rooms in the house that have received nothing in the way of TLC since Charlie moved in. It still had 1970′s popcorn on the ceilings and walls yellowed with years of bachelor men chain-smoking and doing god knows what else in the room.

Since I first came to crash this past May, the door to The Room has remained firmly shut at all times except when the random male of the moment was entering or leaving at some strange hour. There have been friends of Charlie’s who’ve stayed in it for weeks at a time who I’ve never actually seen but, rather, merely heard due to the creak of the door sometime after midnight.

Charlie has either tired of being thought of as the flophouse for his social circle or he’s grown serious about me thinking of his place as my home, because he offered me The Room as my own personal space in his house. And I’m allowed to have complete artistic control. Now granted, this may because he’s already used to having the door shut at all times to hide the disaster on the other side. I’m not sure he emotionally acknowledges that The Room is actually part of his house.

Whatever the truth may be, a weekend ago, we ended up spraying down the ceiling and scraping off the popcorn. I had been dreading the task but it ended up being quite a bit of fun. There was something quite satisfying about running a scraper across the ceiling and having the offensive popcorn drop off in large, gooey blobs. Moreover, we had the whole ceiling clean in under an hour.

As a result, I was totally unprepared for how miserable a task the painting was going to be.

Charlie asked if I could keep the ceilings a flat, hard white so that it matched the rest of the house, and, after plastering 17-some-odd paint samples on the wall, I selected a warm Caribbean blue for the remainder of the room. (Leslie, considering you’ve dubbed me “the Queen of all things beige”, I know you’re skeptical. I’ll post pictures when the project is done.)

Anyway, Charlie was attending an event this weekend and I was impatient to make some progress on painting. Charlie had brocaded the ceiling right after we removed the popcorn, so the first order of business was to put two coats of primer over the brocading and then to paint it.

I’ve never painted a room before on my own. The closest I’ve ever come is when my friend Ed moved into a rental house that was in need of some serious fixing up. A group of friends banded together to help him paint. After assessing my relative painting skills, the group unanimously decided to put me in charge of painting the inside of all the closets. Sniff.

Aware of my status as a relative painting virgin, Charlie verbally walked me through the basics before heading out for the day. He neglected to mention one key point, however–don’t roll directly over your head when painting a ceiling.

Now, in my defense, I was smart enough to borrow one of Charlie’s motorcycle bandannas and I braided my hair back so it wouldn’t drift tendrils into the paint tray. (My hair tends to have a mind of its own about that sort of thing.) I also wore pants and a T-shirt I didn’t mind sacrificing to the decorative cause. But I didn’t really grok the whole “don’t standard directly under the roller” concept until I seriously splattered myself more than once. And painting tends to be messy work no matter how cleverly you may approach it.

By the end of the day, I was freckled head-to-toe in little spots of blue and white paint. I had paint flecks in my eyelashes. I had paint between my toes. I’m trying to avoid graphic detail, here… just trust me when I say paint ended up everywhere. Don’t ask me how. It just did. And repeated scrubbings with soap and water just weren’t doing the trick to take the paint off. Which brings me to the Scotch-Brite pads…

Charlie returned home to find me in a steaming hot shower using a Scotch-Brite pad to scour my skin raw. To his credit, after he finished laughing his ass off, he joined me in the shower and helped me scrub the spots I couldn’t see or reach. Which, considering he’s my favorite hunky Brit, was not a bad way to end the day.

After hearing from Charlie more details of my painting debacle than I would have preferred, Ben, who has worked as a professional painter, informed me he was taking over the remaining coats of paint. So while I’m typing up my saga of the Scotch-Brite pad, he’s busy making my den-to-be a cheerful, even blue.

And, strangely enough, even though I keep skeptically peeking into The Room, Ben’s not covered head-to-toe in paint. Go fig.

From the wide array of tiny house discussion lists and blogs I frequent, I like to think I’m familiar with at least some of the more common reasons people find tiny homes appealing—an opportunity to live more simply, a low-cost housing option, a way to have less negative impact on the planet, etc. Today, however, I read about a reason I’d never encountered before—Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS).

MCS is a chronic condition in which sufferers have anywhere from mild to life-threateningly extreme reactions in response to low levels of chemical exposure. Common triggers can include substance such as: pesticides, secondhand smoke, fresh paint, scented products, formaldehyde, cleaning compounds, and many others.

Just to give you a sense of the scale of the problem, the MCS America website reports that over 1 million Canadians are incapacitated by MCS. And, unfortunately, current disability laws both inside and outside the United State do not currently cover MCS in terms of either protection or services.

I had heard of MCS before, but it had never occurred to me what the impact would be for individuals with the condition in terms of trying to find viable housing…

“When one develops MCS… and needs to find a safer place to live, there is no organized help,” reports MCS America. “There are no registries of safer places, no agents who know what to look for, few landlords who understand that even a small repair or touch up with problem materials could result in months of ill health. Rare are the places with safe tenants (who don’t pollute the air) or buildings with safe maintenance plans. Too many people become very ill searching for a safe home, as each subsequent exposure adds to a cumulative toxic load. Many become homeless, and more than a few commit suicide as a direct result of not having access to safe housing.”

Mokihana Calizar, who has MCS, and her husband Pete Little have lived through this experience. After fourteen moves in fourteen years, the were driven out of their final rental home by the unannounced spraying of pesticides immediately outside their front door. They spent the next six months living out of their Subaru Forester, “Scout”. Thankfully, they have subsequently found temporary housing with friends in Washington state while they work on their more permanent solution… a nearly chemical-free tiny home of their own design, crafted in the shape of a Gypsy vardo.

According to a study headed by the CMHC, 86% of people with Environmental Sensitivities improved significantly after access to safe housing.

Building a tiny home is either within the current skill set–or can become with some education–of most reasonably able-bodied individuals. Tiny homes also tend to be lower cost (overall not by square foot) than more traditional homes, which may be a significant concern to individuals with a condition that limits their ability to function in the traditional work sector.

By designing and building their own homes, sufferers of MCS can select materials that are safe for them. (For example Salizar and Little are using denim-based insulation, white oak, milk paint, and a beeswax finish.) They can incorporate items which make day-to-day living much more comfortable: such as Hepa air filters, tightly sealing windows and doors, and appliances such as washer/dryers that have not been compromised with fragranced laundry soap or dryer sheets. (Quick aside: I just looked up the list of chemicals in a standard laundry sheet and it scared me enough to take the last couple of sheets in my box immediately out to the trash and bury them UNDER the used kitty litter, which with my cat is a frightening toxic substance all of its own.)

Moreover, self-building takes times which gives the builders exposure time with any of the products going into their house as an added check of what they can and cannot tolerate. And necessary changes can be made midstream in the project much easier than working with a regular builder. Salizar discovered she had a reaction to their initial choice in insulation, which sent her back to the drawing board. In the case of a tiny home, changes such as these are much less cost-prohibitive than they would be in a larger structure. Additionally, if a tiny, chemical-free home is built on wheels, it allows the MCS sufferer to relocate should something change in their surrounding environment making their current location unliveable.

While their Vardo is not a direct Tumbleweed design, Salizar and Little attended one of Jay Shafer’s tiny home design workshops.

Salizar has detailed the construction of her vardo in her blog, VardoforTwo. She is a writer and storyteller by vocation and both this and her other blog are graced with beautiful accounts of daily life with her husband as well as poems and other stories. It’s also fascinating to me to see the transformation of their tiny home into a work of art of its very own.

Both of the blogs are extremely well written and thought-provoking. I recommend taking the time to check them out and to follow their ongoing story of tiny house living.

Folly

From Old French, fol “foolish”.

Definition: 1) a fanciful building built for purely ornamental reasons; 2) light-heartedness or foolishness; 3) thoughtless action resulting in tragic consequence.

For whatever reason, tiny housers seem to like to name their homes. Perhaps because of the small size of these homes it’s impossible not to become intimately acquainted with them. After living so closely together, how could you not come to know their name?

Whatever the reason behind it, I’ve been envious of the various names of these structures: Gregory Johnson’s Hermitage, Kevin Rose’s GypsyRose, Jay Shafer’s Epu and Weebee, Hillary’s Calliope… The names are all as wonderfully individualistic and creative as the homes themselves.

I want to find the name for my little place, dang it. To date, as close as I’ve come in the process is catching myself referring to it more than once as “the Floating Folly”. And, yes, it’s a deliberate pun. At various points in the renovation process, I’ve meant “folly” in every sense of the word.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the architectural definition, follies are small, whimsical buildings usually constructed in gardens or family estates. They are rarely intended for actual use but, rather, to serve as a kind of ornament. Often there is an element of artifice in their construction. For example, one very common type of historical folly was a fake ruin. Don’t ask me why, but at one point is was quite the thing for well-to-do English lords to have a Grecian ruin tucked away in some corner of their garden.

Which leads me to the real point of this entry–I recently discovered the U.K.’s Folly Fellowship, an organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of follies. This organization describes itself as: “Initially a group of enthusiasts keen to record what was at first seen as a peculiarly British aspect of architecture, it has grown into a serious conservation and consultative architectural heritage charity, while not losing sight of the basic idea that these buildings are fun – they were built for pleasure before purpose. Some make us laugh, some provoke contemplative thoughts, some can frighten. Some are mere whims, others demand to be taken seriously. People take their pleasures seriously – why should buildings be any different?”

I love that thought… buildings that refuse to take themselves too seriously. I don’t know about you, but that’s certainly the kind of home I’d like to live in.

But beyond just an appreciation for architecture with a lighthearted spirit, The Folly Fellowship has created a Flickr pool with some absolutely wonderful photos of these eccentric structures. Not only do I think this a wonderful collection of images to page through for the sheer fun of it, but I suspect many aspiring small housers could find inspiration in some of the designs.

Tiny House Blog has just posted a wonderful article on Vermont tiny home builder Peter King. I strongly encourage you to check it out.

Mr. King lives in rural Vermont, is passionate about simple living, and his dream is to help others learn to build their own tiny homes.

Below is a video created by Eva Sollberger for her show Stuck in Vermont on Mr. King.