When I started building my tiny home in 2009, I had no idea the life-changing effect it would have on me. I could have never done so many things in my life if I hadn’t had that experience, including partnering with Teona and doing the very satisfying work we do at dpeg Marketing. For a long time, we would go up to the tiny house for a large build project on the 4th of July, so every year, I reflect on that experience because it was so powerful and life-changing.
Here’s a roundup of my experience building independence. I left quoted passages unedited because every writer grows as they continue to write.
Building Independence
Independence Day has always been important for our journey toward tiny. While building, we deliberately used “Independence Day” rather than the 4th of July as we hosted gatherings over the long weekend. For us, this marked a start to our path toward our own independence.
We bought our land around September of 2007. In July of 2008, we invited several friends to our mountain for a long camping weekend. It started a tradition of marking the holiday with steps toward finishing our project.
I kept a LiveJournal during those early days and wrote about the second trip in 2009 when we started construction.
In 2010 we took another week-long vacation to work on the house. We were much further ahead with progress than the year before, even though it felt like it was taking forever at the time.
The big project for the 4th of July was building the overhang for the porch. Matt and Bill figured out the engineering of the project by determining the math and angles and constructing a temporary structure to hold it up before a porch and posts were built. Once the engineering was complete, the actual construction went quite smooth. Sunday night, we made steaks and camping potatoes for dinner and built a fire. Our neighbors came up to hang out by the fire. We played music and sang by the fire.
Just Keep Building
In 2011 it seemed, simultaneously, that the house would never be finished and was so close to being complete. Because the house was nearly done, the weekend was spent with friends relaxing, playing music, and eating.
The morning fare – scrambled eggs, biscuits and pork sausage patties. It was yummy and the perfect brunch. After breakfast, some folks went out to Lowe’s to get the stuff to build a new fire pit. When they got back and got unloaded, there was discussion among some to take a drive out to Mt. Mitchell. I stayed behind with a couple other campers and we had a lovely afternoon hanging out by the barn and enjoying some beer. When the rest of the group got back we were regaled with stories of the tallest mountain east of the Mississippi.
Life in 120 Square Feet
Since we moved into the tiny house in May of 2012, we didn’t host a campout and work party that year. We had traveled for several weeks over the summer just before the holiday, so we wanted to stay at home. We were pleased with our new lifestyle of independence.
For several years we have hosted a 4th of July camp out here at Mt. Matt. This year we decided not to do it for several reasons – we took a two week trip, people have been visiting us on their own schedule, and we’re just getting ourselves involved in the community. However, the reason Independence Day has always been important to us here is because of the real sense of Independence that this tiny house provides us.
Pulling up the blog posts from July 2013 shows that I didn’t write anything about the 4th of July that year. I remember thinking about blogging a lot that summer and realizing that the adventure of building the tiny house had given way to the real life of living in it.
Today
We don’t live in the tiny house anymore. Among the many reasons is that it wasn’t designed or built for aging bodies. But we still have the land and the tiny home on a foundation and are making plans for Life in 120 Square Feet 2.0. Until then, you can ask me anything about living in a tiny house I built with my own two hands.
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