Living Large In Our Little House

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?  

One of the pieces I didn't want to part with

Stuff.

We buy it, we find room for it in our homes, we clean it, pack it, move it, store it and sell it.

For most of us, stuff becomes an obses­sion until we no longer own it, but it owns us.

When we moved to Our Little House from a 1,100 square foot house packed with stuff, we real­ized just how lit­tle room we needed once we got down to it.

We were acci­den­tal in the Small House Movement, find­ing out through liv­ing it how free­ing liv­ing with­out our stuff could be.

The prob­lem became what to get rid of, as I not only had our stuff we had accu­mu­lated through 21 years of mar­riage, but we had my mother’s stuff, some of it sen­ti­men­tally priceless.

Here’s the process by which we elim­i­nated (and con­tinue to elim­i­nate) stuff from our lives:

Continue Reading »

The Belle Writers Studio in the early morn­ing mist

I started mak­ing my list for spring clean­ing yesterday.

After all, when it feels like sum­mer out­side, I feel like I’m run­ning behind.

Dale actu­ally began the spring clean­ing two weeks ago. I was work­ing one week­end day, so I took the dogs over to The Belle Writer’s Studio so he could pull out the stove and fridge and vac­uum the top of the cabinets.

He also came home from work the other day and cleaned the ceil­ing fans, as it was hot and we needed them.

My list is still pretty long:

Continue Reading »

Dale is doing more with wood than stack­ing it these days

We had an inter­est­ing week­end at Our Little House.

Dale is get­ting into wood­work­ing, so we spent part of the week­end going to the Big Box hard­ware stores where he could find the tools he needed to start a project he’s been yearn­ing to do since we moved.

He’s wanted to build a util­ity table for the deck, one I could use as a pot­ting table and that we could also use when we’re cook­ing outdoors.

He received some money and gift cards for Christmas, so he pur­chased some wood­work­ing tools and went to work.

And he did an awe­some job, although he didn’t want me to take any pho­tos of it. He built it out of old pal­lets he had stored from our move, so it isn’t very pretty, but it is sturdy and functional.

A hobby for even­tual retire­ment? Definitely.

A poten­tial source of sec­ond income? If he con­tin­ues on this track, most def­i­nitely. I hope he main­tains his interest.

It was cer­tainly great see­ing him so con­tent work­ing in his garage on Sunday and then rush­ing home from work Monday night to get back at his table.

Continue Reading »