The subject came up recently: chores. Those things you need to do to keep a household running.

We used to procrastinate housecleaning in our big, suburban houses until we couldn't stand the state of affairs. Procrastinating only meant the mess would be harder to clean down the road. It also meant magnifying our so-called "suffering": We were worrying about it before we did the work; we were annoyed by the magnitude of the mess by the time we got around to doing something; and, instead of feeling satisfied with any chores completed, we found ourselves dreading the next time we'd have to do them. 

When we sold our last "big" house, many of the chores disappeared or at least shrunk. We tried out a succession of smaller living spaces and found the time required to get through everything was abbreviated simply because there weren't as many rooms. Now, in our smallest living space to date, the time has shrunk proportionally again. In 15 minutes, one of us can do a moderate clean (vacuuming, wiping down windowsills and baseboards, wiping out the sinks, picking up and putting away stray items...).

It's not a big time or energy commitment, and, as a result, we clean more often. We have a lightweight, cordless vacuum that I can honestly say I enjoy pushing around the place just about every day. (We track in a lot of dirt here.) We wander around happily picking up sticks, because we know that chore promises a warm blaze in the house, a meal cooked on the grill or a campfire under the stars. We take turns watering the herbs on the deck, because we both enjoy tending to them.

Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. 
After enlightenment chop wood, carry water. 

The Zen wisdom comes to mind. Because I no longer watch the clock like I used to and because I no longer spend my days wishing I were somewhere else, I am more present in my own life. I get satisfaction from some of the same chores I used to procrastinate. Plus, I have new chores in this new way of living—but I don't resent them, either. Rather than putting it off, I like the trip down to dump food scraps in the compost pile; I get a minute to look around the garden and see if any butterflies have found the milkweed. When I walk up a path through the woods to empty the composting toilet bucket, I look for animal tracks, I pull an invasive plant or two, I listen to birds. 

Sure, it helps (a lot) that there's less housecleaning to do in a tiny house and that we have more time to do it. But there are less chores and more time because we've chosen to live this way. Clarifying how we want to live helps everyday chores take on meaning. They are part of this new life we're living intentionally.

We're just back from a month wandering around Greece. We walked across the Acropolis in Athens, we explored the ruins of bygone palaces, we consulted the oracle in Delphi, we swam in the Mediterranean and fell in love with Crete.

Someone asked me if we saw any tiny houses when we were there. Yes, we did. "What do they call them?" my friend asked. "They call them houses," I answered.

And that's the truth. Houses come in many sizes in Greece, as they do here. But, in general, the scale is more modest in both mainland Greece and Crete. When we checked into one AirBnB apartment, the host apologized for the size of the space and told us that he understood Americans preferred larger spaces. When we said his apartment was bigger than our house, he was dumbstruck.

Perhaps because the homes we saw in Greece were more compact, they made better use of space than most of the homes and apartments we've lived in here the States. How? Here are a few thoughts:

No wasted space. We saw few, if any, hallways and few oversized rooms. Spaces appropriately fit their function—a place to sit, a place to eat, a place to sleep. Bathrooms, for example. We had to get used to the just-big-enough-to-do-what-you-need-to-do-here proportions. Tiny sinks were the norm and vanities were few and far between. Many bathrooms were "wet," eliminating the need for separate shower space.

Cooking and eating. Kitchens, in general, were not separate rooms, and dining happened at one table. Fridges were smaller. We found everything we needed—plates, utensils, pots, etc—but there wasn't excess. There simply wasn't room for it, and it made it easier to find things.

Outdoor living. Every place we stayed, there was an outdoor space attached. A couple times we had roof decks, micro balconies in others and ground floor patios in the rest. When you drink coffee, eat meals and socialize outside, you don't need as much indoor space. (Of course, this is only practical year-round in temperate climates.) Outdoor living in Greece includes public spaces: parks, cafes, beaches, benches.... 

One tiny living space we didn't see: houses on wheels. I suspect it's easier to build a small living space in Greece than most of the United States. Here, building codes require minimum dwelling sizes. We did see a fair share of camper vans; perhaps, they're the Greek equivalent of THOWs.

And now we're back. Spring arrived the month we were away from the tiny house. The intense green of the new leaves and the wildflower blooms provided a wonderful welcome home. It reminded us that as much as we enjoy our on-the-road adventures, we are magnificently fortunate to have this tiny homestead. 

Ironically enough, one of the Top-Ten-Reasons-I-Love-Living-in-a-Tiny-House is this: Hitting the road. Or the skies. Or the seas.

Simply put, I like to leave the tiny house behind me and wander. Not because it's claustrophobic, as I've been asked. Not because living here is hard, as I've also been asked. Instead, it's because I happily "suffer" from a life-long, incurable case of wanderlust, and it's easier now than ever before to treat my ailment with a week or a month or more exploring new horizons.

Living in this 250-square-foot house has reduced our monthly housing expenses to the point we no longer need to work in full-time jobs. When we spent thousands a month for our house, we were earning a lot of money, but it was largely spoken for—and so was our time. (Two weeks of vacation doesn't get you very far.) Selling that house allowed us to quit our jobs, giving us the time and money to build this house. Now, with our monthly expenses down to a few hundred a month, we can work part time to support this way of life—leaving us as much vacation time as we want and can afford.

We're not extravagant travelers, so that helps. We favor AirBnBs over big hotels; we've stayed in our share of hostels and we've camped across the country. This sort of travel isn't for everyone, but it works wonderfully for us. We like making our own coffee in the morning, eating picnic lunches and finding the best happy hour deals. We also save money on trips by using award miles for our flights. We charge everything we buy (even our car!), using cards with the most flexible award programs and paying off the balance each month to avoid any interest. All our flights for our upcoming trip to Greece were booked this way.

Weary of the winter freeze, we recently took a last-minute trip to south Florida. Our flights were booked with award miles. We stayed in a nice motel listed on AirBnB that offered a 25% discount for stays of a week or more. We hunted for the best deal on a car. For very little money, we happily explored lush parks by day and tested the taps at breweries each evening. (Favorite park: Fern Forest. Favorite brewery: Funky Buddha.)

After Greece this spring, we've got a few ideas brewing for future trips. Nicaragua? Portugal? Prague? Where should we wander next?

I am not a minimalist. Take one look in my house, and you'll know that. Or check out all the materials I've scavenged for "future projects" and stacked in the garage. Or peruse the shelves in the room we rent as our legal address. I've written before about my thing for things and earlier efforts to reduce my baggage. What's gotten me back to editing my possessions is a book sent to me: Goodbye Things: The New Japanese Minimalism by Fumio Sasaki. 

By his own admission, Sasaki was "miserable" and "cranky," "full of excuses" and "constantly comparing" himself with others. He got rid of most of what he owned and immediately "started to become a new person." A "happy" person.

Can getting rid of things make you happy? It can. I know that from personal experience, and I've been reminded of that by Sasaki. The other day, I picked up the book and got to tip #7 of his 55 Tips to Help You Say Goodbye to Things: Discard something right now. "Why not close this book this very moment and discard something?" he asks. I did just that.

Looking in our armoire where I've stashed too many things that I say I'm going to do something with "later," I found not one thing but 10 things that I knew I'd feel better removing from the house. A few were trash (receipts I didn't need, empty packs of flower seeds), a few are off to Goodwill (t-shirts I was given when volunteering).

It felt so good that the following day I repeated the process. I read a little more of the book, where Sasaki circles around the concept of minimalism in a friendly, conversational way, and then I found 10 more things to clear out. That day, I plucked them all from the medicine cabinet: expired medication, makeup I'd bought but never used, tooth whitening strips (I used them!), and a near-empty bottle of lotion (that I also used up!). My medicine cabinet and my peace of mind were better for the exercise.

This morning I chose my ten out-the-door items from kitchen drawers. Tomorrow, I'll take a look in the pantry. Deciding to find 10 things every day is both manageable and productive. It makes a difference, but it doesn't take too long or stress me out. So, here's a shout-out to Fumio Sasaki for reminding me that life is good when I'm intentional about how much I accumulate.

We "finished" building our house a year ago and moved in. Yes, we still had the deck and stairs to finish, the gutters to put up, the siding to complete, the wall to face with boards, the floor trim to put in...but we had walls and a roof, a bed to sleep on, a working kitchen and bath. We had a home. A home that just needed a few more projects completed. We'd done all the hard work of constructing a house, how long could a few projects take?

More than a year, as it turns out. Last week, we finally got gutters up on the house. We spent all week admiring them—and deciding the rain barrels they're supposed to be filling can happen later. Just yesterday, we put the last boards up on the wall behind the sofa. I hadn't cleaned and sanded enough old barn wood when we started the project; so, we just slid the sofa in front of the wall and forgot about the bottom boards for months. But even now, there are still the trim boards to prepare and put up.

Another tiny houser once told us that she wasn't going to move into her house until it was 100% complete, because she'd been warned that, "Once you move in, all progress stops." I would amend that assertion to say, "All progress slows." 

But I can't say it was a mistake to move in a year ago. We've had a full year of living in this house, and, really who cares if it takes another year to put in the rest of the floor trim? The lack of a couple feet of floor trim, a few boards on the wall, a section of railing or a downspout doesn't make this space measurably less wonderful.

I've never had the opportunity before to live in a space designed precisely for the way I want to live. This house fits us. And taking time off from hammering and sanding and hauling and staining is the point. Yes, we feel good about everything we've constructed, but we feel better about the way we live now. We consume less resources and energy, we spend a good part of each day appreciating nature, we read more and we have time for long walks. Plus, as we plan out less of our time, we let serendipity work its magic. If a new project appears before us, we feel free to follow it.

That said, our Muses spoke to us this week to gently remind us that there can be satisfaction, too, in tying up a few loose ends. 

One of the questions I'm often asked about our tiny house journey is:  "How hard has it been to get rid of all your things?" 

My immediate answer: Look around our house, and you'll see an awful lot of things. Our old sofa. Bill's parents' old magazine rack. The rug we bought in Turkey. My grandmother's set of Blue Onion china. My great-aunt's baby mug and my grandfather's old coronet. The vintage boxes we bought at auction. The books I love the most. The rooster and heron prints by my sister. I could go on and on and on. 

How can we have this many things in a tiny house? Shelves play a big part. The shelf that runs along the top of our kitchen windows holds a lot of the china we don't need every day. The shelf along the top of one bedroom window holds old books, family pictures and a plate and bowl we bought in Tuscany. Shelves over the TV hold that coronet, more books, my grandmother's silver and Waterford pieces we bought in Ireland.

Building in as much storage as possible into our design gives us room for things. One of our ottoman/coffee table/seats serves as our linen closet; the other houses our printer, plus office and art supplies. Under our bed, four giant drawers have room for many of our clothes, with enough extra space for backpacks and a small vacuum cleaner. Our pantry makes good use of space with full-slide-out drawers that hold food, everyday dishes and cleaning supplies. Even the space behind the oven gives us more storage for cutting boards, a pizza peel and stone, sink inserts, cooling racks and pans.

That said, we have "gotten rid of" a lot of things we used to own when we had a big home. Most of it wasn't too hard to part with. Generic furniture, unworn clothes, boxes of Christmas decor I no longer put out for the holidays, CDs, crates of pictures. The CDs and pictures we digitized. The things we didn't use or care much about, we "shared," as my husband calls it. Some of it we gave to family or friends, some we donated, some we sold. 

What helped me sell some of our items of value was knowing that the money earned was going to help us change our lives. Yes, we liked the grandfather clock we'd bought. But we didn't need to keep it, and the $750 someone paid us for it added to the $700 we got for our farm table and the $400 for the bedroom furniture joined the profits from selling our house. It all became part of being able to leave our jobs and build this house. And this has been an experience worth infinitely more than all the things we've parted with.

Sorting through what we keep and what we "share" has made me value even more what I choose to keep. It's helped me recognize what's important to me and allowed me to focus on that. I've kept things from our travels, artwork that speaks to me, silver handed down to me. And I'm much more intentional about what I bring into my home now that space is limited. A new acqusition has to be extremely useful and/or remarkably beautiful to me--ideally both.

In this process, "things" have become less important to me. Sharing what I have has become easier and even pleasurable. I am more focused on how I live now, rather than what I possess. That's quite a gift.

Please click on the pictures below for more details.

We have loved building this tiny house. Let me start with that before saying this: Some evenings we are so bone-tired it's all we can do to climb the stairs to our third-floor abode and plop on the sofa.

It's not just the work on the house. We've been cutting down invasives, chainsawing fallen trees, leveling ground, digging postholes, building raised beds, hauling stones, building a retaining wall....On those days it feels as though we aren't making enough progress. Why isn't the house built? Why isn't the garden planted? 

Right around that time is when the universe invariably sends us some new enthusiasm. We get a call or an email or a FaceBook message: Can I come to see the tiny house? Yes! Yes, please! 

Visitors are our elixir. This weekend it was cousin Tom, sister Jill and friends Giselle and Katie (not to mention Giselle and Katie's dogs). In taking them on (tiny) tours of the house and garden plot, the path to the stream and the screen house, I suddenly see all that we've done--instead of focusing on all we haven't done. We sit in the screen house to talk; it didn't exist a year ago. We walk through the tiny house; last August it was just a black equipment trailer. Now, it has ceiling and walls, electricity and lights--and even the first of three ceiling fans in operation.

Building a tiny house from scratch isn't easy. But it's wonderfully challenging, creative, stimulating and satisfying work. Sometimes you just need a few friends to remind you of that.

These last few months, I've been obsessing over the issue of consumption. Reading about the energy requirements of refrigerators and lightbulbs and hot water heaters. Watching videos about installing solar panels and setting up battery banks. Vowing to cut back on the energy we consume—needlessly and thoughtlessly—every day. 

And then there's my consumer consumption. Did I need to buy a new pair of boots last month? No. But I bought them anyway. I saw them; I liked them; I bought them. Ditto for a couple new shirts. Had I looked thoughtfully through my closet before my impulse buys I wouldn't have brought them home. Now, I'm giving more thought to what I wear and what I already have hanging in my closet. I plan to be more intentional about the clothes—and boots—I purchase. I don't want to spend our financial resources on clothing I don't need and I don't want to contribute to the over-consumption of natural resources required to make them.

Looking at the clothes I wear and don't wear has also called my attention to another "consumption" with even greater, more immediate consequences. I have a pair of black jeans I used to love that now sit idly on a shelf. I would love them still—and wear them—if only they weren't so tight that walking is painful. I've been eating and drinking my way through this winter. Literally over-consuming to the point I'm facing a choice: either change my ways or head back to the store for a new wardrobe. It's gotten me thinking about ethical eating in a new light.

I already don't eat meat, and I've made baby steps toward eating more organic and locally sourced food. We have plans to get a vegetable garden going this spring. But I haven't given much thought up to this point about the ethics of over-eating. When I consume more calories than my body requires, I'm not only wasting money (more groceries; bigger-sized clothes; additional trips to the store), I'm wasting away my health. I strain my already-arthritic joints and damaged disks. I nudge myself in the direction of Type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, hypertension, high cholesterol...

So, I'm trying to be more intentional about what I put in mouth. I've gone back to an app I used when I decided to lose weight a couple years ago: MyFitnessPal. I'm walking every day and tracking my miles using another app: MapMyFitness. The apps "talk" to eat other, so the miles I walk get converted into calories I can responsibly consume. Knowing how many calories I need each day and trying to stay within that count isn't terribly fun, but it's good to know how much is enough. 

As I pay more attention to the food we're buying and eating, I've also become more aware of the food we waste. Not knowing what's in the fridge and on the pantry shelf makes it likely I'll buy things we already have on hand. Yesterday, I threw a package of 4 cucumbers on the compost pile because I'd forgotten we'd bought them. I'm not alone when it comes to wasting food: I just read it's estimated that 40 percent of the food available in the United States gets thrown away each year.

I want to stop consuming more than I need--and stop buying more than I consume. 

I'm something of a latecomer to the sustainability party. I didn't start questioning my footprint, evaluating my consumption or looking critically at my possessions until I was in my 40s. It took the shock of my children going off to college for me to stop and look around. 

Every other week, I handed out bags of food to families in need just a few miles away from the 3,500-square-foot house I lived in. Ours was a four-bedroom house with rooms for everything (an office, a family room, a living room, a laundry room) and not one, but two spacious basement levels to store all that we'd accumulated over the years. Handing out jugs of milk, cans of soup and loaves of bread to mothers and fathers—the invisible poor who lived in the shadow of wealthy neighborhoods like ours—started me thinking. Why did I have more than I needed when they were struggling to feed their families? Did I sell everything I owned and give them the proceeds? Did I invite them home? No. But I did "let them in" my life.

We started looking for a smaller house, something that would require less commuting miles and something in a walkable neighborhood with public transportation, something without a big, green lawn to maintain. The house we found was a little smaller (2,000 square feet), and the lawn was almost nonexistent—no more watering, fertilizing, cutting. Still, we both worked long hours to support the mortgage and the constant "improvements" we felt compelled to make. The house owned us. It took us four years to realize the house, as much as we loved it, was still more than we needed or wanted. 

Next we lived in a condo before moving into a house with our daughter's family. They moved cross country, and we rented a two-bedroom apartment, only to downsize a year later to a one-bedroom apartment. With each move, we sold or gave away a lot of what we'd accumulated over the years. Things stored in boxes in the basement, things stuffed in kitchen cabinets, things filling rooms we rarely walked into. In the same way cutting unnecessary words sharpens prose, "editing" our possessions heightened our appreciation of what we chose to keep. 

Though we'd gone from 3,500 to 800 square feet of living space, we found we still didn't use all the space we were heating, cleaning, maintaining and financing. Now we're living in a 400-square-foot studio as we build a house that will be smaller still. I don't remember when we began talking about building a tiny house; in hindsight, it seems a natural progression in the journey we started more than ten years ago. As we spend most of our days building, we have less paid work...but we can live on a lot less money in this right-sized life. 

When we lived in Philadelphia, our favorite library didn't have any books; it was the University City Tool Library. The theory behind the non-profit was more people would likely keep up their homes if they didn't have to invest in tools. At the library, we checked out saws, shovels and rakes, drills and a post-hole digger, a hammer drill—all used as we renovated our 100-year-old "twin" (semi-attached row house) and completely overhauled the back yard. 

Since leaving Philly we wax nostalgically about the Tool Library, wishing we could check out a paint tray and drop cloth when working on my mother's condo or shovels and rakes when putting in landscaping to get Bill's mother's house ready for market. 

While we haven't found a Tool Library here in Loudoun County, Virginia, a friend volunteered to be our own personal power tool library. Borrowing—not buying—a mitre saw, table saw, portable work bench and saw horses has saved us hundreds of dollars. (Thanks, Tom.)

Since then, we've borrowed an extension ladder from our mountain neighbors. Buying it for a one-week roofing job would have cost upwards of $150; borrowing it means returning it  gratefully with a six-pack of Coors. (Thanks, Angela and Mark.)

What we haven't been able to borrow, we have bought. Our first tool investment: an electric chainsaw. We looked on Craigslist, but people were asking almost what they cost new. Bill picked out a 16" electric model (lighter weight and easier to maintain than gas, I learned) with good reviews. He started by cutting up fallen limbs to clear the tiny house site—but within an hour took on felling a 100-foot tree that was leaning precipitously over our building site.

Our goal with this chainsaw is to be able to loan it out to other people with a little clearing to do. Sharing tools doesn't just save money; it can build community.