Drama at the Hen House

My chicken Henrietta died last weekend while I was away in Walla Walla visiting friends. My neighbor found her outside the coop one morning so we figured she had frozen to death. Since I wasn't there to deal with her my neighbor gave her to a friend who makes a mean chicken and rice soup. He discovered that she had been egg-binding - a condition in which chickens don't lay their eggs properly. So I brought my other two hens Jim and Penny back to Portland from Walla Walla. They were nice and mellow on the ride across the state. Unfortunately, when I reintroduced them to Ella they picked on her mercilessly. Since Ella's my favorite by far I decided to separate them temporarily and get rid of the other two hens as soon as possible. My neighbor discovered that the "chicken broker" at the Urban Farm Store will rehome laying hens so she delivered them to him the next day. So now we are down to one hen. On nice days I put her out in a makeshift run in the clover patch. The glass top of the outdoor dining table protects her from the hawks and owls in the neighborhood. Ella is the most clever of my hens and she gets broody so I'm hoping she might take to chicks if I bring her some later this spring. It would be so fun to have chicks around again!

Two years ago, I built a chicken palace in my back yard and raised chickens for the first time with my friends Colleen, Sean, Jon, and Sarah. On two exciting days in March we all picked out and named a chick. I selected a Brit Red and, trying to be clever, named her Henrietta. But we always called her Etta instead of Hen. Since my friend Colleen has a cat named Henry she decided to name her Brit Red Raffiellla after my cat Raffi. The chick was quickly nicknamed Ella. We wanted to try two different breeds so we also went for three silver-laced wyandottes. Sarah picked out Pennryn ("Penny") and Jon chose Betty. Sean named his chick Jim even though we tried to convince him that giving her a male name was bad luck.

Raffi was fascinated and spent hours sitting on top of their brooder watching them. We had fun playing with the chicks every day and marveling at their rapid development. By the time they were a few weeks old we were eager to get them outside into their coop. They took to it right away and enjoyed scavenging for worms, bugs, and weeds in my backyard garden all that summer. In mid-July we were thrilled when the hens laid their first eggs. Ella and Etta seemed to be laying the tiny brown eggs and Jim and Penny were laying little pinkish eggs. Meanwhile we were watching Betty closely because her tail feathers were starting to turn green and get curly. Sure enough, Betty started crowing a few days after the first eggs. That night he was a delicious albeit skimpy dinner.

Raising, slaughtering, and eating my own meat made me especially grateful for my chicken dinner that night. I decided to be more conscientious about my meat consumption because I wanted to be sure that I wasn't taking meat for granted. As a foodie I don't want to have any dietary restrictions that would limit my eating options. However, I decided to adopt a new food philosophy. Now I eat anything I'm served and anything I've never tried before. In New Orleans I ate alligator (nope, doesn't taste like chicken - it tastes like frog legs). In South Africa I tried impala and warthog. Whenever friends serve meat I eat it with gratitude. But when I cook for myself I stick to a mostly vegetarian diet with the frequent addition of seafood whenever I'm near water. I thoroughly enjoyed the chicken soup our friend made thanks to Etta. It had been a long time since I'd eaten chicken soup and I was grateful to know that this hen lived a happy life.

A Tiny Truck House

For a week earlier this winter every time I caught the bus on Alberta Street I admired the tiny house built on the back of a truck, which was sitting across the street at the transmission shop. I stood there and memorized it: the graceful arch of the front door and the window matching the curve of the roof, the brass clip near the door for hand-delivered mail, the wee windows, and the storage hatches tucked near the cab. When I had a long wait I'd tiptoe around the little wooden gypsy wagon and try to peep in the windows... with little success since they're high and I'm short. The folks working at the auto shop were protective of the little house so I didn't want to push my luck by asking for contact information. I could only imagine that the space inside was wonderful.

Luckily, the tiny house world is, well... tiny. This week I finally got to see the inside of this delightful little abode and meet its owner. In fact, I had the chance to swap tiny house tours with the fellow who built this little house on wheels a couple of years ago.

Entering John's house is like unwrapping a present. John's artistic touch is evident in every ledge, knob, and surface of his cozy home. Sitting on John's window seat on a rainy day, sipping tea, and talking for three hours about the process of designing this tiny house I was impressed by the high level of thoughtful consideration he committed to his live/work/play spac. While John's quick to give credit to the craftspeople whose expertise he relied upon, including Dee Williams, the design is very much his own. I was particularly fascinated by the details that make John's place uber multi-functional. His desk can convert to another sitting space or a dining bar. His bed also serves as extra lounging space. His mom used the window seat as a bed the last time John took her and the house for a road trip. There are little latches that hold the drawers under the window seat closed while the house is in motion. The space under the bed provides easy access from the inside for pantry staples and deep storage for camping gear, accessible from the outside. Did I mention that this house is only 14 feet long?!

John is probably my nearest neighbor if you count only tiny house dwellers. I feel very lucky to have found him since it's always a joy to "talk shop" with someone who shares my passions. It was fun to have John over for tea at my little place, too, and to show him drawings of my tiny dream home. He's already given me plenty to consider as I revise my tiny house plans.

In a future post I'll share more about the tiny house design considerations we've discussed. For now I wanted to introduce John and his wee house, Polymecca. John's house will be on this year's Pedalpalooza Tiny House Bike Tour in June. Mark your calendar for June 24th so you can see it, too!

Lazy Snow!

What a perfect morning for cocoa and hot cereal! The snowflakes that have sputtered around Portland for the past three days are the northwest kind: lazy, sloppy flakes that fall in big clusters and disperse as soon as they hit anything. Even so, they confound us. School is delayed two hours this morning. Many of the busses are sporting chains and running behind. They pile up and then leap frog past each other, alternating stops to pick up red-cheeked folks who have been standing in the flurries for twenty minutes. Passengers are not sure whether to be bemused that two buses arrive at once. They're not suddenly chatty because of the snow, but they are very conscientious about not dripping on their stranger seat mates. Rumor has it the light rail and street cars are still running on time. Another reason to consider rail, but not good justification in a region that gets spooked by the mere mention of snowfall.

Most cyclists have switched to transit, more out of fear of ice and out-of-control cars than the unpleasantries of riding in the snow. Depending on the conditions, snow biking can be plenty of fun. My friend Baker reports that zoobombing in the slush is quite amusing. (If you're not familiar with that particular Portland tradition, wikipedia's zoobomb post can help you out!) On Sunday I rode my bike to meet a classmate for brunch at Pine State Biscuitsand kept blinking as snowflakes plopped into my face. I couldn't help thinking of my eyelids as windshield wipers working on their highest setting to provide proper visibility. As we stood in an unusually short line to place our orders (so many people scared off by the weather!), the snow mustered determination for the first time this season. Giddy Portlanders slipped out of the restaurant to twirl on the sidewalks and laugh about making slushmen after brunch. They then promptly resumed their places so they could ensure that their winter adventures would happen on a full stomach of fried chicken on a biscuit, smothered in country gravy.

Last night the snow actually started accumulating and by time Raffi and I climbed the ladder to our sleeping loft my tiny house was masked in a dusting of snow. Unfortunately, it rained all night, so we'll probably have layers of ice to contend with today.

Meanwhile, the wall mounted Envi heater hasn't been able to keep up with these below-freezing temps. (Read more about my slim electric space heater.) Over the weekend I used the propane boat heater twice because it's such nice ambiance on a blustery day, but the fan is still bothersome. So the past couple of days I've kept the Envi heater running at full tilt since it uses less electricity than the oil radiator heater. I set the timer on the rolling oil heater to come up to temp for the hours in the morning and evening that I want the house warmer. So far, so good.

Between Graphite and Rainbows

It's been an exciting week of tiny house happenings. I was delighted by the responses I received when I shared my blog over facebook a week ago. Thanks for all your encouragement folks!

Last week Eli and I spent a couple of hours sketching out tiny house plans during our weekly Orange Splot meeting. Such fun to get the design ideas flowing within the constraints of road legal (8'6" x 13'6"). I feel privileged to bounce ideas off of someone who designs so beautifully. (See Orange Splot's website for photos of Eli's projects). Of course, it's also fun to share what I've learned about tiny houses with someone else who is as fascinated as I am.

During my Secular Sabbath this week I continued working on my favorite floor plan. I also read a book, took a nap, and went for a run, stopping to people watch at the park. Unstructured time is truly fantastic - even just a few precious hours of it!

This morning I contacted several tiny house dwellers about an inventory of small houses in Portland. If you know someone else I should get in touch with, let me know! I'm coordinating a tiny house bike tour as part of Pedalpalooza this spring, so I'm connecting with others who live in small spaces. I now have plans to visit two other tiny houses this week and I'm excited to learn about their experiences.

And, of course, in between my classes (which started up again this week), I've been appreciating the glorious weather we've been having. Including, of course, a nap in my rainbow-bespeckled sleeping loft with a breeze blowing through the window. Nothing like a patch of sunshine on a January day in Portland to make one grateful for the little joys of life!

Don't Leave Home Without It!

When my cousin was a toddler and we were preparing to leave the house she would tick off the things she would need on her fingers. "Coat? Hat? Shoes?" she would ask herself and grin and nod for each one. As a big fan of Kay Chorao's children's book Molly's Moe, I loved my cousin's short list. However, as an adult my Don't Leave Home Without It list is more like: Wallet? Phone? Keys?

My minimalist tendencies rebel against lugging around a purse full of the things I might need. But sadly, I was forever misplacing my keys or phone or (Heavens no!) wallet because they were not tethered to my body (or anything else). This was a problem for me until until a dear friend introduced me to her strategy a few months ago.

My friend found a cool felted pouch just big enough to hold her phone, wallet, and keys. She dubbed it her pod and when she showed it to me I decided I simply had to have one. (I rarely have this reaction to a thing, so I knew I was onto something! Or rather, it wasn't really the thing itself as much as the concept. I knew I wanted that simplicity.) Another friend had given me a little felted coin purse as a birthday present that year and it happened to perfectly fit my phone and my slim wallet. I attached my keys to the zipper pull and all of the sudden, everything I really needed was right there. (Okay, so I usually keep business cards and chapstick in there, too, and they're not truly essential, but they're awfully nice to have when I need them!)

Now I only have to remember ONE thing when leaving the house. That I can do even on a busy day! And with a convenient hook right inside the door, my pod has a place inside the house, too.

A Fresh New Start

Happy New Year everyone!

I still can't quite wrap my mind around harvesting kale for dinner in January. It's the first winter in 10 years that I've lived in a place with mild enough temperatures that we have greens overwintering outside my front stoop! The seasons are more subtle here, but this is definitely a time of transition.

I've always loved new beginnings. Part of the reason I've enjoyed being a student and working at a college for the past ten years is that there are so many chances for a fresh start. I like the idea of setting resolutions that are almost certainly achievable with just a smidge of extra intention. If I determine to do the things I'd like to do anyway, I'm more likely to be successful.

Last year my resolution was to take more naps, more walks, more baths, and drink more tea. I did pretty well at it! This year I will, of course, strive to find fun ways to be active so that people will still think I'm related to my little sister (who just got certified as a personal trainer), but that's what they all say.

So for the next six months, in addition to continuing my habit chart, which for some reason continues to be a good motivator to floss my teeth and contact a loved one daily (what can I say, I'm a sucker for gold stars!), I intend to block out time each week for two things that I want to do for myself anyway:

1) supporting the tiny house movement, accessory dwellings, and cohousing by committing at least four hours a week to my Orange Splot internship

2) honoring a secular sabbath that I have the freedom to reschedule but not skip

Of course, I hope the naps and tea continue, too...

What are you resolving for the new year?

By Hook or By Kindle

I have a few days between visiting family and my internship starting up again so I've been hanging out with friends and finding ways to simplify my life as I head into a new year. Mostly it's involved my new Kindle and a few well-placed metal hooks.

Because counter space is limited in my tiny kitchen and the counter tops are wooden, I've been placing my dish drying rack in the shower to drain. This has worked pretty well, but it's a little obnoxious to have to transfer it every time I take a shower, particularly since my showers only last about five minutes!

Today I made a little adjustment that I'm rather proud of, even though it's not very glamourous. I hung my dish drying rack over my dish pan, so now my dishes are right by the sink, right below the space where they all get put away. Water that drips off the dishes lands in the dish pan which is where I stash dirty dishes until I'm ready to do a load of dishes each morning. This is further evidence that a few well-placed hooks can help to create elegant design solutions. Perhaps I can figure out a more aesthetically pleasing version of this strategy for my own tiny house, but for now, I'm pretty pleased with it.

Now when I want to take a shower all I have to do is turn on the water heater and wait about 15 minutes. Granted, it probably requires more forethought than your showering process, but I'm delighted by my newly simplified system! I've found that by using the "pause" button on the showerhead I have a perfectly pleasant shower with plenty of hot water for two shampooings, conditioner, and a good scrub. I'm not sure how long my shower could be if I didn't use the pause button, but I haven't felt any great desire to figure it out with shampoo still in my hair!

In other news, my cousin upgraded to a new Kindle Fire over the holidays (a xmas present to herself) so she passed on her old Kindle to me. What an ideal gift! I've enjoyed reading the books she loaded onto it. All that wait time in transit suddenly becomes time to read a novel. (On the Corner of Bitter and Sweet was a lovely northwest novel to start on the train from Seattle to Portland during a cold winter day!) I still marvel at how I can switch between different books if I'm not in the mood for the one I've been reading. The device is slim and lightweight. And it doesn't get any more cumbersome to have another book along with me. I've also discovered that a couple of the books required for my courses for next term are available in Kindle format. This is soooo cool! I realize that I probably could eliminate paper books from my life completely if I weren't a student, but I think the format lends itself more to novels than text or picture books anyhow.

There are some books (especially picture-rich design books) that still demand a paper format and I wouldn't have them any other way. I keep a very small collection of design books that I enjoy referencing:

• Sarah Suzanka’s Home by Design and The Not So Big Life,
• Jay Shafer’s The Small House Book,
• Lloyd Kahn’s Tiny Homes, Simple Shelter,
• John Connell’s Homing Instinct,
• Clarke Snell’s The Good House Book, and, of course,
• Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language

Three favorite cookbooks provide inspiration: How to Cook Everything, Moosewood Restaurant’s New Classics, and Passionate Vegetarian. Scrapbooks of my travels to Thailand, South Africa, Belgium, and the Netherlands keep memories of far-off lands close at hand. Nevertheless, the Kindle is a fantastic invention and I'm certain that I'll do a lot more reading now that I have one!

How Many Lightbulbs Does it Take to Heat a Tiny House?

Last fall I designed my tiny dream house in a workshop called Less is More, which was taught by Andreas Stavropoulos and Dave Cain at Yestermorrow Design-Build School. As I was deliberating about heating options, my classmate John joked, "Sheesh! That place is so small you don't need to install a heater - you, your cat, and an incandescent light bulb would heat the place right up!" John had lived on and built boats in Maine for decades so I took most of what he said very seriously. But I also knew I'm a wimp compared to him, so for the last year and a half I've been paying attention to different heating options for small spaces. Heating seems to be a dilemma for many tiny house dwellers. Some folks love wood heat so they install tiny wood stoves and stoke their fires and call it good. A friend of mine who is an arborist says wood is the way he'd heat a tiny house since he has a limitless supply of it. But crawling out of a warm bed to build a fire doesn't even sound fun to me when I'm camping! Besides, I'm a little pyrophobic. Even if I did like building fires I'd need to get good at it so that I could control temperatures so it was comfortable. And since my schedule often involves being gone for 12 hours at a stretch it I wouldn't be around to stoke a fire.

Taking a page out of Jay Shafer's book, lots of folks have installed propane boat heaters in their tiny houses. They have great ambiance (a flickering blue flame) and they heat a space up quickly and without the mess of wood. But in order get the heat distributed throughout the room you have to have the fan on. And the fan is noisy. Obnoxiously noisy. I have a hunch that when you live in central California heat's not quite as critical as it is during the winters here. Portland has a nice, mild climate, but we still have plenty of heating degree days! Brittany installed one of these propane boat heaters (which requires clearances, running a propane line, and adding an additional penetration in the ceiling).

By the time Brittany turned her little house over to me she had pretty much quit using her boat heater. Instead she had switched to a portable oil radiant heater which has a timer so that it can be set to come during certain periods. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a setback temperature so it would come on and bring the temperature up to the set temp from whatever the house had cooled down to. Depending on how cold it is this can take a while! At the end of the set time it again turns off completely. I found that it worked pretty well to just set the temp to about 60 degrees and manually adjust it whenever I wanted it warmer for a while. But it also took up precious floor space, I sometimes tripped over its cord, and it was a little clunky to have to move it every time I shifted the desk over to use it as a table for dining. So I started looking into other options.

Last week my new heater arrived and, as promised by the website, installation took just a few minutes. The new heater is a wall mounted convection heater with a nice slim profile and some sort of special stack effect technology. (I understand the stack effect - I think! - but I don't see how it can be very effective in a heater that is only two feet tall, so I put it on the near the loft so that the height differential can give it a boost.) The heater is made by a company called Envi and after reading reviews for the three heaters on the market that are similar, I went with this one because there's a temperature control and the design has curved edges which I figured would help me be less likely to snag myself on it. The others also had some reviews that talked about worrisome defects and poor customer service, but it doesn't help that all three of them have very similar names. So I sprung for the one that cost $30 more.

Which brings me to the notion that $130 is a lot of money to spend on a space heater - unless it's your entire heat system and then it's nothing! I like the slim profile and it seems to be heating up nicely so I'm impressed so far! It doesn't actually have a thermostat, but it does have a temperature control. I can turn it up and down as well as on and off. I can't tell what the temperature is in my tiny house. But there's only been one day since I installed it that I felt chilly (and that was after I turned it down because I'd gotten too hot). It was also right around the winter solstice. Short, dark, cold days. So for now I'm just keeping it at full tilt and appreciating that it's always warm inside my house.

Perhaps the coolest thing is that, unlike the oil heater which was a 1500 watt heater, the new one only uses 475 watts (basically like having five incandescent lightbulbs on!) Which, I'll admit, got me thinking of John's comment: it might actually be more cost effective in the short term to just swap out all the nice CFLs Brittany put in for incandescents since they produce so much heat I might not need a heater at all! But really I don't think they'd quite do the trick...

Tiny House Sleeps Five Comfortably

My friends Sarah and Jesse from Walla Walla visited yesterday, bringing their pup Dodge along. It was fun showing them the Alberta Arts District and it was chilly enough that our cocoas were a perfect warm up treat. Jesse cooked us a fantastic squash soup in my tiny kitchen and he served it with homemade bread. Delish!

In order to accommodate everyone for the night I moved the camping gear that I usually store in my loft over to the host house where I stashed it in a corner of my neighbor's room since she was out of town. I set up a bed for myself in the storage loft above the door with a foam pad and plenty of blankets and pillows. Raffi slept with me, Jesse and Sarah had my sleeping loft, and Dodge claimed my giant pillow chair as his bed. We all slept really well and they only tricky part is that I only have one ladder. I'd crawled into bed last so the ladder was on my side. In the middle of the night Jesse, not wanting to wake me, managed to climb down from the sleeping loft using my kitchen counter! Did I mention he's resourceful? And tall!

I'm glad my tiny house was Sarah and Jesse's first stop on their road trip down to California. They live at West End Farm in Walla Walla and they left me with farm treats: pumpkin bread and apricot jam. It was a delight having my friends here even if the visit was too short. And it's nice to know that as long as everyone likes each other a lot my tiny house can comfortably sleep five!

A Praising Accessory Dwellings

Yesterday I joined Eli Spevak, Martin Brown, and Jordan Palmeri for a workshop about appraising accessory dwelling units (ADUs). See the Accessory Dwellings website for lots more information about ADUs, including this post about appraising ADUs. I suppose I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to housing, but I everyone there seemed to think it was really fascinating, so I was in good company. One of the things they talked about was how accessory dwellings often add value to a home because they create possibility (rental income, a space for live-in help or a young adult that's temporarily returned to the nest, or a parent deciding what the next step is after retirement). There are tons of spaces that are being rented out to singles and couples across the country.

The demand is high and it's a win-win situation for home owners and renters alike. But because so few of them are permitted most mortgage companies tell appraisers to completely ignore ADUs when figuring the value of the property. This makes it tricky, of course, for homeowners considering building an ADU to justify the expense. If it won't increase their property value it's hard to make it pencil out. So many people are building ADUs for the value they bring that's not monetary. The group of folks there would like to see ADUs getting some attention and recognition as a legitimate housing option. There are more single-person households in America than ever before so it would be great to have more housing options that are legal and permitted.

Another interesting aspect discussed was Jordan's research which shows that of all the different things you can do to make a building more sustainable, building small is the most effective. Now I completely understand that most people like having a little more elbow room. (A few of my friends like a little more head room than my kitchen affords, too.) But I do think the research helps create the case for building the smallest spaces that meet our needs.