On a silly note, I stumbled across the $timator website last night where you can supposedly calculate the “real website value”.  Naturally, I had to plug in Coming Unmoored.  I came in around $5,000 which is a far cry from Amazon.com’s $619 million.

$timator even goes so far as to provide a dispassionate report of your website’s charms and failings. Apparently I have great internal and external linkage and search engine recognition, but I’m not, ahem, terribly popular with the web crowd at large. (Why do I suddenly feel like I’m back in middle school and just been told I’m not invited to sit with the cool kids at lunch?)

Of course, being in the middle of renovations, my brain immediately translated my web-value number to all the new fixtures for the bathroom plus a on demand water heater. Not that I really think anyone would want to buy my little corner of cyberspace, but it made me laugh.

I’ll be glad when I can stop converting everything into dollar values.

“The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men
Gang aft agley.”

–Robert Burns

Don’t ask me why, but I seem to have an preternatural ability to find trouble.

Things start simply enough… I find some bright, shiny, new fascination and I proceed to track down any and all available information about it. But frequently, in following the path of delectable tidbits, I forget to look up and take notice of my broader surroundings. And, sooner or later, this eventually leads to me stumbling into trouble.

I have a sneaking suspicion that if I were ever cast as a character in a fairy tale, I would be inside the witch’s oven and approaching a temperature of 350 degrees before I looked up and muttered to myself: “Hmm. That’s strange. What happened to the really cool gingerbread house? Wasn’t I supposed to be checking out the licorice gables? Where, exactly, am I?”

All of this is my feeble attempt at leading up to an rational explanation of why, in my recent pursuit of researching earthships in Taos, New Mexico, I found myself buried in a snow drift up to the hood of my rented Jeep on an unnamed, unlighted, road twenty miles outside of Taos around 10 PM at night with a snowstorm rolling in.

In my defense, when I got stranded on a back road outside of Taos, I had a full tank a gas, several layers of warm clothes, a 4-wheel–drive vehicle, a laptop with a cellular modem and 12-volt adaptor, a AAA card that was up-to-date, and cell service on both of my two phones.

So I didn’t panic when I first realized I seemed well and thoroughly stuck. Things started to look a little more grim, however, when I called AAA and had to spend the better part of 20 minutes trying to explain first to the customer service rep and then her manager, what the hell an earthship was and why I couldn’t give them a name of the road on which I was stranded. And, once I managed to successful navigate that hurdle, it turned out that the ONE tow service AAA used in the area wasn’t answering their phone. AAA couldn’t give me even a rough estimate when they might be able to get someone out to try to find and assist me.

I thanked AAA for their time and asked them to call me back when they were able to reach the tow service or state patrol. Then, I dialed my friend Warren Faidley. In case you’ve never heard that name, Warren Faidley is the madman you see on CNN reporting from the heart of most bits of bad weather in the United States. He’s a journalist who makes his living as a storm chaser. Warren’s idea of a good time is reporting from the eye of a hurricane in the Gulf Coast up to his chin in water with nothing more than his flashlight for light.

Warren and I have been friends for several years, now. And, more than once, Warren has come flying unsolicited to my rescue. Sometimes even when I actually needed the help. One of Warren’s recent projects has been writing a book titled: The Ultimate Storm Survival Handbook. So Warren seemed like the natural next number to call.

The phone call went something like this… “Warren, hey, it’s Steph. Oh, not much. Look–I don’t want you to go into DefCon 5 or anything. I’m okay. Really. Don’t freak out or anything. But I seem to find myself buried in a snowdrift outside of Taos. And I don’t think anybody’s going to be coming to help for awhile.”

“Uh, yeah. I know you gave me a copy of your book. But, uh, I really didn’t make it past the section on flooding. I sort of skim-read from there. Would you mind reminding me what the hell I’m supposed to do in a snowstorm? The only thing I remember from that section is that, in a pinch, I can drink my own urine to stay hydrated. But I don’t think I’m quite there, yet.”

To his credit, once he finished laughing his ass off, Warren patiently walked me through making sure my exhaust pipe was uncovered so I wouldn’t gas myself out if I ran the Jeep through the night to stay warm and how to try to extricate myself from the drift using my vehicle’s four-wheel-drive. He also coached me on how to make the Jeep’s battery and gas last as long as possible.

About that time in Warren’s pep talk, someone with sharp eyes who was driving along HWY 64, spotted my hazard lights in the distance and braved the unmarked side road to see if I was okay. He was an old-generation Taos native on his way back to his ranch in a battered old pickup truck with chains.

With my Good Samaritan’s help, I was able to back the Jeep out of the drift, and sheepishly find my way back to the correct unmarked road that held the earthship where I was staying the night.

Warren made me call him back as soon as I was done dealing with my rescuer to assure him I hadn’t been carried off into white slavery. And then again when I’d found the right earthship.

As I thanked Warren for his help and wished him a goodnight, his parting comment was: “I’ll say one thing about you Steph. Your calls are never boring.” So I guess I have that one small thing going for me, right?

Anyway, I’ll fill you in on how I managed to get myself stuck in a snowdrift in the first place when I post my review of the Hut Earthship later this week. I think that’s enough self-humbling details for one day.

I’m learning at lot about the best way to work with contractors. Mainly, I’m afraid, by making every mistake in the book along the way. (Of course, a good friend of mine who used to fight martial arts competitively insists that pain is the best, most efficient educator there is. If he’s right, I think I deserve a PhD in home renovation by now.)

Anyway, I’ve decided to share some of my hard-earned wisdom. If someone were facing a significant renovation project like mine, and I was only able to give them once piece of advice, this is what it would be: Never, EVER, pay a contractor more money than what they say is the absolute minimum they need, right now, to either start or keep a project going. Let me tell you why…

Should you pay a contractor up front what they give you as the total estimated amount of the project, I pretty much guarantee that they’re going to be in a lot less hurry to finish you project (and, thus, be able to ask for the rest of the money).  Especially if they have other projects which are competing with yours on which they can collect more money if they finish.

Moreover, the costs for renovations seem to magically expand in some particularly ruthless, evil version of Parkinson’s law. Plainly stated: remodeling costs will expand to what your contractor estimates to be the total size of your wallet. Trust me, you are much better off if your contractor/builder thinks it was a real struggle to come up with the 50% up-front than that you didn’t break a sweat writing a check for the full project before it’s even started.

One final advantage to paying in increments is it lets you keep better tabs on whether or not you’re running over-budget and provides you the opportunity to make mid-course corrections rather than simply being keelhauled when a bill for the final tab shows up.

Lest you all begin admiring me for my profound depths of wisdom, let me confess that that’s so NOT how I handled the latest round of things with Kenny…

At the beginning of this phase of renovations, Kenny gave me an estimate of $10,000 to replace the windows and doors, siding, and roof panels. I wrote him a check for $10,000 thinking that would be “easier” and that it was less likely I would burn through the $5000 that was sitting in my savings account waiting for him to finish the project.

What followed was v-e-r-y slow progress on the house. Followed by Kenny breaking his leg and being unable to finish the project for several months, and me being in a position of not being able to hire someone else to finish the project because the money had already been spent.

And now that the project is finally wrapping up, I’ve received a bill for an additional $6,000. This, after months of asking if we were over-budget at all and not getting a response. Oh, and by the way, he needs the money NOW or he’s not going to be able to do any more work on my house. Never mind that I waited, reasonably patiently, after he broke his leg and couldn’t put the new roof on my house, leaving my house without a roof for two months during the rainy season.

(Can you tell I’m just a teeny, little bit cranky today?)

Anyway, I guess I know where my tax returns are going. Sigh. The check went out in the mail today and I’m going to do my best to follow my own advice in the future.

For those of you who are into Twitter, you can now find me as Unm00red. I’ve also got updates posting in the bottom of the sidebar if you’re curious but don’t want me filling up your Twitbin.

Be forewarned that my Twitters may be even more eclectic than my blog entries.

(And for those of you who this entry is complete gibberish, please move along. This is not the entry you were looking for.)

P.S. If anyone can help me figure out why the bullet points for my Tweets aren’t aligned with the others in my sidebar, can you shoot me an email? (stephanie.reiley at gmail)  It’s driving me nuts.

Some of you may recall that I have teeny-tiny crush on Tim Ferriss. (Well, okay, perhaps just comfortably short of being worthy of a restraining order. But who am I to get hung up on details?)

Anyway, as part of the promotion campaign for Leo Babauta’s book, The Power of Less, he just posted an interview with Ferriss that is well worth a listen.

What I found the most interesting about the interview is how Ferriss has consciously chosen to architect his environment in such a way as to make it almost impossible to focus on anything other than what he’s decided is his top-priority at that given time. I’m talking monastic-level severity.

I’ve spent several hours today mentally kicking around his approach to work and I still can’t decide if I’m intrigued by his methods or terrified by them on a deeply visceral level. What’s punching my buttons is the realization that the place in which I’ve traditionally been able to achieve a flow state and be my most productive is 180-degrees diametrically-opposed to Ferriss’.  (About the only thing that makes this a little less true is he apparently likes to have a movie running silently in the background.)

I am an information addict and I tend to want to be connected to what I deem my important sources of information at all times while I’m working. I want to be able to flip to my news feeds, email, or the phone number of my cat’s astrologist with a single keystroke.

I normally am reading somewhere between 5 and 10 books simultaneously. Bookstores actually send me thank-you cards around the holidays.  (Although their ardor has begun to cool somewhat since I started getting roughly 95% of my books from the library.)

It’s a necessary survival-skill for anyone I date to learn how to safely navigate around the circumference of books, notepads, and laptops (generally there’s three running simultaneously) surrounding my usual roosting spot without either killing themselves or unplugging anything critical that will result in me killing them.  (Yes, the three laptops are after I downsized my belongings.  There used to be four.)

After reading The Four Hour Work Week, I tried scaling down the times I checked email. I decided to start small and simply have my machines only check every half-hour rather than every minute. I think I made it a day and half before I started experiencing Delirium tremens. People I’m close to generally know they can fire off an email at any time of day or night and stand at least even odds of getting a response from me in under a minute.

At this point, I’m not sure I could write a grammatically-correct sentence without simultaneously having to keep a yowling Balinese cat from stepping on anything critical on the keyboard.

I could go on, but my main point is that I have made the conscious choice to work in an environment where there are almost always multiple demands on my attention at any given time.  Of course, it is also highly possible that my chaotic working style may be one of the contributing factors to why I felt the need to seriously simplify my life in the last year.

I can follow the argument in Babauta’s The Power of Less that you’re likely to have more energy to direct at a particular goal if you tackle only one goal at a time. Certainly a finite amount of energy directed at a single target is more effective, right? And no one is given more than 24 hours in a day.

I guess I just don’t buy the assumption that the amount of energy we have is a constant whether we’re working on one goal or multiple ones. In terms of my personal proclivities, I’m not certain how much enthusiasm I’d have for any one project without others hovering interestingly in the wings.

Bright, shiny distractions are an energetic shot-in-the-arm to me. They give me enough juice to keep plugging away at whatever I currently need to get done.  If I shackled myself away in a room somewhere safe from all distractions, I think I’d feel compelled to chew off my own leg in under five minutes. Then I would hobble away and refuse to think again upon whatever it was that led me to that situation in the first place.  (Thank god ADD was just becoming a popular concept when I was a kid or they would have drugged me to the gills with Ritalin. As it was, I spent most of my public school education banished to the school library.)

Of course, I also think I’ve chosen to engineer my life in ways to weed out what I perceive to be meaningless distractions. I don’t own a T.V. I refuse to track or even understand anything related to American sports teams. I couldn’t tell you if the Dallas Cowboys are a baseball or rugby team. (Actually, I know the answer to that one. I’m just trying to make a couple of male friends howl in protest.) If you force me into a mall, I shop like a man with fifteen minutes left to live, and I’ll never give a damn about anything involving a shoe with heels. I couldn’t bowl a strike or make Baked Alaska if my life depended on it. I am capable of sitting with a friend or loved one in an hour or more of companionable silence without feeling the need to fidget. And I absolutely refuse to give even another minute of my life to trying to understand differential equations.

So I guess I’m capable of being zen-like in particular areas. But abandon my books, email, and newsfeeds?? Inconceivable. (To borrow a quote from The Princess Bride.)

Still, I catch myself spending quite a bit of time and energy considering things like Babauta’s book and Ferriss’ interview wondering if there is, in fact, a better way I could be choosing to manage and use my limited time on the planet… I’ve got a feeling that this may be an area where I continue to evolve my thinking over the next couple of years.

And, before my extended navel-gazing on a Friday night gets totally insufferable–yes, I still think Ferriss is munchable.

(Image from tinksworld.org)

So, wow. Since Karen Datko’s story on MSN Money came out yesterday, Coming Unmoored has been getting a bunch of new visitors.

Let me start by saying thank you for stopping by my little corner of the internet. Also, I wanted to make sure that those of you who have an interest in tiny/small house living find the resources you need. I would encourage you to check out my small home resource page for a bunch of good links to other websites and blogs you might want to check out that weren’t mentioned in Ms. Datko’s article. There’s also some great ideas of books you may want to check out in the bookstore.

If you’re just starting out learning about the Small Home Movement, you’ll probably want to check out the Small House Society run by Gregory Johnson.

Also, a fantastic blog that will give you plenty of ideas of different options people are pursuing is Kent Griswold’s Tiny House Blog.

There are two yahoogroup lists that may also be of use to you: smallhousesocietyonline and TinyHouses

Please enjoy your visit and let me know if I can answer any questions or help you in any way.

I’m happy to report that I just heard from Kenny that they’ve managed to get the new roof on my house. (I plan to go light a stick of incense in homage to whatever minor deity is in charge of Portland weather just as soon as I finish this entry.)

You know the project triangle that consists of good, fast, and cheap? The one where you can pick any combination of two elements but you have to forgo the other? Well, Kenny is proving to be good and cheap. (“Cheap”, anyway, as far as anything involving a contractor goes.) Fast, however, is another story. Which has caused me more than a couple of sleepless nights knowing that my roof was ripped off my house during the rainy season in Oregon. (For a detailed explanation of how that came to happen, please see this earlier post.)

Kenny’s emailed updates arrive in a style I’ve come to think of as Kenny-ese. Here’s an excerpt from the latest one: “I have alittle more siding to do on the tops, vary small peices and trying not to waist to much material, the little cuts waist lost and that material is expensive and trying to use as many peices as I can.”

To be clear, I’m in no way knocking the emails. Kenny, with his AOL account, is probably the most technologically-advanced River Rat I’ve dealt with so far on the house. When I’ve mentioned to other people working on the house that the easiest way to get hold of me is usually by email, the reactions were so shocked you would think I’d just suggested they fry up the newest puppy in the marina for breakfast.

Anyway, I think Kenny is holding out on me for any new pictures until the final bits of siding are done. He may even wait until the deck railing and flooring are in. I’m not sure. I’m willing to wager, though, that the next spiffy set of pictures show up the same time as his next bill for labor does.

In other news, it looks like this blog got a mention today on MSN MoneyBlog in a article titled In Praise of Teeny Tiny Houses.

Viva la Teeny Tiny Revolution!

While not small in scale, its design and locale are too gorgeous for me to resist. This beautiful floating home is a project by MOS (architects Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample). It sits just off a remote island on Lake Huron in Ontario, Canada. The project began in 2005.

The house was built offsite on Lake Huron and then towed into place once complete.

Additional information can be found at Arch Daily.

Photos by Florian Holzherr

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!  I have new siding. I am very excited! (Note all the exclamation points!!!!)

Kenny emailed me yesterday with a bunch of photos of the new siding on the house along with the skeleton of the new staircase to the rooftop deck. I haven’t had a staircase since last roughly last April. I’m not sure if anyone other than myself can relate, but this feels like major progress. I was so excited by the new round of photos that I woke up around 3:30 AM and had to check my email to confirm I hadn’t dreamed it.

Now Kenny has safe access to the roof so he can get the new roofing on. (You can see the new metal roofing sitting in piles on the deck.) After that, he needs to add the new stairway and deck railing and the outside is done.

My friends who know my decorating tastes will probably be highly amused by the generous use of beige. In my defense, I would like to point out that the roof will be green, the railing white, and I plan to bury the deck in colorful plants come spring. (Lots of purples, pinks, and greens.) Have faith.

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.