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.

The wonderful thing about telling people you're a scavenger is that they offer you materials and items you didn't even know you needed. Some of those items you graciously turn down. (It's easy: Just remind them you have a teeny, tiny house.) Other offerings are pure treasure. For example, the vintage folding lawn chairs that had been tossed in the corner of a room in an old house friends are selling.

"They're broken," they told me, when I was walking through the house with them after they'd offered to let us scavenge some old boards. 

But unfolding the chairs, I could see that that the wood frames were intact. Only the fabric back and seating were moldy and torn. I realized they'd be perfect extra seating for us, because we could fold them away when not in use. I even knew where: there's a small space in the screen house between the "sink" and the wall.

I happily took possession of the chairs; then they sat in the garage for months while I researched upholstery for them. I didn't have a sewing machine, so I was looking for fabric the exact width I needed. Or maybe I would pay someone to put fabric on them. Both options proved expensive.

Then one day my sister Jill offered me a bolt of upholstery she wasn't going to use. (Note: she had already covered a seat cushion in the fabric for me. Thanks, Jill!) I accepted it. With nothing to lose, I figured I could experiment with replacing the fabric. I folded over ends instead of sewing. I stapled away.

After a couple false starts, I have two of the chairs in use. (One more to finish up today!) We can pull them out to seat guests in the screen house, on the deck or in the tiny house. Now, the next time we have ten people in the tiny house, the last two to arrive won't have to stand!

"But where do you work?" 

I get asked that question regularly by people who learn I work from home, and that home for me is a tiny house on wheels. The truth is it's not hard to work from anywhere (a tiny house, a coffee shop, a bed...) when your main tool of the trade is a laptop. But it's also true that I frequently need a printer, a disc drive, a back-up drive, paper, stamps, pens and all the rest.

That's where the box comes into this story. When we were planning our build, and still living in an apartment that came with a garage, I got the idea to start honing my construction skills by building furniture out of pallet wood. When I came up with the idea for table-ottoman-bench-storage cubes on wheels, I wasn't even sure they'd make the final cut when it came to furnishing our eventual house.

More than two years after we built them and a year after we moved into our house, I'm pleased to report that they get used more than anything in the house—except the bed. We sit on them when we have guests, we prop our feet up on them when watching TV, we put drinks and food on them and, yes, we store all our office supplies neatly in one.

Because it's on wheels, I can easily slide the office cube anywhere I want it. It stows away the printer, when not in use, and gives me a place to print when needed. I can pull out paper, grab my backup drive,  or switch out pens in a second. It even has room for my art supplies. (I'm no artist, but I love myself a good doodle.)

So, the answer to where I usually work is: our "living room." But we never have to look at my notes or cords or paper clips because they all have a home in one of our rolling boxes. ​(The second box serves as the "linen closet" with our second set of sheets, bath towels, beach towels and a tablecloth or two.) On a nice day, I can even move the "office" out to the deck.

When we got tired of wearing the same shoes every day, we knew it was time to figure out where we could store our footwear. The bedroom, where the rest of our clothes reside, seemed likely, but we didn't want shoes thrown in the bottom of a closet or lined up along the bed. 

The solution? We realized we had up to eight inches to play with between our wardrobe and the woodbox we're building for the stove. We measured our shoes; they would only need shelves six inches wide, and that would still leave room for the sides of a shelving unit and a firewall for the wood stove.

​We built shelves the height of the IKEA wardrobe we'd already assembled, inserted six-inch-wide shelves, painted it all black to match the closet and, viola, all our shoes and boots have a home. Because the armoire is 24-inches deep, a pair of shoes can slide in each slot.

We don't need to store a lot in the bathroom, but what we need--like toothpaste and toothbrushes--we want at hand but out of sight. To find room  for toiletries in our compact bathroom, we borrowed a little space from the utility closet next door. 

Our wood medicine "box" hangs on a stud behind the wallboard. We added a few shelves, then covered the box with a hinged mirror. (Actually, a big mirror we already owned that was more frame than mirror; so, we cut the frame down to fit its new space.) The result: we've got lotion, razors, medicine, those toothbrushes and lots more tucked out of the way but right where we need them.

Please click on the pictures below for more details.

After assembling the kitchen cabinets we realized we had about five inches to fill between the refrigerator and the table. We needed to fill the space with something that would leave room for the refrigerator door to open. What would a five-inch cabinet be good for?

Wine, of course! 

Rummaging through the scrap wood pile, we pulled out two small pieces of plywood and several strips of pallet wood leftover from finishing off the clerestory windows. Lots of measuring, a few cuts with the circular saw, some wood glue and about a hundred tiny nails later, we had ourselves a wine rack.