I see no need for lots of indoor space and lots of need for natural outdoor space. I hear people complain about having to maintain a large yard, but I don’t understand having to maintain a large house. I would much rather be outside gardening or pruning or lawn-mowing or walking around my yard than inside vacuuming or dusting or sitting around my house. One of my favorite periods of my life was when I was studying abroad in Kenya for a semester and our classroom/dining room/everything room was only walled on three sides – and our sleeping quarters were small open air huts or safari tents. I LOVED being basically “outside” all the time. Immersed in the world. Don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate an enclosed comfy building when it’s rainy or freezing outside – and I learned how to appreciate that to the full extent from months-long stints living in tents – but a smaller living space affords more time outside of it. So, a nice small, cozy house seems to be abundant with benefits. How I see a small house as ideal:
- I spend less time cleaning
- There’s less that needs to be maintained – saving me time and money
- It’s cheaper to heat and cool and to light up in the dark hours of the day
- It uses less resources to heat and cool and to light
- It requires less materials to build
- I can focus more on quality because the quantity has been minimized
- It doesn’t require I acquire massive debt to own
Condensed: I would have more free time, more money, and less impact on the world. Sounds pretty ideal to me.
So, I am finally (finally) now moving towards living this ideal of residing in a tiny house. After many years of dreaming and scheming, designing and planning, my husband and I have jumped all in! We’re building a tiny house. And, the tiny house seemed to exemplify a Danish concept I recently mentioned in a post: hygge. So, my husband and I have already christened our soon-to-be-in-existence tiny house, The Hygge Hale. Wikipedia describes hygge as “a Danish and Norwegian word which can be described as a quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being”, or basically “snug” (hygge is pronounced HOO-gə). Hale means house in Hawaiian (pronounced ha-lə) – meaningful to my husband and I as we recently lived in Hawai`i.
So, if you’re interested in this specific attempt at my living the ideal, I’d love to have you come join me in this journey! I’ll be posting the updates on our build of the Hygge Hale on Tiny House Posts.
Some tantalizing visuals from my 3-D model created in SketchUp are below. The model is a work in progress, but this is pretty much what we’d like the Hygge Hale to look like.
