Little By Little

The days are beginning to blur together.

Dan and I often find ourselves forgetting words, forgetting thoughts, forgetting why we even walked into a room! Needless to say, the day we step into that tiny house and just SIT DOWN will be nothing short of amazing, and beyond much needed.

Last Friday, I put in a few hours on my own. Dan was planning to come join me, but he ended up having to stay late at work. We did the math, and by the time he would have made it to the site, we would have had maybe an hour of work time before dark. I told him not to worry about it and just head home. I planned to work on just one thing, and when I was done, I was headed home. Sometimes, that kind of mindset can help you get through, especially when the list of things you could be doing seems endless at the moment.

I decided I was going to work on the kitchen counters. We need to have a working space to make meals in order to get moved in there. That's what the mind set has been lately, “What do we Need to have finished before we move in here?” The answer? We need a place for our clothes, a place to sleep, a place to make food, and a place to go to the bathroom. I know that pretty much seems like a whole house, haha, but I guess what we mean is that the finer details are being left out. For example, we don't need to make sure all the windows are trimmed. The book shelf doesn't need to be built. The table doesn't need to be ready....etc.

YAY! KITCHEN!

Once we established those as the priorities, it made our lives easier. I set forth to get the kitchen counter started. It was slow going on my own, but it was peaceful in a way. I developed my own rhythm and got a lot more comfortable making clean cuts with the saw. As the kitchen counter took shape, a new surge of excitement pulsed through me. Up to this point, we've been looking at a hollow shell. It's a pretty hollow shell, but to see the actual counters and cabinets start to form really solidifies how close we are.

On Saturday, we had a family wedding to attend. We spent the morning catching up on other life chores and then celebrated a beautiful day with amazing people. My cousin married the love of his life, the girl he took to prom! How sweet! It was a beautiful day, and spirits were high. Then Sunday came, and the tiny house that lives in my conscience came a knocking right at 7 am. The party was over, and we had work to do!

First, we headed out to get more supplies. In our post party haze, we didn't have a great plan shaped up for the day, so we bought an assortment of materials so that we could work on several different things.

Despite being hung over and down right achy and tired, we accomplished quite a bit on Sunday. After some discussion, we decided to tackle the post and the loft boards first.

We really liked the idea of the tree as a post, but didn't think we would be able to mount it nice and evenly. So, we bought a post at the big box store just in case. Turns out there was no need! I think we must be developing some good carpentry skills, because it went quite well and looks great!

After we had the post mounted, we started putting in the loft boards. It was exciting, and kind of sad, to see the rooms down below officially close in. As we put up all the little walls, the interior is taking shape, and the house seems more like it is-- tiny. Haha

Once the loft was in place, we worked on creating the kitchen shelving that would also serve as the wall to the bathroom. We made use of some of the leftover barn boards we used for the ceiling. This will tie things together nicely! One kind of weird thing that we have noticed is that since our bathroom and closet are slightly larger (depth-wise) than the kitchen counters on the other side, the window in the back is not centered-- as far is the interior is concerned. It is centered on the outside.

This observation didn't bother either of us too much. I liked Dan's point of view: “Hey, we made every last bit of this ourselves. There will be little quirks like this. But it's ours, we designed it, we built it, and we're not professionals.” 

I also installed the light in the great room. It is LED track lighting with flexible arms. We chose to use all LED to really cut down on the power load. We liked that this fixture would be several lights across a large space, but only one electrical fixture. The light provides more than enough to brighten the whole place, and with so many little adjustable bulbs, we can have some pointed at the ceiling too!

Today, I plan to head there after work and seal the loft boards. I need to sand down some of the dirt and rough spots, then I will apply tung oil. This is a nice straight forward 1 person job that shouldn't take too long. Dan has class tonight, so I'm flying solo. Then I'm off to Maryland for work and won't be back until Thursday. Then we leave Friday for my best friend's wedding in Canada!! Busy, busy!

So we have a lot on our plates and we are doing our darned-est to pack in as much work on the house as we can, while we can!

Thanks for reading!

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