Living in a tiny house makes life more intentional. Shutting a door to hide a messy room isn't an option when your house is one room. Tossing excess into a closet isn't possible when every inch of your one closet already plays a role. Things that don't get used need an exit plan. Things that we do use need a place where they belong. They also have to be easy to access: nothing stashed in the back, nothing buried under a pile.
So when I started my Master Naturalist class and suddenly had six new reference books, a three-ring binder, a journal and pencil case, etc., I left them stacked on the kitchen table the first couple days, moving them every time I sat down to eat. I needed to come up with a storage solution. No room to spare in the kitchen. No space in the bathroom. The armoire is fully committed; the bedroom shelves too high to be convenient. Then, voila! I remembered the sofa. I had originally planned to build a new base for our old love seat to create storage drawers underneath. When we realized we didn't need the extra storage, we never built the drawers—but there's still a little unused real estate under the seating.
Having room to stash left-over building materials in our friend's garage (thanks once again, Susan) means I can squirrel away scraps from projects. I dug around in the garage, and found beautiful old boards already sanded and stained. In an hour, I put a box together—just the right size to fit all my books and just the right height to slide easily under the sofa. Now, I can pull out my Forest Ecology tome or read over notes for the next class sitting right here on the sofa and, more importantly, I can stow them away neatly in a second. (I'm still on the lookout for a handle, that will make pulling the box in and out even easier.)
It's not that we don't have "things" now that we live in a tiny house. It's just we think more about what we keep and what we acquire. And everything we do keep needs its own home within our home.
So when I started my Master Naturalist class and suddenly had six new reference books, a three-ring binder, a journal and pencil case, etc., I left them stacked on the kitchen table the first couple days, moving them every time I sat down to eat. I needed to come up with a storage solution. No room to spare in the kitchen. No space in the bathroom. The armoire is fully committed; the bedroom shelves too high to be convenient. Then, voila! I remembered the sofa. I had originally planned to build a new base for our old love seat to create storage drawers underneath. When we realized we didn't need the extra storage, we never built the drawers—but there's still a little unused real estate under the seating.
Having room to stash left-over building materials in our friend's garage (thanks once again, Susan) means I can squirrel away scraps from projects. I dug around in the garage, and found beautiful old boards already sanded and stained. In an hour, I put a box together—just the right size to fit all my books and just the right height to slide easily under the sofa. Now, I can pull out my Forest Ecology tome or read over notes for the next class sitting right here on the sofa and, more importantly, I can stow them away neatly in a second. (I'm still on the lookout for a handle, that will make pulling the box in and out even easier.)
It's not that we don't have "things" now that we live in a tiny house. It's just we think more about what we keep and what we acquire. And everything we do keep needs its own home within our home.