People love to love tiny houses.
‘Tiny house’ conjures up thoughts of a cute, cozy wood dollhouse for humans.
Or maybe a sweet Airstream tricked out with funky laminate countertops, atomic lamps, and shag rugs.
How romantic and carefree! A fraction of the housework! More time to spend outside! Good livin’ for dirt cheap!
It didn’t take us long to find out that long-term living in a tiny house just isn’t our jam.
Dirt cheap? Check. Our family of three is living pretty much for free in my dad’s super-cozy, light-filled 500 square foot loft above his barn while my husband designs our new home. We’ve saved a lot of money!
Shag rugs and atomic lamps? Check. We have the cliched penchant for mid-century modern and Scandinavian aesthetics.
Romantic and carefree? A fraction of the cleaning? No and no. For a family of three in one room, for almost three years…well, you get the picture.
Or maybe you don’t. Allow me to explain:
Living in a tiny house sounds cool. Until it turns you savage.
I know my situation smacks of privilege, but if you’ve ever considered living in a tiny house, consider this cautionary list:
1. A tiny kitchen doesn’t always mean less cleaning.
We’re kitchen people. We like to cook. We crank out loaves of wild yeast sourdough and whole roasted chickens every week. But we are working with a miniature gas stove and no dishwasher.
Our pots and pans look like crap. The grease trap is always goopy. Grease-dust puffballs shower us when we shut the ceiling fan off.
Counter space is premium real estate. In the interest of expedience I frequently give into the temptation of merely rinsing and stacking our dinnerware, skipping the sudsing step entirely.
My eight-year-old: Mom, is this dried hummus on my glass?
Me (savagely): Just scrape it off!
2. Then there’s the laundry basket.
The dirty laundry multiplies quickly. The laundry basket is an attractive woven reed basket, but the dirty socks and dinner napkins that get tossed in it from across the room flop over the sides like dead bunnies that mated and died.
We also toss underwear, shoes, books, towels.
It’s fun to see if we can make it into the basket! Random things tend to sit there for awhile getting buried until they’re discovered on laundry day.
Savages!
3. The noise. The noise.
There is no going into the other room and shutting the door.
My husband’s YouTube farming videos compete with my kid’s iPad ‘Gravity Falls’ binges. The sink shudders when we turn on the hot water. We set the smoke detector off at least thrice a week.
Last week I yelled at my husband
‘Stop blowing your nose!’
This week it was ‘Stop breathing!’
I can’t hide from the ticking of the wall clock, and we yell at each other from one side of the apartment to the other.
We just can’t be bothered to get up to talk to teach other—it’s a tiny house. Pffft.
4. Trash is tricky.
We try not to make a lot of trash. But because he doesn’t consider the smallish space under the kitchen sink a ‘real’ space for a kitchen wastebasket, my husband insists we leave our trash outside our front door in a bucket. It’s a nice way to your introduce your guests to your intriguing tiny home!
And since that means actually opening the front door to throw something away, our eight-year-old tosses her gum wrappers behind her loft bed and leaves her orange peels in between the couch cushions.
Savage!
5. It’s easy to wear things out in a tiny house.
Even though my dad says the apartment is old, I’m feeling bad that we’re on our way to breaking everything in it.
Tiny-house candidates, take note: the more you use something, the more likely it is to cease to function.
It started with the toilet seat, a bathroom faucet handle, a kitchen tap. Now the microwave is fried, numerous jelly jars have crashed to their deaths from our stack of drying dishes, and the finish on the hardwood floor is sad.
My husband broke the pullout wooden cutting board in a fit of rage when he ran out of room on the counter.
But that was an easy fix.
6. A tiny bedroom is a passion-killer.
Some of my friends with kids and regular-sized homes report that their level of privacy is about the same as ours—kids always seem to get in the way when you want to snuggle with your sweetheart, no matter what your living situation.
When my friends ask about intimacy in a tiny home, I just say we wait until the kid is off at a friends’ house. In a tiny house, creativity is key.
At least our tiny home doesn’t have a loft bedroom. Climbing ladders and knocking your head in the dark sounds like a nightmare.
7. Shoes are the real problem.
Everywhere I turn, there’s a tiny flip-flop or a big-ass boot. At dark-thirty in the morning, when I am getting ready for work, an errant shoe has the potential to send me flying into a corner or a cabinet.
Every time I clear some floor space, a pair of shoes moves in.
Savages!
I give up.
I’ve learned to embrace the suck.
In hindsight, it’s actually been a hilarious, and—dare I say—fun experiment in problem-solving and minimalism.
And if you have a unit designed properly for a family (with a dishwasher, maybe?), your story might not be quite so savage.
Alas, our tiny house saga will go on. And on.
Oh, yes.
Because next year you’ll find us living savagely in a (not-Airstream) trailer on the property where we’re building our dream home.
