We have food cooling in the refrigerator, a kettle warming on the stove, a gigantic sink, a table to eat at, silverware organized in a drawer.... Still to come in the kitchen are shelves, backsplash, pot racks, slide-out drawers in the half-finished pantry and, most critically, running water. 

Happily, the plumbing is progressing and we should have our wee-sized, point-of-use water heater hooked up before too long.

Kitchen specifics:

• Stove/oven: Our Origo 6000 is an alcohol-burning marine stove. Cooking would quickly draw down our solar-fueled batteries and we don't want to use propane for eco reasons. So, we've gone with clean-burning, renewable alcohol for cooking. It's tiny--but so far, so good.

• Refrigerator: Our Energy Star GE fridge is efficient enough that solar has no problem powering it. Yes, it's summer, and the sun is producing more energy now than it will in the winter, but Bill has us wired so the the highest energy users (hot water and refrigerator) can be plugged into the grid if needed. The 5.6 cubic feet of space seems plenty big enough for the two of us.

• Sink: We don't have a bathtub, so we wanted a large sink for anything big we'll want to wash. Our 32x19x10-inch Kraus sink takes up a lot of counter space, so we have inserts that drop in to cover the sink when we want to spread out in the kitchen.
• Counter-height table: The stainless base is from IKEA, intended for a stainless top but sold separately. We made our table top from sanded, stained pallet wood. Its the same dimensions as the table we assembled for the screen house, so we can put them together when we have more people over. The black/stainless stools are also from IKEA.
• Wine rack: Another pallet wood project. More on it here.
• Cabinets: We thought we'd need to build our own cabinets to get things just the way we wanted them (sink centered on the window; oven built-in, etc). Then we looked at an IKEA catalog and realized they had pieces that would fit perfectly and save us loads of time. We could have kept costs down by going with all-white doors and drawers, but we decided to splurge on stainless. The drawers are full pull-outs, and, by leaving two drawers off one unit, we were were able to build in our Origo stove/oven and even leave room for storage behind it.
• Pantry: Eventually the pantry space will have six pull-out shelves and one fixed shelf (on the top). It's our main kitchen storage and will hold glasses, dishes and appliances, as well as food. Shelf slides are from Home Depot. The three bottom sliding shelves will house antique wood boxes with some of our bigger kitchen items; the top three sliders will have pallet-wood rims to keep things in place.

Though our kitchen footprint isn't large, the space feels big to us. Maybe it's all the light, maybe the high ceilings, maybe the open floor plan...or maybe we've just adjusted our spatial perceptions!

We've been puzzling over power for our tiny house ever since we made the decision to build a house. We want to reduce our carbon footprint, so renewable energy seems a clear choice. But wind, solar and the like are sizable investments, and our budget is less "sizable." Lots of tiny housers go partially solar for lights and outlets, then augment with energy-efficient propane for cooking, heating and hot water units. But that re-raises the eco dilemma: we don't want to buy new technology (stoves, hot water heaters, etc) that rely on a non-renewable, fracking-associated fuel like propane. 

A solution that balances resources (both financially and ecologically) came to Bill as he was stringing wire through the framing of the house. Why not buy as much solar as we can afford now and take advantage of the generous offer of our landlord to tie into her grid electric for additional power. Hopefully, down the road, we'll move off the grid and go 100% renewable. 

Then we moved on to agonizing over what solar panels, batteries, charge controller and inverter to buy and where to buy them. We don't want the panels on our roof; the house isn't in an ideal spot for sun, and we want a system we can easily expand in the future. A ground-mounted system works for us. We researched and read about battery life and storage capabilities, about sun requirements, about pure sine wave inversion and...the learning curve was steep. So when we heard about an integrated, portable system that comes ready to plug in and power up, it seemed the right fit. It's more expensive than cobbling together our solar setup ourselves, but it meets all our needs for a reasonable markup.

And the winner is: the Solman Classic by SolSolutions. The all-in-one unit comes on wheels, so we will be able to orient it for maximum sun as often as we want. (Evidently, adjusting position to track the sun a couple times a day can bump up power production by as much as 30%.) We can also situate the unit in a field some distance from our shady tiny house site. The 3000 "usable" watts of battery storage (batteries store more watts than can be drawn from them effectively) should have no trouble handling our all-LED lights, outlets (largely for charging devices) and ceiling fans. 

For things that draw a lot of power, we have a hybrid approach. Cooking will be on our alcohol-burning stove/oven by Origo. We'll heat the house with our super-efficient wood-burning stove, the Kimberly by Unforgettable Fire. Our hot water heater and water pump (both still TBD!), Energy Star refrigerator and, should we decide we can't live without one, our microwave all get tied to the grid. The local electric cooperative has a less-than-stellar portfolio of energy: lots of coal power,  no renewable. But it's available on site we can always "un-tie" ourselves down the road. In the short term, we can move more over to solar if we see we're producing enough power.

To make this magic happen, Bill installed two breaker boxes. One will be powered by our battery bank, which in turn will be powered by our three solar panels. The second breaker box draws from the local electric grid. Once the two grounding rods get stuck in the ground and connected to the ground wires, we'll be all powered up. Now, if we only had walls and flooring and...

It's been months since we walked through the shell of our house and decided where we wanted outlets and lights, ceiling fans and refrigerator. But we put off getting started on the wiring because we didn't know where the power was going to come from. 

We would love to be able to say we were going 100% solar— but that's not in the budget. A solar panel/battery system large enough to power our entire house would run well over $10,000. Some tiny housers opt for propane for things like cooking, heating and cooling. But we'd like to stay away from fossils fuels and all things fracking-related. We have the less-expensive option of being grid-tied to our friend's house, but one of our goals for the house is to move toward sustainability, so tying into a power system that derives much of its power from coal plants doesn't seem quite ideal, either.

Our stalemate has finally been broken. We've decided to buy what solar we can afford now: a modest system capable of powering all our outlets (largely for charging devices), LED lighting and ceiling fans. For now, we'll tie our energy "hogs" (water pump and water heater, for example) to the grid. Our goal will be to move all our energy to sustainable sources down the road, once we've finished with the expense of our initial build.

So, we started stringing wire! The miles (or so it seems) of yellow wire will lead to two breaker boxes: one will draw power from our battery bank, the other from the grid. The GFI outlet in the bathroom has a dedicated wire. The ceiling fans have their wire. The kitchen lighting another wire. Before we string any more lines (for kitchen outlets, bedroom plugs, etc.) we'll tape labels on the existing wires to keep everything straight. 

Bill's done a bit of wiring on houses past. What he doesn't know he looks up in building codes and watches YouTube demos. I have everything to learn. Luckily, I have a patient teacher. Though we're not at the point of putting in plugs yet, Bill tutored me step-by-step through the process so I would have a better understanding of the entire wiring job. Time to get back down there and power things up....

We haven't posted anything about building lately...because, well, we haven't been working outdoors much these sub-freezing days. (And there was that wedding in Mexico to blissfully distract us.) But we've still made progress, spending time reading and calculating and dreaming—and shopping. We've made a boatload of decisions: from lighting and heating to our wall paint and our composting toilet. 

Some of our picks:

The Kimberly Wood Stove. This sleek, stainless "gasifier" wood stove burns efficiently and cleanly, with less than half the emissions allowed by the EPA. It could heat a space six times the size of our tiny house, and one load of wood can burn up to 8 hours. So, as long as it works as advertised, we should be toasty all winter next year. Not to mention, we can do a little cooking atop it and, if we opt to buy a thermoelectric generator, we can produce a little power to boot.

Origo 6000 Oven/Stove. Electric stoves are energy hogs; using one would tax our solar/battery system (still in the planning stage). While some "tiny housers" opt for propane cooking, we're trying to steer clear of fossil fuels associated with fracking. The Origo runs on clean-burning, non-pressurized, denatured alcohol. We were lucky enough to see a couple in use at the Tiny House Conference we attended last April. Our two-burner stove and oven is designed for boats—but it's also a great choice for off-the-grid tiny houses. It may take us an extra minute to boil a pot of water, but we think it will be a well-spent minute.

BioLite Basecamp. No more propane grills for us. This wood-burning grill makes good use of the sticks that fall to the ground all around our tiny house. A built-in thermoelectric generator charges the internal fan that improves combustion and enables a cleaner burn. Plus, it generates enough extra energy to power its built-in light and charge a phone.

Ecovita Privy Kit. We're building our own composting toilet. Not the most glamorous of subjects—but quite essential. The short story is that keeping Number One separate from Number Two makes things easier and neater. This privy kit will work in combo with a plastic gas can, plastic bucket, coco fiber and a wood base we're working on. Enough said...

Yes, the day has finally come...we have inhabited the screen house. We decided to go low-tech: no power source and no running water. We use candle lanterns for lighting, a cooler as refrigerator and a Berkey cistern for water. As we gear up for the Tiny House build, the screen house has become our refuge, our socializing spot, our work room—and we even bought cots to try it out as a sleeping porch.