I just hate to wait, don't you?

Patience is not a virtue of mine. I hate to be late or to wait, so I apologize to you for not getting out my post on time. I guess that life somehow keeps sputtering along even when we are sidetracked by all of lives obligations. Because my obligations have nothing to do with living tiny I will not bore you with them.

So...I'm back! A couple weeks ago I had a chance to see the "I Madonnari" chalk art festival which is held at the Santa Barbara Mission. This was the 27th annual festival and it drew over 150 artists from master Italian street painters to kids. The artists use only chalk to create beautiful images that will be washed away at the first rain. If you are ever in Santa Barbara during the festival this is a great event to see.

Mornings chillin with the chickens

The ranch has several chickens and two roosters which I hear every morning while walking Tilly. I have never been so relaxed as I am living on the ranch. There is something about being outside communing with nature that is soothing to the soul. Every day feels like a vacation.

Mornings are my favorite time to see and hear nature. Most people are still snoozing away while I am checking up on the morning rituals of all the local animal inhabitants. Tilly doesn't bark so we can walk along without scaring the wild animals or even the not so wild ones. Actually the chickens are more skittish than the deer or turkey!

This morning a few of the horses were a bit eager to receive breakfast. They were lined up along the fence waiting for the wranglers to come.

This cute paint horse is a newcomer to the ranch, he was sequestered for a couple days until the rest of the gang had a chance to meet him. This morning was his first day out and you can see he is still standing apart from the others. I hope he finds a buddy soon.

I am so grateful that I have a tiny house on this property. It's really beautiful.

It's hard to be a recluse in a tiny house

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a recluse. Not a "Howard Hughes" type, more the woman who lives with her cat or in my case her little dog and parrot. This makes me sound really crazy. I am not crazy! Really!

I have always been one who likes to stay at home. No matter what size the home is, 2000 square feet or 136 square feet. With the notoriety I experience in my tiny house, it is overwhelming at times. Don't get me wrong, I love to discuss tiny living with people, but the vast number of people I encounter here on the ranch can monopolize my entire day. So I recently had to put restrictions on my open house visits to the weekends. This allows me to be a bit of a slob during the week. I can come home from work, do my laundry and hang it in the bathroom or let the dishes pile up in the sink. I can work on bills or even a hobby. The dust can coat every surface for a couple days (until I freak out & clean it). I can even curl up on my little storage bench and take a nap with Tilly or Abby. Ahhh, life is good in my little Ynez.

Laundry day

New desk I put together last weekend. Still need to paint or stain.

Nap time! Tilly & Abby last Christmas Eve (dreaming of Santa).

I had to include the last picture even though it is a bit old. They are just so cute when they sleep. You may notice this is before Abby was downsized to a smaller cage (or as I call it Abby & Tilly's bunk beds).

June 6th - One year in my Ynez tiny house!!!

Wow, I can't believe it has already been a whole year! I think the experiment was a success. I feel confident that I will continue living in my tiny cottage for many years to come. Looking back a lot of things have changed.

I:
Downsized a tremendous amount of "stuff" out of my life
Reduced work hours to 28 hours a week
Paid off 70% of my debt
Got a cute little dog (and still have my cute not-so-little parrot)
Had a shed built and got rid of rental storage
Met tons of great people at the ranch
Lived through a fire and earthquake!
Saw lots of animals including: mountain lions, bobcats, silver foxes, deer, turkeys, horses, long horn bulls and long horn cows to name a few. Oh and Bob the pig!


Life is good in my Ynez!

Some of my new neighbors. Aren't the babies cute!

What's for next year? So far I have just a few things on the list.

Like:
Pay off balance of debt
Re-stain or paint exterior (the sun is very hard on the finish here)
Maybe add skirting of some sort
Take a little vacation (there are so many local things I haven't seen yet)


How would I change my tiny house if I were starting it now?

I have often been asked this question. Even at the beginning of the process I questioned whether I should add an extra couple of feet to the length to have a space for an office/single bed, murphy-style but I didn't want to exceed a set price and had to forgo the extra length. The 20 feet that I have is the minimum I felt would work for me and I use every inch of the space. One thing I would change is to have sliding closet doors. I opted for regular doors so I could utilized the inside of the doors to hang things on, but I find it irritating to constantly have to walk around them. And as I said before the blinds are a dirt magnets (perhaps I will change these for roller blinds in an easy to wash finish or stick blinds with a lining that can be removed for cleaning).


Suggestions for want-ta-be tiny houser's?

Be clear on what your needs are and choose multi-functional pieces. Get rid of everything else. Use apartment sized furniture that has a non-bulky style. Open legs on furniture will give the feel of more space. Folding tables and chairs can be removed or stored when not in use. Mobile furniture instead of built-in's will give you the most flexibility. Leave as much open space a possible. Less is more with a tiny house.

Traffic Jams - Ranch style

Living away from the city has its perks. One of them is that the traffic jams are a bit more interesting. This road didn't have an easy on-ramp or off-ramp so I and the the cars behind me had to follow until this flock of 5 wild turkeys could exit. It's a lot more fun to wait on the turkey, quail and deer traffic jams then on the human ones!

Morning turkey traffic jam

Once there was a traffic jam right on my lot! I took Tilly for a walk and came home just as it was getting dark. I startled 5 deer milling around my deck. Likely they were disappointed that I didn't replace the tomatoes, cilantro and pepper plants they had eaten a few days prior. Tilly doesn't bark at them so we were quite close, just a few feet away before they decided they should move on. Sorry, I didn't get a picture of it.

Another high traffic time will be in October when it's tarantula mating season. I hear they migrate right through the ranch. The other day I noticed at least 8 tarantula burrows just a couple feet in front of my car!

Tarantula burrow (one of many). Not a good traffic jam to be in!

White fire at the ranch

This week has been very exciting. On Memorial Day a fire broke out at the Sage Hill campground off of Paradise Road just north of the fire ranger station. The fire quickly engulfed the campground and moved east toward the ranch. VERY quickly the mountains were on fire. In just 15 minutes the fire hopped from one mountain to the next and burned all the way to the top! Our only exit was blocked. Soon all the surrounding communities were involved to put out the fire. There were trucks, air tankers, helicopters and ground crews. With the winds gusting to 60 mph what started as a camp fire became a 2000 acre wild fire. Luckily, this area is a national forest so it is not densely populated and no one was hurt.

Then, on Wednesday May 29th I was jolted awake by a 4.6 earthquake! I immediately thought that Abby, Tilly and I were going to flip over and slide down into the ravine. This was the biggest quake I have felt since moving to California.

Happily, I can say that we survived both the fire and quake with no casualties.

Embracing my dusty lifestyle

One thing I really didn't consider was the dirt factor! Living on the ranch with Tilly can certainly be challenging especially when the rainy season hits. I did have gravel put down on my lot to minimize the mud and Tilly is good about sitting at the door when we come in so I can wipe off her feet but her whole "under carriage" (yes, I am from the auto capitol of the world) becomes a wet muddy mess.

There hasn't been much of a rainy season for the last few years and instead of rain what I am usually dealing with is dirt. As I previously discussed the afternoon winds blow the hot air out of the canyon making the evenings nice and cool. It also creates dirt clouds whipping through the ranch. I no longer open the windows on west side of my cottage (except in the mornings when the air is calm) but I still have to clean the blinds EVERY weekend! And with 12 windows and 11 blinds this does not make me a happy camper. If I had to do it again I would invest in windows with built-in blinds (the blinds are encased between 2 layers of glass, therefore never need to be cleaned). Whoever designed them was a genius!

The consensus among my fellow full-timers is that I must "let it go". Dust is a fact of life in this style of living. Unless, I want to spend time every day just dusting and cleaning blinds. So, if you come by for a visit know, there will be dust.

This is a picture of the "dirty thirties".

OK, not as much as this, but close!


My new mantra: I will embrace my new dusty lifestyle and suppress my urge to constantly try to eliminate it.

Life, love and coffee

Recently I received an email from a friend about life and coffee. I don't know the author but it was too good not to pass along. Let me know what you think.

Life is like a cup of coffee.  Click on the link below.

LILC.swf

High wind advisory!

Recently we had high wind advisories. Because I am located in a canyon area the winds are high every day, usually in the afternoon around 4:00. They are referred to as Santa Ana winds or Sun Downer winds. The winds blow out the hot air and "no-see-ums" for the evening making it nice and cool. Great for sleeping in the loft. So when I heard about the high wind advisory I wasn't really concerned until the howling started. I'm from Michigan and to me it sounded like a tornado. This could be bad, very very bad.

I had been told when I moved in that there had been an incident a few years back where a couple of RVs had flipped over in the wind. I have a steep ravine just a couple feet to the east side of my tiny house and a large gust of wind could topple me right down it, as the winds always come from the west.  I also have a new neighbor to the west in a light-weight 5th wheel that could tumble over into my tiny house. Operative word being "light-weight" (it says so, right on the side of it). For 48 hours I watched and listened to the howling winds. The news said that the gusts were reaching 80-100 mph! That's a category 1 tornado!

I am glad to report that all is well in my Ynez. The minor shaking I did get from the winds were actually less than when the dryer spins. I did talk with a couple neighbors who were staying in their RV's, they said they were "rockin-n-rollin". Not me, I was just on the "spin cycle"!

What if I build it & can't find a place to put it?

Finding a place to park my tiny house was a huge concern and finding the right place not just any place seemed daunting. They say location is everything. I needed more than just a parking spot I needed a place to call home. As you already know, the laws about this are varied. You can park in many places but living in your tiny house is another matter.

My Ynez all ready for delivery. The deck is tucked inside.

This was the most stressful part of the whole process. What if I built it and couldn't find a place to put it? Financially this could be a very big issue! I lost a lot of sleep thinking about it. I wanted a place that had: a nice view from the windows, was safe, not more than 1/2 hour from work, near my current location, where I could stay long-term and a place I could meet like minded people.

I talked to everyone I came in contact with: work associates, people at the farmers market, neighbors, bank tellers, grocery store clerks, everyone. I listed it on Craigslist. I made a flyer with a picture of a similar tiny house and handed them out. I also put some in mailboxes of homes in rural areas near where I was living. I framed another flyer and took it to a party. This all happened prior to the start of the "Tiny House Listings" site.

Some opportunities that came up were to live in the city and park it in driveways or backyards and one on a sliver of land between two very large homes with a beautiful ocean view. My fear in these locations were that I would get all settled in and then a neighbor would complain and I would have to quickly move off the site. For this reason I decided to go with the ranch. It had all my "Have To's" except one. It was not near my current location. 

The ranch has over 300 acres and a campground on the property. They were familiar with RV's, trailers, 5th wheels, coaches and park models but were not familiar with "tiny houses". So...I brought them up to speed. I spoke with the manager a few times, I brought up the plans for him to review and we went online to see the in-progress pictures the builder had posted (that was very helpful). I got the ok from the ranch and made the final arrangements with the builder.

Now if you are like me, you don't own a large truck to bring your cottage to it's final resting spot. I knew no one I trusted to bring my house to me.  I didn't want to rent a U-haul and try to drive it over Mt.Shasta (remember these houses are not aerodynamic) and the cost to rent a truck, take time off work and get a pet sitter made it impractical. So...I started calling RV dealers in the area and asked who they used to bring coaches and RV's from the manufacturers to the dealer locations. They all used the same people. Perfect! I called them to arrange for the pickup and delivery to the ranch. They also plated the tiny house and insured it! A huge plus.

Where are you parking your tiny cottage? And how did you find the location?