I have to get something off my chest. It’s been a big downer throughout the process of Hygge Hale’s build, and that can weigh heavily.
I’m continuously surprised by how many people are themselves surprised–and sometimes judgemental–about how long it’s taking us to build this tiny house.
Considering how few people I’ve known who’ve actually built a house themselves, no contractors involved (and I’m not talking about renovation to a room or basement, I’m talking built the entire thing from the ground up), I’m surprised how many people seem to have a definitive determination of how long it takes to build a house. I’m going to guess despite their conviction in their idea of the timeline for building a house, most people haven’t really thought about what that involves.
We ourselves, started out in that place: When we first rolled the trailer into our yard, we thought we’d have a live-in-able house in a year. So, really we perpetrated this misinformation ourselves from the get-go. But, with lots of hindsight, I’m going to throw some things out there for consideration:
- With zero contractors, not a single bit of this build has been outsourced. None, nada. Just the two of us–and a bit of help from our parents.
- Eli may have experience in home building from years ago, and I, myself, in assisting my parents with home renovations as I grew up, but neither of us are experts or professionals.
- Tiny houses are not a traditional build. Let me repeat that. This build has been in no way standard. The building of a tiny house on a trailer takes a lot of head scratching, weighing traditional knowledge (which is often conflicting even for normal house-building circumstances) for applicability to abnormal house-building circumstances (man, I’ve read ALOT of articles, books, and chat room posts on home construction), uncertain decisions, innovation, and inventing solutions. What you hope to be sound solutions. So, considering from LOTS of angles. So, so much of our time has been spent discussing and researching and discussing the best method to do…well, pretty much everything in this build.
So, let’s consider those three elements I just noted: Eli and I are a two-person crew constituting the Research and Development team, the architect, the construction team, the electrician, the plumber, the office team for locating materials and sellers and placing orders, and handling all the other random things that come up. Not a single part of this tiny house build has been outsourced–I’m going to reiterate that again: none. …Okay, maybe just a bit: we didn’t build our own windows (though Eli contemplated it, yikes!) or refrigerator or stove/oven or toilet. And, no, we did not mill our own wood (though we honestly would have liked to). But, to make a tiny house as livable as possible, everything has to be efficient… and so very often that means custom-built. We even built our own light fixtures for heaven’s sake! When’s the last time you designed and made a light fixture? And, how long did it take? Actually, if we could, maybe we would have even built our own stove/oven…
So, our entire crew is only the two of us, and we both work full-time challenging jobs (that have nothing to do with home-building) that already drain our brains and emotional capacities. Yes, we need time in the evenings–and even sometimes on the weekends–to recuperate, which does not involve working on aspects of a difficult house build. Some weekends we just really need to catch up on lost sleep from the work week.
And, to be honest, sometimes we like to be able to see our families. And, occasionally spend time with friends. Or, more boringly, our time has to be spent on the regular chores of living and of maintaining the rental house and yard where we currently live. You see, even if you’re building a tiny house, you still have to do laundry and sweep the floor, mow the lawn and clean the gutters, make dinner and do the dishes, do your taxes and pay the bills, can the peaches and dry the persimmons your trees are so kindly providing an abundance of… you get the drift. Just because you’re building a tiny house doesn’t mean the regular bits of living disappear.
We’re also regular people (not the hyper-productive stylized people our culture seems to idolize). We need to just take a break every now and again. Have an adventure. Yup, we too, like everyone else, enjoy and need vacations—from both our day-jobs and the job of building Hygge Hale. We enjoy getting out and experiencing the world, too, along with our work and projects. For example, on one weekend we “should” have been working on the tiny house to complete it more quickly, instead, we took a mountains to sea tour, snowshoeing in the Sierra Nevada mountains on Saturday and heading out to Point Reyes National Seashore on Sunday:
So you see, we haven’t received a large inheritance that allowed us to quit our jobs and build the tiny house full-time (we’re actually paying for the whole build as we go with no loans or debt accrual), we aren’t professional builders being paid to build this tiny house as our regular day job, we aren’t experienced contractors who know the ins-and-outs of where to find materials and all the current tech and products, and we aren’t family-less and friendless people. And yes, we too enjoy–and dare I say need–leisure.
There’s A LOT to squeeze into the waking hours of our days… I honestly think we’ve done pretty damn well at balancing all the demands, needs, and wants for our time. And, really, why are we always in such a rush?