At the local RV store, I tried out the various bathroom setups, units that allowed you to sit on the toilet while taking a shower, or to crouch in a baby bathtub with your knees near your ears while you sipped wine and enjoyed a nice tub soak. These units were almost exclusively made of fiberglass cloth impregnated with styrene (a cancer-causing chemical that smells to high heaven). Every time I did an inspection at a fiberglass shop—watching how they shot stuff out of a handheld gun, or slathered it with trowels and squeegeed out the residue, I walked away with a headache from the chemical exposure. I wanted something different in my house, and besides, the RV and travel trailer units drained to a holding tank, a big box strapped to the belly of the trailer that seemed like it’d be a pain in the neck to manage; all I’d do with my newfound free time was drive back and forth to the RV-sewage dump, repeatedly emptying the tank like my own very small bladder.
The kitchen sink would have to drain into a bucket that could be dumped in a garden, and an outdoor shower and compost toilet seemed like my only option—a sad option, for sure, as I liked the look of a small “marine head,” as it was called in the boating world. The marine head is a unit, not much bigger than the butt it accommodates, which for me created a certain functional elegance. Just before I bought my big house, I’d dated a man who lived on his boat, and for our first month I never had the courage to use the toilet, in part because it was located in a tiny closet no more than a foot from where our pillows bunched together in the V-berth bed, but also because it was awkward to navigate the gentle movement of the boat while I maintained control of my stop-pee muscles for what seemed like an eternity as I ducked in, turned around, dropped my “step-ins” as we called them in childhood, backed up, and hoped for the best. It was an awkward fit, so instead I sauntered to the front of the boat, hung my tookie over the rails, and peed. Eventually, out of need, I came to terms with the toilet and even grew to love it once I figured out the ergonomics. Sadly, the marine head required a holding tank, so a composter seemed like my only option.
I agonized over which should take up more space inside my postage stamp of a house: a refrigerator large enough to hold a week’s worth of food, beer, and half-and-half, or a composting toilet that, according to the pamphlet, was too big to fit in the trunk of my car. I chose neither. I shrank the refrigerator down to the size of an undercounter icebox, and decided to adventure forward with a bucket composter—a system that required me to manage the waste along with my organic kitchen scraps in a compost barrel outside the house (a decision I made only after reading a hefty book called The Humanure Handbook, a really great manual that walked through the various diseases, germs, bugs, and social phobias we all carry when it comes to our poop).
The only major unknown was the shower. There wasn’t any room for it inside the house; there wasn’t an easy way to heat up the water, deliver it to a showerhead, and dispose of it safely. I was stuck, and after staying up till three in the morning one night, thumbing through the Lehman’s catalog, which included photos of all the ways the Amish and off-grid settlers bathe, I decided to buy a membership to a gym. I figured I could get a membership at one of those big national gyms, so wherever I went from town to town, I could shower as much as I wanted. I’d heard of this happening in L.A., where hopeful would-be stars lived out of their cars with memberships to the gym. They’d sleep on the beach all day long, working on their tan, then wake up at a reasonable hour, shower at the gym, perhaps attend a casting call, then go to their bartender job till the wee hours of the morning; then back to the gym before heading home to the beach.
All of this consternation—trying to sort through how much I could bend without breaking when it came to modern conveniences—left me one part freaked out about living in the little house and one part over-the-top excited; it was like imagining what traveling to Africa to visit my friend Gina would feel like, the sound of rain on metal roofs, the smell of camel dung or food in the market, how the people would seem in Kampala versus the village where Gina was living.
It was exciting and also begged me to ask a thousand times a day: What am I doing? What is the point? And every time, something deep inside me would shoosh me and say: “Shhh, there, there. You can do this, Sweet Pea. You can build a simple, kind house . . . nothing fancy, no big deal . . . just a little house to find yourself at home.”
After a month or so of playing around with layouts, after examining all of my little quirks and patterns, I came up with a floor plan for the little house. At that point, I was ready to introduce my friends to the next greatest thing, so I invited them to dinner. I greeted them at the door, masking tape in hand, and showed them the blueprint I’d taped out on the living room rug. “This will be the kitchen,” I offered. “And this will be the bathroom,” I explained, shifting my weight to the right. “The sleeping loft will be above, and here,” I said, taking two steps forward, “is the great room.” I stood on the leeward end of the rug and threw my hands over my head like pom-poms.
They stared at me with a mixture of concern and curiosity.
“Umm,” one friend asked, “doesn’t that make the great room [she said it with little finger quotes] the size of the dining room table?” She wanted to know if I was joking.
It wasn’t a joke, but I had to admit I was curious about whether or not it could be done. I felt that it could, in the same way I was certain it would be fun to try climbing Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens, and Mount Hood all in a single weekend. Of course it was possible!
I had done this before to my friends: announced that I was going to do something even though it appeared to be out of left field. I made these dramatic proclamations, and most of the time I delivered, like the time I double-dog dared my housemate John to hang a show of his artwork at the local coffee shop. “I tell ya what, I’ll do it first!” I had taunted, even though he was the real artist between us. “And you’ll see how fun it is and you’ll have to do it too.” In that case, I surprised my friends (and even more so, myself) by developing enough artwork to have a little show complete with an opening-night party and by selling enough pieces to take a trip to Hawaii.
Another time, I had announced that I wanted to become an EMT because I thought it’d be awesome to “poke the siren button” in an ambulance. So I struggled through six months of training, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt with patches on the shoulders and black rayon pants that made me look like a parking attendant, and I became an EMT.
This time, I wanted to build a little house.
My friends went along with the story, and as we ate dinner sitting on the living room rug, they joked about how I could vacuum the tiny house with a tiny DustBuster and could pull it through a car wash when the windows needed cleaning. After a few beers, we played a game like Twister, tumbling over one another while standing on the rug, seeing if we could reach for a pillow off the imaginary living room couch while sitting on the toilet, or open the front door and reach for a coffee cup on the far side of the kitchen without ever stepping foot in the house. Before everyone left that night, I gave each of them something pulled randomly from the kitchen: a bottle opener, a wineglass, a ladle, or a set of pot holders that looked like chicken heads. I gave Eileen a small armada of soy sauce packages and thin wood chopsticks—leftovers from takeout—because I knew it would supplement her own perfectly matched collection. The downsizing had begun.
Dream Big, Build Small
(MAY 2004)
Six weeks after being laughed at by the Russian welders, I got a call that my trailer was ready. Suddenly, I felt like a seven-year-old girl, standing at the far end of the high dive at the public swimming pool, my arms wrapped nervously around my chest and my wet swimsuit crawling into my butt crack, with the big kids in the water below yelling, “Go on! Do it! Jump!”
There was no more time to sit around reading books and twirling my architect ruler like a sword. At this point, I needed to believe in me; that my design was good enough and my
skills were fair enough, and I could pick up the trailer and get cracking! I took a little warm-up lap around the living room, popped my head side to side, and shook out my legs like I used to do before a race. It was time to get started.
I borrowed a truck from my friend Barb, who had borrowed it from another friend, and together we drove over to the trailer place, giggling with excitement. I raced into the office feeling like an expectant adoptive mother and settled up the bill in what must have been record time. I was sweating so intensely I could feel the salt landing in my bra, and a moment later spilling down my stomach into my jeans, and then finally we marched out to the back parking lot. My jaw dropped. The trailer was perfect, with shiny black side rails, heavy-duty axles, deeply treaded tires, and taillights that seemed to twinkle and spit cute bubbles out of their mouths as we walked up.
I don’t remember saying anything other than a strong “Got it” as the foreman showed us how to connect the lights and brakes and explained in broken English that the cross-hitch chains were critical. “They are for keep trailer,” he said, pointing at the trailer hitch, “from go to bye-bye.” He offered this last part as he pantomimed me supposedly waving good-bye to my house and the trailer as I drove up a hill.
“Got it.” I smiled. Over the next ten minutes, I proceeded to spit out the same thing another fifteen or sixteen times, saying it with a nod, like a genius, like I had grown up around trailers and had studied metal fabrication at university; but in reality, I was so excited it was impossible to track all the information. All I could hear was the rabble in my head saying “Wow, wow, wow-wow-wow!” as we walked around the trailer, and all I could say in the end was “Lug nuts, got it.”
The library books never said anything about checking the lug nuts every so often, or minding the cross-hitch chains to avoid a runaway load. I summoned my courage and looked at my friend as we pulled into traffic, both of us grinning nervously and leaning forward into the dashboard. We arrived at my house twenty minutes later, after motoring along slower than five miles an hour, waving other vehicles around us, and collectively screaming “Whoa!” as we went over a tiny neighborhood speed bump. I turned off the ignition with a big “Woo hoo!” and then noticed that I was four feet from the curb, still sitting in the street. “Whatever,” I told Barb, “let’s go get a cup of coffee to celebrate!”
I positively swaggered with adrenaline as we walked around the corner to the coffee shop. Barb and I spied a neighbor who lived down the street, and he gave us a nod and said, “Saw your trailer a minute ago. Sweet!” He was a building contractor, a short, stocky guy with a thick neck, and the sort of man who in the dark might be mistaken for a badger. By his comment, I immediately felt that I’d been accepted into a special club where everyone wore flannel, was successful in a shovel-in-hand sort of way, and often said things like “Hold my beer” before doing something powerfully dangerous.
“I hope to start building tomorrow,” I said, holding my crossed fingers up in the air and looking skyward like I was praying for rain, and instantly feeling that this gesture placed me well outside the flannel shirt crowd.
He nodded. “Nice. Can that trailer fit up the driveway? The city won’t let you keep it on the street . . . fascists.” He said this shaking his head, like a piece of gravel could fall out, and if it did, he would have given it to me to throw at City Hall.
“Ya. Right. I know,” I said firmly, while inside I screamed, Shit, shit, shit-shit-shit!
There was no way I could back the trailer up the steep rampart that defined the front of my driveway. And even if I could drag it up and over the steep slope, the drive was so narrow it would be impossible to pull ladders alongside. There was barely room to open a car door, let alone set a ladder and maneuver plywood up over your head to the roof. I needed another solution, and in the meantime maybe it could just sit on the curb, looking cute.
Later in the day, I mentioned the driveway conundrum to my friend Camelli, who lived across the street. She was an engineer for the city, so I figured she’d know the inside scoop and would set me straight. We’d met years ago, in college, when she was a freckle-faced freshman with the driest sense of humor on the planet; she would play wry jokes on her housemates, as when one of them was grilling a chicken and she stole it from the grill while he wasn’t looking. When he returned and found it missing, he thought he was crazy, and he headed for the kitchen, scratching his head, at which point she returned the chicken to the grill. She repeated this process twice, each time returning to her spot in the living room, where, when her housemate stormed past looking for his lost chicken, she’d tuck her hair behind her ears and adjust her glasses, flipping a page in her book like she’d been studying the whole time. “What do you think the city would do if I parked the trailer on the curb for a month?” I asked her. “Fine me? Tow me?”
After a bit of thought, she invited me to build in her driveway, explaining that she wasn’t using it or her garage. In retrospect, I wonder if she knew what I didn’t: There was no earthly way that I could build a house in a month, working alone and only on weekends. It would take at least three months, and in that time, working in the street would not only be illegal, it’d be dangerous. Leave it to Camelli to be logical and generous.
The trailer fit perfectly in her driveway, and I spent the next hour measuring everything: the trailer’s width and length, the depth of the side rails and wheel wells, the height from the pavement up to the top of the trailer, the distance between ribs, the size of the tires, the location of the lights, and the distance diagonally from the front of the trailer to the back corners. I used this information to redraw my plans for the floor frame and walls, and then I pulled together a list of every stick of wood I’d need to start things out.
The list looked small and suddenly beautiful, like I was studying a list of pieces that I hoped would grow from my wishful thinking into something called “floors,” “walls,” “roof,” “little house,” and “home.”
“Here we go,” I whispered to RooDee. “We’re gonna build a house.”
The next day, I ventured off to the lumberyard with my Post-it note in one hand and a tape measure in the other. I started by culling through a giant pile of “studs” (a word that totally made sense given the fact that these were the strong pieces of wood that would hold up the roof, define the walls, and keep my little house in shape), pulling sticks of wood from the pile and searching each one for the slightest hint of a twist or warp, just like Katy had taught me. Almost immediately, while lifting one stick of wood off the other, I slammed a sliver into the palm of my hand, causing me to twirl around in pain, clutching my hand like I’d rammed it into a wood chipper. I stood in the center of the aisle, staring and probing at the meat on my hand, and then chewed the sliver out, biting it because my fingers couldn’t do the job—an act that made me feel clever and brave.
I was thinking on my feet. Injury number one: no big deal.
Over the next half hour, three different men offered to help me, making me wonder if someone had made a secret announcement about a skinny blonde who was sucking her fist in the lumber department. I was too proud to accept their help, offering a quick “Oh, that’s sweet, but I’ve got it” as I continued to sort through the wood alone, gingerly picking up each stick like it could be tethered to an electric prod.
I loaded the wood on a small pushcart, with two twelve-foot sticks balanced in the center and poking out in front like a lance. The cart weighed a ton and I had to really put my weight into it to roll it toward the cash register. Seconds into the haul, I realized things weren’t going well. I was headed for a display rack, so I grabbed the back of the cart, but too late. The lumber slammed into the rack, knocking it over and ramming the lance backward into my pelvis, doubling me up like I’d swallowed a tire iron.
Injury number two that day was a sadly placed goose egg, which paled compared to injury number three: my pride.
Things had g
otten off to a bumpy start, but soon enough I was working my way through a stack of lumber, building the floor frame, and then attaching aluminum sheathing to create an undercarriage. I felt like a woman learning to swim, awkwardly paddling over to my drill and then slowly treading water as I tried to get my bearing around a piece of wood; daring myself to dunk my head underwater as I measured, then remeasured, and finally cut the floor joists to length. It was exhausting and exhilarating.
During the workweek, I entertained my coworkers with stories about sunburning the inside of my mouth as I panted, openmouthed, over the aluminum undercarriage, struggling to fit it in place; and oddly, I found myself calmer than I’d been in a long while. Maybe it was simply because my muscles ached or maybe because I felt that nothing was more compelling than the stack of wood that was waiting in Camelli’s garage, but whatever the reason, I was relaxed as I discussed problems with a factory worker, and less overwhelmed when I realized there was nothing I could do about the way “acceptable levels” of radioactive mud were being deposited in a pond at the edge of town.
After my second or third weekend of consecutive twelve-hour days, I realized that I might have underestimated how long it would take to finish the house. I had the floor framed, complete with metal undercarriage, rigid foam insulation, and plywood deck; and I also had the walls framed out and resting on the ground nearby. But that was it . . . hardly a house. At the rate I was going, it would take me no less than a year to have a livable structure, and by then my back, arms, legs, fingers, and earlobes would be reduced to nubbins. Every part of my body ached: my scalp from walking with plywood balanced on my head, my feet from dropping wood, tools, boxes, and bins on my unprotected flip-flopped feet (the reason real carpenters wear steel-toed boots). My shins, elbows, armpits, the webs between my fingers, my cheekbones, knuckles, hip sockets, and the tiny hairs above my kneecaps—everything hurt, but I kept at it, and finally the floor was in place and the walls were prefabricated, sitting in a neat stack near the trailer. Now it was time to wrangle my friends to help me lift the walls into place, square them up, and secure them to the trailer.
The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir Page 9
