Living Large In Our Little House

I’m a pretty seri­ous per­son most of the time. Like many, I need to be.

I run my own busi­ness, I’m respon­si­ble for the care of six dogs on my own for most of the day, 10 acres with a house, stu­dio and barns and I also take care of the fam­ily finances.

That’s all pretty seri­ous stuff.

Two weeks ago, I went on a trip, not far away to Branson, Missouri, for work. The idea is to expe­ri­ence some of what the town has to offer so I can bet­ter write about it.

I signed up, along with two other writ­ers on this trip, for a go-kart adven­ture one after­noon, some­thing I used to love as a kid, but hadn't done in a long time. Dale isn't a go-kart adven­ture type of guy – he really isn't into risk tak­ing with much of any­thing – and even told me to be care­ful on “those things” before I left.

My go-kart days can be traced all the way back to when I was about 8, vis­it­ing my aunt (who now lives down the road) and cousins in the rural Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky.

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Lora, Kerri and Shelly at the 1886 Crescent Hotel

This past week, I attended the annual slum­ber party with two of my friends from school. We’ve been doing this since recon­nect­ing three years ago here at Our Little House.

I’ve known Shelly since Kindergarten. My dad was good friends with her grand­fa­ther where they both worked on the railroad. When my dad passed away, it was her grandpa who brought my mother money col­lected from all of the co-workers to see us through until her sur­vivor ben­e­fits kicked in. He was also a pall­bearer at the funeral.

Shelly and I met Lora when our grade schools merged into junior high in 7^th grade. My photo albums from that time always have Shelly and Lora in the picture.

Every year, we’ve had our reunion slum­ber par­ties in a dif­fer­ent place since we all live in dif­fer­ent states. This year, we were back in Arkansas and we stayed at the fab­u­lous 1886 Crescent Hotel and Spa in Eureka Springs.

We wanted to get a lit­tle spa action in, as well as ghost hunting.

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Alexandra! You have won the com­postable tooth­brush from World Centric! Congratulations! Please get in touch with me at fivecoat@​ozarkmountains.​com with your snail mail address!

I have another nature post this Tuesday, one you will either love or hate.

Dale came home from work the other day and said, “I got to see a taran­tula this morn­ing on the way to work.”

Before we built Our Little House, we had never seen a taran­tula out­side of a pet store and really didn’t know they were here in Arkansas.

When we were build­ing, we drove up to the con­struc­tion project and saw some­thing on the side of the foun­da­tion. “Is that mud?” I asked and as we got closer, I could see it was a huge, hairy spider.

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We had a great week­end this past week­end as my friend, and Living Large com­mu­nity mem­ber, Kathleen Winn, paid us a visit.

Entertaining in a tiny/small home is always a chal­lenge – espe­cially when there are six dogs under­foot – but I think Kathy had as good a time as we did.

She good naturedly allowed the dogs their “wild time” as they always get very excited to see peo­ple other than me and Dale (although I gave her free reign to tell them, “enough”) and said Our Little House didn’t feel as small as 480-square feet sounded and didn’t feel cramped, but rather, “cozy.”

As well, we didn’t spend a lot of time at Our Little House, as I wanted to show her around the area too. We took long walks on our road, vis­ited a cou­ple of my favorite retro/antique stores, ate a nice Asian lunch (I had sushi, Kathleen had Chinese at the same restau­rant), spent some time on our beau­ti­ful lake, ate a nice din­ner of bacon wrapped shrimp and even did some tar­get shooting.

When we were home, we made use of the Party Deck. It’s always good to have out­door liv­ing spaces in a small home.

It’s also great that we have The Belle Writer’s Studio, which is equipped with a fold down futon and its own bath­room, which gives us and guests plenty of privacy.

We don’t enter­tain overnight guests a whole lot, maybe a cou­ple of times a year. I like to give our guests a B&B feel when they’re here, which means set­ting them up with refresh­ments in the stu­dio, com­plete with cof­fee for the next morn­ing and cold drinks in the mini-fridge.

Unfortunately, I think the biggest glitch to the week­end was that we for­got to turn on the hot water tank to the stu­dio before her arrival. We use it so occa­sion­ally that we typ­i­cally do not pay to keep it on, which also saves energy.

She described her shower on Sunday morn­ing as “tepid.”  Oops.

I love hav­ing guests come and stay with us at Our Little House. Last week, I wrote that our first five years here had been full of mixed emo­tions lit­er­ally rooted in feel­ing home­sick for our hometown.

Showing Kathleen around Our Little House, the beauty of our area and what our new home has to offer made us appre­ci­ate even more our move here. This is a side ben­e­fit of see­ing good friends again. Acting as a tour guide, it allows one to see their home in a new light too.

I also imme­di­ately made a mas­ter “to do” list of every­thing that needs to get done before some­one else comes to visit. Maybe they’ll even get a hot shower.

Do you have a small space? How do you accom­mo­date guests or what is the biggest ben­e­fit, aside from see­ing friends and loved ones that you’ve found when they come to visit?