When the subject of our tiny house comes up with people we've just met, two questions pop up more than others: Does your composting toilet smell? Do you have to climb a ladder to get to your bed? The answer to both: No.

We've waxed on about our kitchen and answered the toilet question in past blogs, but we haven't said much about our amazing ground-floor (!) bedroom.  Things are just about where we want them now, with the big exception of installing our wood stove—and, with winter around the corner, we're getting on that.

The bedroom has a compact 11x8' footprint. All our clothes, shoes, backpacks, accessories, jewelry, scarves, and hats, plus books, photos, art and more share the space with our bed. That's possible thanks to a big IKEA wardrobe, an IKEA bed frame with built-in drawers, two above-window shelves and our newly crafted shoe shelf. 

We had planned on building the bed platform and closet ourselves and just went to IKEA for ideas. But when we saw they had solutions that fit our needs almost exactly that cost the same or less than our DIY approach, and they could be up and running in a day (instead of weeks!), we broke out the credit card and brought home the IKEA pieces. The Brimnes bed frame has two massive, slide-out drawers on each side that hold all our jeans, T-shirts, sweaters—and more. The Pax wardrobe fits all our hung clothes; plus, it has three drawers for our socks, etc, a slide-out shelf for a few shoes and a shelf with plenty of room for our "charging station." (Via a small hole cut through the side of the wardrobe, we plug all our phone and computer chargers into a four-plug outlet we installed with just this in mind.)

We went with all black wood in the bedroom, to give the space its own look and feel. The white walls make a great gallery space. A little less lovely to look at—but extremely useful—is a wall of hooks for jackets, backpacks, etc.

​Please click on the pictures below for more details.

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!

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.