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.

The GypsyRose is the creation of Kevin Rose. While not a Tumbleweed Tiny House design, it is similar in concept. GypsyRose is a tiny home built on a trailer.

Kevin spends his summers on his truly stunning sailboat, Raven. He and his partner Marion built the tiny home as a house for Marianne to use in the summers while on shore and for both of them to winter in while Kevin’s sailboat is “put on the hard” for winter.

To learn the full history of this little home, I encourage you to check out Kevin’s blog, Building GypsyRose It is probably the most detailed blog I’ve run across to date detailing the construction of a tiny home.

This past weekend, I traveled back to Arizona to participate in an annual camping trip with friends. Charlie was initially supposed to go with me, but he ended up having a work commitments that kept him in Dallas until fairly late Friday night. So, he had to fink out on me. The original plan had been for Charlie and I to drive out with our fairly deluxe collection of camping gear. But when it was determined he wouldn’t be coming, I couldn’t find the motivation to drive all that gear out for a weekend event for just little ol’ me. Instead, I decided to fly in to Tucson and supplement my flying-friendly minimalistic rig with a few key pieces borrowed from friends. You know—minor things like a tent and enough bedding not to freeze into a block of ice overnight.

All this sounded great in the planning stages, but I forgot one critical element–who I was dealing with when I put out calls for help… The first person I asked is my friend Warren Faidley, who makes his living as a professional stormchaser. I don’t normally tend to think of myself as a princess, but Warren’s idea of “enough bedding” to keep me warm was one of those goofy little Mylar blankets you find sold in $1.99 “survival” kits at back-road truck stops. (I exaggerate slightly for the sake of the story, but not by much.)

Weekend Learning Lesson #1 for me–never ask the guy who spent the worst hours of Hurricane Andrew chest-deep in water in the basement of a parking garage in order to report for CNN for enough blankets to stay “reasonably warm”. Warren is not a guy who easily grasps the concept of “reasonable”. And “warm” is totally out of the question.

Learning Lesson #2 was: if you’re going to borrow a tent from someone make sure to check it out throughly before you head out to the camping site. (This, by the way, is a close cousin to the rule: never try to set up a new tent for the first time after dark. I learned that one many years ago.)

Anyway, I made plans to borrow a dome tent from my friend Argyle. I think at some point everyone jokingly describes someone of their acquaintances as “having done too many drugs in the 60’s”. Well, in Argyle’s case, it’s actually true. He had the rap-sheet and Hepatitis C to prove it before cleaning up his life. Argyle is a very cool man with a huge heart. I am happy to claim him as a dear friend. But I just have to say that sometimes common sense completely escapes the man.

This lack of common sense was reflected in two ways in terms of the tent he loaned me. The first was the size of the tent. Argyle had assured me that the tent was big enough to comfortably sleep two adults on a queen-size mattress. Well, the reality was, the only way that could have possibly happened is if the theoretical adults he was describing were malnourished hobbits.

I’ve never honestly seen a dome tent as small as the one Argyle loaned me. I could barely fit myself (at 5 foot 11 inches), head to toe, inside the tent, let alone have room for anything else. I seriously suspect the thing shrunk in the rain during a previous camping trip. Either that or the tent was designed so that your pet dog could have its own space overnight. Suffice to say, my duffle bag of clothes and other camping gear ended up spending the weekend outside the tent.

I guess I shouldn’t have been quite so concerned about whether or not I actually fit inside the tent because the second issue with the tent made itself quickly apparent—the front door was no longer attached to the tent. Somehow Argyll had neglected to mention this minor fact when he said he had a tent I could use.

Now, call me old-fashioned, but when I’m camping out in the desert I kind of like having a way to seal up my tent. First, it helps to keep heat in a night. And second, it helps keep creepy-crawly things out. I’ve already been bit once by a brown recluse and I’m really not in a hurry to repeat the experience. Things were further complicated by the fact that I ended up staking my tent facing into the direction of what the wind ended up blowing all weekend. (Did I mention that camping in the desert also tends to be pretty dusty? It’s never good when you’re so gritty from camping that you can feel the sand lodged between your teeth.)

When I set up camp I wrestled with the zipper on the tent for about a half hour and thought I had it to the point where the door would stay on. But when I actually turned in for the night around midnight, the door was back on the ground. It was already freaking cold outside and I didn’t have the patience to try to wrestle with it again in the dark. Instead, I crawled inside the tent, whipped out the small package of safety pins I travel with–I tend to look obsessive-compulsive next to Eagle Scouts when it comes to certain things–and stitched the edge of the door to the rest of the tent.

When I ran short of safety pins, I grabbed the two pairs of earrings and a pin I had with me, and closed the most egregious of the remaining gaps. Then I crawled under my pathetic little Mylar blanket and did my best to pretend I was sleeping until sunrise, sandy teeth chattering through the night.

Anyway, that ended up being the way my tent was held together the rest of the weekend. The crew I was camping with ended up laughingly referring to it a “Steph’s Goth tent”. To be fair, more than one person in camp offered me crash space in their much more luxurious tents replete with tent heaters. But at that point, it was a matter of pride to stick it out in my little hobbit hovel.

I froze my ass off. I and all my belongings were covered in grime from head to toe. And I did, in fact, end up having creepy-crawly things visit me in my tent. Most importantly, though, I ended up having a total blast with friends I haven’t seen in too long.

This experience got me thinking about my place in Portland. While I’ve still got a long way to go in terms of renovations I want to do, if I’m being completely honest, the place is to a point of being pretty much habitable in its current state. All the windows and doors are now in place. It’s got a functional–albeit, admittedly ugly–bathroom and kitchen. The biggest creature-comfort that’s missing at this point is any sort of heat source. (Well that, and any sort of insulation in the walls of the new back room.)

But until I have the new heaters added by the electrician, it wouldn’t be that hard to bring in a portable unit and live in the front half of the house. It’d be a hell of a lot more comfortable than how I spent the weekend and I came out of that no worse for that experience. And as much as I like my creature comforts, I’m capable of roughing it if push comes to shove.

I think being there would make it significantly easier to coordinate some of the remaining work that needs to be done and possibly even light a fire under Kenny’s crew. (Hey, a girl can dream.) Plus, I’m just ready to spend some time in my house, dang it.

Anyway, the game plan I formulated on the way back from my camping trip is to drive my Mini Cooper up to Portland over the holiday weekend of Jan 1st and then camp out in the house for a few weeks and try get the remaining interior work kickstarted.

I made sure to book my return flight in late January on Southwest. Not only will they let me move up my departure date without a change fee in case I discover I’m truly miserable in the house with no central heat, but they also offer the only direct flight beteen Portland and Albuquerque I’ve been able to find on any of the airlines. Go figure.

So expect tales of “roughing it” on the river shortly after the holidays are past. Hey, at least with my house I’ll have a front door that actually shuts.

Admittedly, this tiny home is purely theoretical at this point. But I found it just so unusual and charming that I had to share it. To me, it’s the perfect example of just how far out of the box small-housers are willing to think.

Scott designed this house to be constructed inside a concrete drain pipe. He shared the design on the Tiny House Forum hosted by Michael Janzen. The image was drawn by Scott using Google SketchUp.

If you enjoy alternative small home architecture, I encourage you to check out some of the other designs on the site.

The Tiny House Forum has only been in existence since August. I have a feeling we’ll continue to see innovative ideas as additional people join the site.

Those of you who’ve been following my blog will know that with the purchase of my floating home, I pretty much had to reduce my belongings by more than half in a very short period of time. I’ve discussed how I went about this in bits and pieces in various entries. I thought it might be useful,however, to summarize the main channels by which I accomplished this in case there are others out there faced with the task of having to downsize in a hurry.

eBay
I used eBay as my first stop in trying to find new homes for many high-dollar items I knew I wouldn’t be taking with me. Through this channel, I sold several fairly valuable musical instruments, electronics, and even one of my two cars. (Bye bye Kharmann Ghia that ran only one day in two.) I believe the trick for successfully using eBay was taking good, clear photos of the items and providing detailed descriptions. The more detail you can provide on an item, the better the case you can make for why you’re asking for the price you are.

I think it’s also important to make an effort to respond quickly and honestly to questions sent to you by bidders. There’s an element of trust involved with buying high-dollar items online. Anything you can do to ensure a potential buyer that you’re not a con-artist operating from the Caymans is a good thing.

If you’re using eBay to sell large or high-dollar items, be careful not to underestimate your shipping costs. I took a bath on the first to instruments I sold because of this.

I experimented with trying to sell some of my large pieces of furniture on eBay but found Craigslist was a lot more successful for this. (Although, I was able to find a local buyer for my large, flat-screen TV via eBay which I listed as “pick up only”.)

Craigslist
Most large cities now have a Craigslist for their area. Essentially, this is a free online classified service. Through Craigslist, I was able to see most of the large pieces of furniture I wasn’t planning on taking with me.

Like with eBay, good photos and descriptions can go a long way in attracting the attention of serious buyers, as can staying on top of email inquiries. My experience leads me to believe that most people hunting Craigslist want to buy a specific item in a short period of time.

I think it’s a good idea to post you’re general crossroads with the item but refrain from listing your address until you’re certain someone is serious about coming by to look at an item. Also, wherever possible, I recommend scheduling appointments to view items during daylight hours when you know neighbors will be around. Better yet, have someone else with you when you know you’re going to have people stopping by. To be honest, unlike with Freecyle, I never had a scary situation come up with someone off of Craigslist. In fact, I had a couple of buyers who I think were just as cautious about their own safety as I was being.

Expect most Craigslist buyers to want to pay with cash. If you’re not charging an even multiple of $20, make sure you have bills handy to make change. I would recommend setting your prices on items slightly higher than your bottom line as two thirds of the Craigslist buyers I dealt with want to haggle over the price.

If you’re selling items that will be difficult to move, make sure you prep your potential buyers that they should bring help with them to transport the item. If you don’t, odds are good you’re going to be doing some heavy lifting. (Just like I got suckered into with my bedroom set of drawers. Beware of young moms toting teething infants who show up with no muscle to help, that’s all I’m sayin’…)

Consignment Furniture Stores
I used a local consignment furniture store to deal with the last few pieces of furniture I was unable to sell off Craigslist. (My couch and loveseat, an entertainment center, and a bedframe.) I discovered both pros and cons to this approach.

Consignment stores are convenient if you don’t have much time to deal with individual buyers coming through your place. They normally pick up your items in one stop and deal with all the headaches of dealing with buyers.

Expect most consignment stores to take 50% of the sale price of an item. Some will also charge you an upfront appraisal and/or transport fee for your items. (I ended up paying $50 for my items.) On the plus side, the consignment store also priced my items for roughly twice what I was advertising them for on Craigslist. So, I’ll end up seeing roughly the same amount of cash for my items.

Most consignment stores issue checks once a month on items that have been sold. It’s not a bad idea to find out what day checks are being issued and call a few days before to check on the status of your items. The place I selected did eventually sell all my items where they were initially priced. But it took multiple phone calls to actually get the checks sent to me once the sales had been made.

Most consignment stores will ask for a couple of months to try to sell your item. If they are unsuccessful, they will give you the option of trying a lower price or donating your item to a local charity.

Gifting
I had a couple of treasured items that really didn’t serve a purpose in my new home but which I also couldn’t bear to simply sell. In most cases these were things that had been deeply meaningful to me at a certain point in my life, either because of the purpose they served or because they were a gift from someone dear to me.

Of all the things I had to downsize, these were probably the most difficult for me to figure out how to handle. Ultimately, I chose people whom I thought might appreciate them as much as I had in the past and offered them as gifts. Seeing my friends excitement at receiving something special at an unexpected time allowed me to finally let go.

Donation
In the process of downsizing, I significantly culled both my wardrobe and small household items. This resulted in several bags of clothing and boxes of small items (most of which were small appliances, knickknacks, or other decorations). Stronger souls might have had the fortitude to host a garage sale or to Freecycle all these. I didn’t. Plus, I have the excuse that I was on a tight schedule and didn’t have an open weekend.

For these items, I opted to donate them to local charities and take the tax write-off. Clothes and household items with to the Salvation Army. An old cell phone went to a local battered woman’s shelter. The collection of stuffed animals and toys given to me by various exes (minus a few that are really dear to me) went to Toys for Tots.

Freecycle
Many communities now have a Freecycle program. Freecycle allows users to advertise items they no longer want. People interested in the items contact you. Most groups expect items to be offered for free and the normal expectation is that the person receiving the item is responsible for pickup unless other arrangements are made with the donor.

I have seen just about everything from used coloring books, to fetish wear, to an antique clawfooted bathtub posted on my local Freecycle group. In my case, I used Freecyle mainly to offload: small pieces of furniture that weren’t valuable enough to try to sell; lawn equipment; pet supplies I couldn’t use with my new cat; and some household appliances like an old, box-style TV.

I’ve had both good and bad experiences with Freecycle, some of which I’ve written about previously. Freecycle appeals to me because its a way to given items you no longer need directly to people who can use them. However, I found using Freecycle to be more time and energy intensive than several of the other methods.

If you’re going to advertise items on Freecycle, I recommend posting them early in the day. Don’t necessary always chose the first person who responds to agree to give the item to. I found that in my local group there were a group of people who remained online all day and offered to take pretty much everything off my hands. After a couple of experiences accepting first responses, I learned to wait until I found someone who really seemed like they were going to benefit from the item. And who seemed on-the-ball about when and, perhaps even more importantly, how they planned to pick the item up. (Don’t get me started on the college student who tried to pick up an Ikea wardrobe with a bicycle.)

Only give directions to your place if there’s still several hours of daylight left. Otherwise, I guarantee you’re going to have someone tromping around your house later in the evening than you would like. (I learned this point when someone set off my security system banging around my porch at 1 AM picking up an old vacuum cleaner I was giving away.)

As a matter of safety (and also convenience for the person picking up the item) I also recommend wherever possible leaving items on your porch rather than inviting someone you don’t know into your home. And if you’re leaving several different items on your porch, label to whom each is supposed to go. I found this cut down on people showing up and helping themselves to items other than just what they were supposed to pick up.

“The Great Giveaway”
This one was pretty much my own invention. I have to confess to having a personal loathing of garage sales. I don’t like the experience of people showing up on my porch at 5 AM “to beat the rush” or sifting through my worldly possessions and trying to haggle over something priced at a quarter. But the potential to find homes for much of my remaining “misfit” items was too great to ignore, so I devised The Great Giveaway.

What this consisted of was inviting a bunch of local friends and college students I know to come by anytime during three different time slots/days I named. I clearly marked everything that was up for grabs. All people were expected to “pay” was their effort to cart the stuff away.

I used this method to divest myself of a bunch of craft supplies, camping gear, and old Target bookshelves I’ve been carting from place to place from my college days.

Undoubtedly many of those items could also have been donated but it would have taken multiple trips using my car. Moreover, I found it far easier to give away things like my treasured cache of fabric to friends than it would have been to strangers.

The Town Dump
For some, strange reason I’d never actually been to a dump before my downsizing project. I don’t know if I thought there would be seedy characters there doing drug-deals or what, but it was definitely an eye-opening experience to see the mound of stuff people leave behind. (Makes you think twice about the things you buy, I’ll tell you that.)

The trash was pretty much my channel of last resort, but I had two carloads of stuff like soggy cardboard boxes (that had never been successfully throw away after my last move), old xeroxed research articles, etc. that really had nowhere else to go.

For anyone else who’s never gone to their local dump, usually the way it works with residential vehicles is that they either charge you by the vehicle-load or they weigh you entering and leaving the dump and charge you based on weight. I ended up paying roughly $30 for two carloads.

Renting a Dumpster
As I progressed further into the process of downscaling, I realized I was going to either need to make several more trips to the dump (which was 45 minutes each way) or I was going to need to find a better way to manage the garbage.

I called my local trash service to see if it was possible to get a larger trash container and learned that most cities make available various size dumpsters for a rental charge. The dumpster you tend to find behind commercial establishments are referred to as “roll-offs”. I ended up renting something roughly half that size and paid approximately $100 total for a month’s rental, including delivery, pick-up, and disposal of the contents.

Depending on how much garbage you have to get rid of, you can also schedule additional trash pick-ups during the term of your rental. I didn’t have that much stuff, however.

The dumpster ended up being a true godsend in terms of getting rid of a large quantity of junk quickly. I only wish I’d discovered this option earlier in the process.

The only negative I experienced with the dumpster is people coming by to dumpster dive in the early mornings. More than anything, that was an issue of noise. It was actually a bit of a relief that people more motivated than I were finding homes for items I hadn’t managed to.

Photo Scanning Service
I had a large hatbox which is stuffed to the brim with pictures that has followed me from location to location since college. I always had the good intention of sorting through all the photos, organizing them, and putting them into albums. I felt guilty every time I caught sight of that box and, after ten years of this insanity, I decided that I refused to move the box one more time.

Instead of taking the box of photos with me to Portland, for a little under $100, I had a photo scanning service take my mound of photos and put them into nice, neat digital files which I could dump into my iPhoto application and sort to my heart’s content.

Now, admittedly, media formats will change over the years. But I figure it’s far easier for me to transfer my photos from an old computer to new one than to deal with fading paper pictures for which I no longer have negatives or any sort of organizational system.

Converting to MP3
Fortunately, I already had about 95% of my music collection converted to MP3′s on my laptop. I converted the rest to MP3′s over the course of a weekend while packing. Then I turned in my three boxes worth of CD’s to the local college used bookstore and donated the credit to a local literacy program.

While it’s possible that I might someday regret having given away my hard copies, I haven’t had a reason to use an actual CD in several years. I am also careful to back up my computer’s full hard drive on a regular basis. The cost-to-benefit ratio of continuing to cart and store those three boxes with me as back-up was just way too high.

Giving Away Books, Going Digital, and Shifting to the Library
Of all the things I did to downsize, drastically reducing my book collection was probably the hardest step I took. Over the course of about a week, I forced myself to go through all of my bookshelves and select the books I simply HAD to take with me to Portland. I packed them as I went.

Then, I pulled all the remaining books from my bookshelves and stacked them into boxes headed to the used bookstore. If anything else caught my eye in the process of packing the “donate” boxes, I set it off to the side. Then, at the very end, I went through this stack and picked out the true treasures I’d missed. Everything else went into a “donate box”.

Through this process I ended up reducing my collection by enough books to fill my PT Cruiser to the roof, with the back seat pulled out, TWICE.

To help ease the pain of separation, I took a portion of the credit I received for turning in my books and bought an Amazon Kindle, which allows me to acquire and store new books digitally.

As a further proactive step to try to slow my re-accumulation of books, I’ve forced myself to develop the habit of not buying any book if it’s available through my local public library system. There’s only been one book I’ve checked out from the library that I found valuable enough to subsequently purchase for my permanent collection.

The process of downsizing in a hurry is a pain in the ass. I won’t lie to you about that. But, hopefully some of my experiences may be useful to you. And, man, are you going to be glad you did it once your done.

The Greenest Dollar recently wrote an article that I think does a great job of summarizing the appeal many people find in micro homes.

Certainly, their descriptions of the ability to live simply and frugally resonated with me. If you’re curious about this, I’d encourage you to go check it out.

There’s also a list of tiny home designers/manufacturers at the bottom of the article.