The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir

by Williams, Dee

  I launched into a story about a trip that Doug and I had taken to Guatemala the year before and the impact it had on me; how I’d gotten to see how most of the world really lives: without running water or a decent toilet. I explained that I felt like a cliché in Guatemala, like a typical wealthy American tourist speaking English to the locals and pantomiming when that failed, wandering around with a fanny pack and a floppy hat, feeling nervous about getting dysentery or being robbed. “The people there,” I explained, “are constantly crapping their pants with preventable diseases.”

  I went to Guatemala to help build a school but left wondering what “help” would really look like. Many of them lived without electricity or access to medical care. They lived with the memory of a civil war; a war that included babies being ripped out of their mothers’ arms and thrown into the forests like cordwood, as a priest had described one day. Even the little town where we were working, a town smaller than the ten square blocks that made up my neighborhood, was under curfew with barricades in the street and policía patrolling at night. The people I worked with and met were great; they barely had enough food to eat but always offered to share what they had; and even though I hadn’t ever experienced a war and poverty, or what it felt like to watch a child die from diarrhea, they never for a minute treated me like a spoiled white lady. I hadn’t prepared myself for how humbled I’d feel, or how hard it would be to find my footing when witnessing a cycle of poverty that seemed to defy any sort of help.

  Doug chimed in and, together, we positively gushed about Guatemala—how spider monkeys walk like old men with artificial hips and bowed legs; how there are more butterflies and banana trees than coffee beans, and how the kids play soccer like the pros. I explained that the trip had challenged my interest in continuing to pump money into my house, paying four-hundred dollars for wood trim along the ceiling in the living room because, according to my logic, “it would really pull the room together.”

  It was a compelling explanation for wanting to give up my big house and build a tiny house. And it was completely true, but so was the unstated fact that I was a bit lost with my heart. I didn’t know what to do with the way my heart problems had become so predominant in my life—the way I felt my mortality just as clearly as I felt my vitality. It’s hard to explain why you love the morning sunlight because it proves you too are a miracle for waking up.

  It’s not exactly the story you offer to a stranger.

  Doug asked me about Guatemala as we were driving home; it was the first time I’d talked about the trip this way, and he was curious. “Well,” I explained, “there was no way that he would believe that story about the squirrel costume.”

  Later that night, I tried to describe Jay’s house to Doug’s wife, Alecia. I talked about the cedar siding and the woodstove, and the way you could pop into the sleeping loft through a little cubbyhole near the kitchen. I explained how the space felt small but not claustrophobic, simple but not crude, and functional in that everything had a purpose and a place. I talked and talked, describing this detail and that feature, but ultimately, Jay’s house was more than all those things. It was bigger.

  The house reminded me of the road trip I had taken when I was in my twenties: I wanted to leave the Midwest permanently but couldn’t just yet, so I recruited some friends to drive with me to Colorado for a weekend in the mountains. We left Kansas City after dinner and drove all night across the Great Plains with nothing but the moon and the idea that if we kept switching channels, we might find something better on the radio.

  We drove until we finally hit Boulder, where we stopped at a Get N Go gas station with a sign that emphasized GO, but suddenly all we wanted was to stay, because as soon as we opened our car doors, as we stepped out into the predawn cold and let the mountain air hit us, the pine tree pitch settled into our arms and we realized . . . we had arrived. We could finally stop all our rushing and let the smell of the forest—now mere inches from our fingertips and still hidden in the early-morning shadows off the highway—settle into our lungs. Everyone was quiet, happy, suspended in the moment, with one foot still resting in the car and a hand still holding the door latch.

  Jay’s house was like that.

  Doug and I spent the next couple of days planning, talking about the trailer configuration and walls, yammering through dinner and while we were out walking the farm, as he showed me the place where he sometimes found morel mushrooms and the spot where his goats kept chewing through the fence. We tried to pin down how long it would take to build a house similar to Jay’s, and I estimated two or three weeks—the same amount of time it had previously taken me to build a short ramp (a single piece of wood) for a friend’s cat to enter and exit through the cat door. Doug figured it would take longer, but I was so excited to see the final product that I completely ignored his more realistic calculations.

  On the plane ride home, I doodled little floor plans, dreaming about where I’d sleep and cook, and how I’d build the floors and walls. I imagined how the door would open and I would walk into a place that felt like home, whatever that meant, however that played out.

  I imagined that my house would be modeled after Jay’s but different: It would be roughly the same size, set on a trailer, then I’d build an open front porch where you could lounge like you were having a tailgate party, and a kitchen and living room that would open up through skylight windows, like walking into an empty barn with light pouring in through the cupolas. Simple. Kind. And as E. B. White said in Charlotte’s Web, “like nothing bad could ever happen again.”

  Now all I had to do was take my own bait, to convince myself that I could do this! It felt like a big commitment; the trailer alone would cost nearly $2,000, so if I was going to walk into a metal shop and have them start welding away, I needed to know I was serious. Then there was the little matter of my heart. Perhaps the current state of my health should have raised a bright red caution flag, but instead it fired me up. I wanted to do what I wanted. I didn’t care if hefting plywood and climbing a ladder weren’t on my doctor’s recommended list of activities, or if I was foolhardy to think I could lift a fifty-pound roll of tar paper into and then out of my car. I was going to do it because it sounded like a blast, like the best possible way to have fun. It sounded akin to hiking into bear country with nothing but a backpack, my wits, and a one-pound bag of mini Snickers bars (which everyone knows is a backpacking essential). Building my own house sounded like something Laura Ingalls Wilder would have done if she hadn’t been trapped in that gingham dress and lived under the shadow of her nickname, “Half-Pint.”

  I thought of building my own house as the greatest adventure a girl could have. And that was that.

  As fate would have it, I arrived home and found a set of house plans curled in a cardboard tube, waiting for me in a stack of mail; Jay had already sent them with a little congratulatory note and a double-dog dare to “go for it!”

  Fear and Logic

  (OLYMPIA, WASHINGTON, APRIL 2012)

  No one comes to visit me without calling first. They are afraid to walk past the gate, then down my friends’ driveway, past their house and into the backyard where my little house sits. They stand out by the mailbox, worrying how to best trespass beyond the big house to the little house without being seen; or they scheme how to walk through, singing “Yoo-hooo” to minimize any alarm. It’s a lot to think about, so my friends usually call first.

  Given all of that, you can understand my surprise when earlier today, my friend Dave knocked on the door without calling first, wanting to know if I would help him pick up a wood chipper from a rental store. Dave is the sort of guy who doesn’t ask for help, so when he does, it makes you feel like a champion, like you’re donating blood or delivering medicine to an isolated village. Still, it was raining, and I was curious about why today was the day, but agreed all the same simply because I was super-curious about the chipper.

  If you’re not familiar w
ith a chipper, it is a giant version of the garbage disposal that sits below a kitchen sink, or a giant version of your own small mouth, wherein tree branches are shoved in, chopped into thumb-size pieces, and spit out the back of the unit. We went to the rental place and hitched the chipper to my truck, then drove to Dave’s house. He had recently pruned several fruit trees, along with fir and spruce trees, and hoped to grind down the remnants into usable compost. This is what people do in early spring when they tidy up; they look around the yard after a few months of hiding indoors, wondering how badly the winter wind, snow, and rain have mangled their yard, and they see that things are mostly okay but perhaps in need of some pruning. And so they rent a chipper.

  I have a lot of power tools, but nothing compares to a chipper, the workhorse of destructive behavior. The unit came with a long liability waiver and a four-page pamphlet with intimidating precautions, telling us to wear safety glasses and hearing protection, and to avoid horsing around and being sucked into the unit. Neither of us had ever operated a chipper, so we hesitantly started by shoving thin twigs into the hopper (the mouth of the unit) and watching them explode out the back in a satisfying array of brown and green; this was followed by Dave and me giving each other the thumbs-up and graduating to slightly larger branches.

  As we worked, we got more comfortable but never completely relaxed with the way the chipper would quickly grab the branches and then automatically suck it into its gullet like a four-year-old slurping spaghetti noodles. Even Dave, a manly man who in another life would likely have worn beaver pelts and carried an axe everywhere he went, would instinctively pull his head back and scrunch up his face as if the unit might projectile-vomit at any moment.

  We each wore red clamshell protection over our ears, which reduced our communication to a series of pantomimed gestures. At one point, I’d signaled Dave to “watch this” by wiggling two fingers in front of my eyes and flipping them toward the hopper, and then I shoved an unbelievably large branch (nearly the size of a Christmas tree) into the unit. It sprayed out the back like confetti shot out of a cannon, making us hoot. In response, Dave grabbed an even larger branch and shot it through the unit. Next, he bit the top off a pinecone like he was pulling the pin on a grenade and lobbed it into the hopper. He grabbed a plastic pop bottle and threw that in the chipper too, and while his wife was watching, he dragged a lawn chair over and pretended he was going to shove that through the unit.

  The sun came out and we threw all sorts of crap into the chipper: rotten lumber, an old rubber boot (because we could, though we later discovered it was a pain in the buttocks to remove the little rubber bits from the compost), crappy wood planters, cedar shakes, and tree limbs. We finished up, staggering around the chip pile sprayed out on the lawn; feeling satisfied and slightly dizzy when we finally pulled off our earmuffs. “That kicked ass,” I yelled.

  Operating a chipper is the sort of behavior that makes me feel like a gladiator, like I’m larger than I am—taller and more capable. It’s also nice because it’s so easy to see that you’ve accomplished something monumental at the end of the day—where you once had a giant mishmash of tree limbs, branches, and brambles, now you had a tidy pile of usable wood chips. Just like that. Voilà: Success.

  The other (perhaps less reasonable) reason I appreciated operating the chipper is because it scared the piss out of me. When I first started shoving stuff into the blades, I got a little zing in the pants and my kneecaps quivered. And actually, even before we left the rental store, before I pushed the first tiny stick into the chipper, I was afraid I could lose an eye. I worried that something would malfunction, that we’d miss a step, overlook a risk, or otherwise slip on the proverbial banana peel and end up as viscera in the mulch pile. At Dave’s house, I confronted those fears reasonably well by using my fourteen-pound head. Fear and logic belong together. I reread the precautions and thought ahead to what could go wrong, and I reevaluated how to best get my body and brain to work together. Finally, I put on my goggles, hearing protection, and toughest set of nerves, and went to work. We opened up a big ol’ can of whoop-ass, and that was an exhilarating feeling.

  In the few months since I had returned from Iowa, I had vacillated between outright panic and resting comfortably in the notion that I could figure things out. Every time I’d look at my blueprints, I felt like a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, where instead of planning to map rivers, mountain meadows, and the curious habits of the local residents, I’d be navigating the grizzled, manly world of carpentry.

  The thing that scared me the most was the idea of moving the little house down the highway. I’d seen plenty of evidence along the highway to confirm that people don’t know jack about hauling stuff. In a single trip down a fifteen-mile stretch of the interstate, I counted a dozen things that had likely blown out of trucks at high speed: a mattress, a sofa (minus the cushions, but I saw those a couple of miles later), a cat-scratch tower, a dinner table, smashed-up plastic lawn chairs, and what appeared to be a bicycle folded in half. I felt sad about each item, and worried over the people who were likely crying about their orphaned shoes and missing barbecue grill.

  I didn’t want that to happen to me, so I started examining my options for keeping the house from suddenly veering sideways whenever a massive semitruck passed. I wanted to stop it from lunging forward when I threw on the brakes, or sliding backward into a nosedive on the pavement like the coffee cup that I’d recently left on the roof of my car (the cup actually hung in there for several miles before losing its grip and bouncing on the car bumper on its way down).

  Jay had already figured out what was required by the Department of Motor Vehicles to be safe: I had to build the house short enough to slide under highway overpasses, and skinny enough to avoid bloating a single traffic lane. I wasn’t sure which state trooper invented the numbers, but I wasn’t going to mess with the math or fudge the measurements; my house would be no more than thirteen and a half feet tall, and eight and a half feet wide.

  Securing the house to the trailer was a bit more of a head-scratcher. Jay had constructed the floor of his house above the trailer, like strapping a couch to a skateboard to move it across town. He’d used a thousand screws to secure the wood floor frame to the metal trailer frame, but I wanted something different. I wanted the floor to fit inside the metal trailer, like putting your foot in a ski boot, so the two components would work intrinsically as one.

  I went to the library and researched how other people had done this; I looked at gypsy wagons, covered wagons, travel trailers, and RVs, and poked around trying to find specific references on how to secure a boat to a trailer, and how those cute little garden sheds at the lumberyard were moved when they were sold. There wasn’t anything that I could find that was an exact match. Travel trailers were made out of lightweight aluminum and plastic; shepherds’ wagons were lightweight wood and canvas; while my house would be made out of thousands of pounds of lumber, plywood, and metal.

  I needed something different, and I figured that if I could decipher how a carpenter might build a normal, wooden house along a fault line, in an area where earthquakes happen all the time, then I’d have a good idea of how to build my house to handle the gyrating bumps, jolts, and vibration of the highway. The same logic applied to high winds and driving rain; I just had to discover how houses were built to withstand a hurricane.

  “I don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” I told my brother when we were talking on the phone one day, “just modify it.” Which is how I found myself sitting at the library with a small mountain of notebooks containing what was quite possibly the most boring literature in the world: the City of Seattle and City of Portland building codes.

  Both cities have plenty of wood structures sitting above what they call the Pacific Ring of Fire, an earthquake-prone geography riddled with active volcanoes. I remember climbing one of those volcanoes, Mount Hood, in February one year. Everything was draped in snow, and the topo
graphy took on a lumpy mashed-potato quality with cartoonish rocky outcrops and puckered ice at the crevasse edges. Our route took us to the lip of the caldera, the mouth of the volcano, where we could see steam vents cracking the surface of the snow. As we were hiking, we’d occasionally smell the sulfur farting out of the earth—an odor that I first thought was coming from Steve-o, my climbing partner, but was simply Mount Hood, reminding us that we were mere mortals, tiny beings crawling around, drunk on the experience, like ants at a picnic.

  Similarly, when we climbed another local volcano, Mount Rainier, Steve-o and I found ourselves pinned in our tent high on the mountain, hoping our little structure could withstand the massive windstorm that had plowed into us from the north. Those sorts of windstorms were common all over Puget Sound, the Columbia River Gorge, and into the Willamette Valley, where Portland sat. There had to be something in the code to tell me how to best build for ninety-mile-an-hour winds.

  I found myself sorting through the building code like it really was a code—an ancient text written in a little-known, hardly understood ancient script. Perhaps if I could recite it into a recorder and play it backward, it would finally make sense; or if I held the book over a toaster oven, some secret message previously written in lemon juice would appear. I turned the pages and looked for diagrams; I took notes and retraced my steps through the manuals. Ultimately, I learned that it made the most sense to install a massive tension-tie in each corner, designed to withstand four thousand pounds of uplift—this is how a normal big house is made, so that’s what I would do. I made little pencil drawings and scribbled the pattern for connecting bolts. Everything would be screwed and glued to prevent vibration; every facet of the building (plywood, siding, window trim, and roofing) would be clipped, stapled, and glued in all the right places. Even the placement of the screws through the plywood would be calculated—no more than six inches apart along the edges and twelve inches apart on the interior, to increase the structural stability of the plywood. This is what any carpenter would have to do if he were building a house in an earthquake zone, or in a place like the Gulf Coast where a hurricane could blow in and try to take your house apart.