Tiny Living WITH Big Things...And Loving It Mostly
TYBEE BEACHCOMBER | DEC 2019 15
By Amy Callaghan
By the time you gander at this article, it will be two years of living tiny!
Whoop whoop! I can speak for myself when I say that I love most of our
tiny life. Robyn and I are living at an organic farm called Greenbridge Farm.
The owners of the farm are Michael Maddox and his lovely wife, Annette.
We have two other tiny house dwellers around us, a couple living in a yurt,
the other a family of 3 in a modified school bus.
Finding the farm has been a pleasant escape from campground life. If
you work on the farm you can have as much of the produce as you’d like.
There are also chickens running around that my dogs have yet to identify
as playful or a threat. I worked on the farm a few times and for the sake
of my back, I have no problem paying for my potatoes or onions anymore.
One time the owner grabbed a big black snake instead of a yummy egg!
No thanks, I’m not that brave for some eggs.
Rent is affordable and we can stay indefinitely. It’s a quiet haven from the
rest of the world. We have everything a camper needs for full functionality,
except cable (Netflix and chill age). We have mobile internet, and as long as
it’s charged, we have Wi-Fi. There’s been little to no problems and we have
racked up the gigawhosamawhat without buffering constantly or being
slow. We’ve taken it to the beach and out of town without the camper. It’s
been the trustiest sidekick for everything technological, I’d say even better
than the old router we used to deal with.
On top of it all, our two furry sidekicks, Frank and Opie, now have acres
to go on walks and a fenced yard where they get freedom off the leash.
Now for the parts that I don’t like most about tiny living:
1. When you hear of grey tanks and black tanks, that means one is
equivalent to dirty dishwater, the other is ugly and I’m ready to never
think about again. We have a washer dryer combo, it’s been an amazing
purchase. It uses a lot of water for how small it is. What that means for the
grey tank is you have two small loads of laundry and a decent shower until
one grey tank is full. When you’re in your birthday suit about to take said
shower, but it’s turning into a bath of dirty dishwater, you truly understand
the word inconvenient.
2. We had big dreams of taking our big bad mamajama home everywhere
we could. Vacations galore, boon docking in the middle of nowhere,
because why the eff not! One, its 40 feet long and weighs over 15,000
pounds. We weren’t good at the math during that time, but just so you
know, Robyn has excelled since! We were awakened from our big dreams
when it cost almost $200 in gas to move our home a whopping 70 miles.
3. The biggest pain when it comes to tiny living is finding a place to park
and also have full hook ups (electricity, water, sewer). Prices are insane
and availability is not as common as we were lead to believe. I stumbled
across the farm on page 2 of the googles (complete desperation when
you go there!) from an article that was written almost seven years ago.
Sometimes persistence pays off kids!
4. Cleaning is quicker than previous homes, by a landslide! Only complaint
is that there’s so many crevices that tiny web making occupants can dwell.
Of course no visible tenant while cleaning, but I know my dogs didn’t make
that insect trap, so I’m left to presume. Frank wishes in his wildest doggy
dreams that he’s the house bug killer!
Some crazy decisions had to be made and sacrifices a plenty on both
our parts during this adventure. Going on two years and stronger than ever,
this has been an eye opening experience of a lifetime. We now know more
of what we want and don’t want for our future together. There’s so many
aspects of downsizing and feeling a sense of simplicity, yet there’s more
to it than we honestly thought.