This post was going to be "Winter Is Coming" if I had gotten around to writing it as planned in October. The good news is that we actually started winterizing ahead of the first frost this year, even if we didn't get around to writing about it. We may have finally learned our lesson—that winter comes whether we've insulated our water pipes or not, etc.

So, what did "winterizing" mean this year?

Protecting pipes. We doubled up on the insulation that protects the water intake on the house--a winter weak spot in the past. We also put a new light bulb to heat the cavity between the joists where a water pipe crosses under the floor to the kitchen sink.

Anti-freeze measures. When it's not freezing, we love having hoses by the deck and the garden. They have to be shut off and drained when the temps dip. We also empty the big Berkey water filter we use as our water supply in the screen house, and we empty the cooler we use as a back-up refrigerator much of the year. Clay pots of flowers look great on the deck for half the year; leaving them outside in the winter filled with soil means cracked pots. Now, they all get emptied and stored away till spring. All of this has become more routine as we live in the house longer.

Loading up on firewood. This one seems obvious, but we've gotten caught under-prepared in the past. To fuel our Kimberly wood stove, we have one box inside the house, four small cans at the ready outside the door and one big trashcan of pre-cut, kiln-dried wood in our friend's garage. This also means walking around and picking up sticks, breaking them to size and loading up the wood boxes outside the house.

"Glassing" the screen house. Last year, we tested out installing seasonal Lexan over some of the windows of our screen house. It's expensive but it worked. We invested $2500 in Lexan sheets and cut them to size to cover all the windows and doors. Our thinking? We'll keep snow out, and we'll drastically extend the season we can enjoy the screen house. Sunny days heat up the space, greenhouse-style. We're even experimenting to see if more plants can winter over inside there.

Clearing the deck. We designed our deck so that we can push snow under the railing. But you can't do that if there are things in the way. Besides putting away the pots, we moved the rocking chairs and dining table and chairs into covered space (that same garage) for the winter. In the future, they'll be able to go right under the deck, once we set up covered storage there.

Topping off the tanks. For the winter we fill three 78-gallon tanks with water, as needed, so that the pipe from our water source doesn't freeze again. We turn on the super-efficient heater set to go on when the temps drop to 35 degrees and turn off when the space reaches 40 degrees.

I have never been known for my patience. In the past, when I wanted something done, I wanted it done yesterday. Building this tiny house has been something of a lesson in patience. Take our new slate, for example.

We built our tiny house about ten feet away from the screen "house" we built first. The screen house is an open air living space for about 8 months of the year. It's part of what makes our tiny house not feel quite so tiny, and we walk between our two living spaces several times a day. In the screen house, we have a primitive kitchen (cooler for a fridge, a sink that empties into a bucket), a table for dining and a much-used lounge area.  But back to the slate...

Two sets of stairs lead down from the tiny house to stairs up to one of the screen house doors. For more than a year, we've had to step down on to dirt or mulch to cross between our living spaces. (Imagine all my dirty feet and socks...) We had a few hundred ideas about what to do in the gap between the houses, and we actually took the time to weigh them. What would each cost? Would they reflect or clash with what's already on site? How much time would be required, time taken away from other projects? We thought long and hard about what we wanted, and we came to this conclusion: we wanted a walkway of slate slabs between the houses.

The next lesson in patience came when we looked at the cost of slate slabs. At local nurseries and hardware stores, we found prices between $200 and $300 to buy enough slabs the size and thickness we wanted. The walkway wasn't enough of a priority to justify the hit to our bank account. That's when Bill turned, once again, to Craigslist.

He kept his eye out for slate (among a few other wish-list items) and, after a few months, he found it. We paid $15 a slab for pieces larger than what we had been looking at. The walkway cost us only $30, once we realized we could make use of a couple pieces of slate we already had on hand.  The 2x3' slabs were so reasonable, we spent another $60 and had enough to put slate at the bottom of another set of stairs off the deck and under a little table and chairs that had previously teetered on dirt.

That's neither our first nor, hopefully, our last Craigslist find. The set of wicker furniture that we lounge on in the screen house cost less for all four pieces than the price of some new chairs. And then there's the beautiful, metal Emu chairs and table on the deck—in great shape and also a fraction of the price if bought new. We've also scored free landscaping stones and lumber. 

Yes, you have to wade through a boatload of ridiculously hideous and/or overpriced items, not to mention scams, on Craigslist—but, with a little patience, Craigslist can be the tiny house builder's best friend.

We took a deep breath after we finished the deck project, and it wasn't until we had a couple families coming to visit that we felt motivated enough to tackle the next project: proper stairs leading to the kitchen door. Our "construction grade" stairs (narrow and railing-less) needed a safer, more aesthetically pleasing replacement.

In the end, we decided to build a deck-lette just outside the door, with stairs leading down the side of the house. This way, we could save the space between the tiny house and the screen house as a courtyard of sorts and have three sets of stairs leading to the same landing. Once we score a few more squares of slate to add to the two salvaged pieces we already have, we'll be able to cross from the deck to the screen house, or the screen house to the tiny house, stepping across slate instead of the ground.

We live at the edge of a forest. We wanted the house to suit its natural setting, so we looked for a wood stain that would blend with the trees around us. While the hue we picked ("Pewter") didn't turn out quite as gray as the bark we were hoping to match, we've been happy with the color.

​Putting up the deck—in all its new wood glory—reminded us what a difference the stain makes. We're happy to say now that the deck blends in a little better these days, thanks to another gallon of stain.

Now, there's just those railings to finish...and vertical garden to plant...and...

We have 250 square feet of living space inside our house. We've added another 420 square feet of living space outside—otherwise known as our deck. Unlike many tiny houses built on wheels, the plan is for ours to stay put. Technically, the deck is freestanding (therefore, not a part of the house) and modular (sections could be lifted out whole), but we have no intention of packing up and moving either the deck or the house.

We live on a semi-terraced hill. Before the deck, the land outside our sliding door sloped down, leaving a gap between the ground and door. (While running around one day, our grandson slid down through that gap and landed under the trailer our house is built on.) On the opposite side of the house, another door opened four feet above the steeply sloped ground. (Perching on ladders to install the siding on that side of the house was near impossible.) Now, we walk out both doors onto a solid, level surface—and no one's slipped down under the trailer again.

Still a work in progress, the deck wraps around three sides of the house. In fair weather, it will function as our second kitchen and dining room. We've already hauled our wood box (a reclaimed shipping crate) onto the deck and sketched out plans for a table we'll build beside it for our wood-burning grill. When it's time to eat, we have a steel table and chairs (a great Craigslist find).

Next month, we'll install planting beds on the sunny, southeast side of the deck so we can transplant  oregano, lemon verbena, rosemary, sage and mint already growing in our garden—and plant new basil, cilantro and more.  Whether cooking inside or out, we'll have fresh herbs on hand.

In the meanwhile, we have railings to finish and the entire deck to stain. (We waited to let the wood dry out completely so it can absorb the stain; eventually it will be the same color as the house.) We also have earth to sculpt and landscape, so that mud stops washing down the hill onto the deck outside our sliding door. Oh, and there's also the stairs to build outside the kitchen door.

So, lots of work still to go on the deck, but we're looking forward to completing it. Between the screen house that's already in place and the deck that's almost finished, we plan on living in our 580 square feet of outdoor "rooms" as much (or more!) than we do inside these four walls. Here's to temperate weather!

Please click on the photos below for more details.

We had finished three sides of our tiny house when winter hit hard last year. The final side was a challenge even in fair weather. The ground drops away on that side of the house, and balancing on extension ladders to nail boards and screw in metal panels proved difficult and downright dangerous with snow on the ground. We decided we'd wait to finish the siding until we built a deck, which would give us a stable platform. For months, we did our best to ignore the Tyvek house wrap still exposed on that side of the house.
 
Other things took priority. Wiring the house. Plumbing for sinks and the shower. Walls. Ceiling fans and lights. Finally, this September (more than a year after the start of our build) we turned our attention to the exterior of the house again. Bill designed a deck we could build in pieces and take apart, if that ever became a necessity. As soon as we had the platform in place—even before the boards were screwed in place or the railing built—we installed the rest of the house siding (no more Tyvek!) and finished the eaves. Now it feels as though the house is complete.
 
From our first sketches, we had corrugated metal and pine boards in mind for siding. We like the mix of "industrial modern" and "rural rustic" for our mountain setting. The materials echo the construction of many of the farm buildings in the area—plank barns and metal sheds. They have the added advantage of being affordable choices. Sheets of metal run around $20; eight-foot shiplap boards cost less than $10 each.
 
Mixing the two materials helped break up the 24-foot-long sides of the house. And it made it possible to give each side a distinctive look. One side, the side that faces the home of our friend/generous landlady, has only wood because she's not a fan of the metal. Two sides have their own pop of color—green and blue doors.
 
Form follows function in our design. We wanted a home flooded with natural light, so we worked a total of 11 windows and three glass doors into the design of our 250-square-foot house. Putting windows at the same height and keeping their proportions similar hopefully gives the house a sense of balance even though there's a lot of asymmetry going on.
 
Now that our house has four finished sides, we're working full time on getting the deck finished—more on that later.
 
Please click on the images below for more details.

One of the reasons our house doesn't feel so tiny is that we like to live outside as much as possible. We already have our wonderful screen house, where we often eat and more often sit to take a break and drink a beer (or two). Now, we're started work on our next outdoor "room": the deck.

Eventually, the plan is to have the deck wrap around three sides of the house. At this point, we have one section in place outside our big sliding door. Already, I love it. Stepping out onto the deck instead of mud on a rainy day feels so civilized. 

Time to build a little more decking...

We didn't think about building a deck when we were designing our house. Then one day we looked out at the forest stretching out behind our tiny house site, and knew that view deserved a deck. We erased a window on our graph-paper design and drew in a door instead. A door to that one-day deck. "One day" became "this day" when we realized how much easier the deck would make finishing the eaves and siding on the last Tyvek-ed surface of our home; the side that drops off steeply into the forest. And, so, we've started the deck, and we work on it whenever the temps get high enough to thaw the ground. 

Bill's design for the deck makes it a stand-alone structure, not connected to the tiny house. Eventually we hope to use the underside for storage. A second section of decking will eventually wrap around the side of the house, covering the trailer hitch. And then, perhaps, a deck between the screen house and the tiny house, where we could put the large wooden shipping box we found in the woods. And, of course, decking on the fourth side of the house would be nice outside our patio door. It's winter time, and we dream of decks—many decks—and the lovely weather when we'll use them.