Apr 24 2022

Short Book Review and Tiny Home Goal Update

Hi All! It’s been a while, yet again, but I found a snippet of time just now to write :-)! I finished the book, The Beginner’s Guide to Tiny Houses, over a month ago now and have been meaning to get on here to provide a review about it while it was still fresh in my mind. Overall, it was a truly informative book in which I highly recommend to anyone looking to embark on tiny home living. On a rating of 5 being the best to 1 being poorly done, I give this book a 4 1/2. The 1/2 star is because I wanted the whole thing to be strictly about tiny homes, but they added a ton of information about schoolies (converting a school bus into a home) and other tiny-homes…such as yurts. I have mentioned this before: nothing at all against schoolie or yurts, I think they are both rad, it’s just that I have no interest in living in either of those types of homes so I ended up just having to skip through those parts.

Took me a minute (if a minute equals 3 months) to finish this book, but alas, I finally finished reading it!

The book had a lot of great information about possible places to live with a tiny home and provided many outlets in which to look for land to either rent or buy for tiny home living. There were many resources listed (especially in the back of the book) of different websites or avenues to look for where it’s possible to place your tiny home. There was also great information about what to look for in companies that build tiny homes if you are having yours built for you (which I am because let’s face it folks, if I tried to build it myself it would probably take over a decade and even then, the big bad wolf would probably still be able to blow it down).

The Beginner’s Guide to Tiny Houses also provided different ideas to consider when having your tiny home built for you, including important financial decisions to consider such as what appliances the company provides in the total price of the tiny house and what extra amenities you might need to consider buying yourself. There was also a fun quiz to take in the beginning of the book to guide you in how ready you might be to live in a tiny home, my result was “Tiny All the Way!” I’d say that was a pretty accurate result 😅.

☝️Part of the quiz that is in the book The Beginner’s Guide to Tiny Houses. It was a pretty intensive quiz (11 pages long). I felt it was very accurate if you answered the questions truthfully 😁

This is a book that I am definitely keeping on hand for the rest of my tiny home journey as I feel I’ll reference it a lot for different decisions I’ll be making along the way. I am more than halfway to my savings goal of buying my tiny house🙌and I have gotten incredibly diligent in my monthly budgeting so that if I stay the course and stick with it, I can reach my goal of buying a tiny home at some point in 2023, which is literally just around the corner.

Despite having a really strict budget in order to save up to buy a tiny home, I managed to put away a savings fund for vacations and am planning to attend a friend’s wedding on the West Coast this summer. I had an amazing coincidence come up where one of the air bnb’s that I picked out to stay at in Oregon just so happens to be a tiny home constructed by the same company that I am planning to have build mine. The owner of the Airbnb has been actively communicating with me all about her experiences with them and is super open about me asking her tons of questions, she also said she’d be happy to meet up with me when I arrive to show me the four different tiny homes she has had built by them. I’ll definitely have updates for you all after that trip and thanks for following along with me on my journey so far!🙏☺️

Dec 12 2021

Feeling Hopeful

Hi All! Hope everyone is having a beautiful week wherever they may be. I wanted to give a little update since I was aiming to write in here at least a couple times per month. There isn’t huge news and my dream of owning my tiny home feels so far away, but in reality it will sneak up fast. I am fortunately in a good position right now to put much of my income into savings, so it will stack up quickly!

I have been eyeing a ton of different tiny home builders, but I have only found a couple that fit my needs. I am looking for builders that have a layout that matches my vision, are flexible with personal design requests, and are affordable. It has been difficult to find builders that match those three things, but I have found two! And out of those two, only one has been actively communicating with me, but luckily it has been the one that has felt most right for me. I am trying to stay open too, as not to put all of my tiny home dreams in one basket.

Another thing that I have been working heavily on is getting my budget in order. As long as I stick to a specific savings goal each month for one year straight, I should hopefully have enough to purchase a tiny home without needing to finance one, which is ideal for me. I have been debt-free for a year (shout out to Dave Ramsey and his whole team for inspiring me with the plethora of YouTube videos that inspired me to become debt-free!) My end goal with my tiny home is to only have the monthly expense of land to place it on.

Alongside of scouring ads online of tiny home listings, I have also been scouring ads online for tiny home communities to live in. There are a surprisingly large amount of tiny home communities, but that’s counted across the whole nation. In my state there are only two tiny home communities, one of which is three hours away from family and friends. So naturally, I contacted the closest tiny home community to friends and family; I found out that there’s a pretty long waitlist to get in it, but the lady that owns it added me on and has been super kind in all of our interactions, I’m feeling good about the community there!

Most exciting is that coming up in February I am going to a Tiny Home Festival. It will be so nice to see layouts up close and personal! I hope to connect with a builder or two as well that can dream up my vision with me. That’s all for updates though at the moment, but thanks for stopping by to read and dream along with me 🙂

Nov 25 2021

Tiny Home Vision

Hi All! It has been a long time since I have touched this blog as I have had some pretty major life changes in the last couple of years, but I’m going to attempt my hand at it again! I hope that all is well with you, reader, wherever you may be.

I have recently gotten really into tiny homes. I have watched almost all of the mini-documentaries on Netflix regarding tiny homes and have watched a good chunk of YouTube videos all about tiny homes: from learning about construction of tiny homes, to learning about rules on what kind of land you can stick your tiny home on, and seeing all the different styles of tiny homes. I have scoured through dozens of online used tiny home listings. All of this obsession has truly led me to one thing and that is: my tiny home vision!

I started this blog almost ten years ago to keep track of my goal to meditate daily and then it sort of twisted and turned more into random musings. Well, now I’m gonna use this blog to keep track of and focus on my newest goal and vision: buy my own tiny home within two years! That is the goal and with previous goals and plans of mine, I always found it nice to record them somewhere like a blog, where it might inspire others who are following along and it has always helped me to reflect while on the journey and after the journey.

I have always been a minimalist and not super into materialistic things. I have even lived in a couple tiny places before: a studio called “The Treehouse Studio” in Portland, Oregon because it was literally in a studio on top of a home, nestled next to the biggest tree on the block and I also lived in a couple huts near the salty air of the Pacific Ocean while working at farms on Maui. Some might have described the spaces that I lived in claustrophobic, but they were truly everything that I needed in my day-to-day life.

There are so many things about the tiny house lifestyle that are appealing to me too. I love the idea of having a place that is easy to move with me since I can’t seem to stay in one place for too long. The simplicity of a tiny home is another draw of it; to only have to spend an hour on cleaning up my whole place sounds divine. Lower costs all around, from the actual purchase of a tiny home to the monthly utilities would feel like a big weight lifted! Only bringing into my home that which I really need and use seems appealing as well, really living and embracing minimalism.

So welcome to my newest edition of this blog! I hope to inspire and ignite others’ dreams and visions, whether that goal is to also live a tiny house lifestyle or something completely different…either way, I hope this new little project of mine inspires you too in some way. I am hoping to log-in to this blog at least a couple times out of the month with updates on where I am at with my savings and budgeting towards buying a tiny home. I also want to record any insights or new things I have learned about tiny homes. I will also give updates about whether I plan to have one custom built or buy a used one. The options feel endless right now, it’s been a while since I have felt this inspired! Until next time, take care and thanks for reading!

Jun 5 2017

Materialistic Mindfulness

AmericanBeauty

After my first 10-day meditation retreat, something within me really snapped and shifted. All of a sudden I wanted to get rid of a ton of personal belongings. I still found a few items very meaningful: my journal, coffeemaker and hygienic tools were things that were important to me. However, my shelves upon shelves of dusty DVDs, CDs, books, and random knick-knacks felt heavy. Impulsively, I grabbed a few large garbage bags and just started pulling all of these items that felt heavy to me and gently placed them into the garbage bags. Without thinking twice, I jetted the collected items over to my local thrift store and dropped them all of without looking behind. I felt a lightness in my mental and physical state instantly.

Materialism has never been my thing, but especially since starting meditation in 2011, it seems that any fractal of interest in it has dwindled even more. Almost a year into my 20-minute daily meditation practice, I was inspired to write a piece for Lightworkers World about how I feel in regards to the idea of physical things creating inner happiness. The deeper and deeper that I have gone into the depths of my soul, the further I have gotten from caring about comparing what others’ have to what I have. I have instead thought more and more about how I appreciate the things that I do have and truly taste the blessings that I am given on a daily basis. The cravings for more lessen as I see how amazing it is that I have a fully stocked kitchen, efficient means of transportation, and ohhhhhh so much more!

ChuckP

When I was visiting my sister on the East Coast over this past winter, I had a couple of Netflix binges and upon doing so came across an incredibly inspiring documentary entitled “Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things.” The main two cast members of the documentary Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodermus also have an inspiring website, The Minimalists, which you should definitely check out if you have time. A lot of what they mentioned in their documentary was exactly the same thoughts that I had been having shortly after my first 10-day meditation retreat. They touch upon the last few decades of American culture and how it has heavily influenced our consumer mindset. We have somehow been driven to think that things create happiness, but as the late George Carlin would state “trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all of your body.”

Over the last six years, I have moved about eight times (what can I say, a spiritual awakening can cause a bit of chaos, hehe) and one of the moves was cross-country. With each move, my amount of possessions has lessened and I find myself only holding onto the things that I find necessary. Not having a whole lot of clothes makes life so much easier to me and the few clothing items that I do have are my absolute favorite, so I get excited to wear them. Everything that I own, besides some old mementos stored in family and friends’ attics, fits into my vehicle. It feels so freeing to be able to pick up and go to a new place if my heart is calling it, I feel incredibly blessed to be able to do this.

I am excited to see a lot of other people feeling the same way about materialism, how it’s not truly all that it’s cracked up to be. Advertisements are unfortunately always going to be around as long as money is around, but at least as we get more and more in touch with ourselves and remembering who we truly are, we will be able to get less swayed by those advertisements. How are you feeling about all the things that surround you right now? Do you truly need all of it? Or might you be able to donate some of those extra items that you haven’t touched in ages?

344 Everything that I owned in 2011 as I made my way from the Midwest to the West Coast of the U.S.