Where you lay your head

A little over a year ago we were in a bit of tailspin.  We’d owned our 2.4 acre property for about a year and a half and thoughts of being on the land, building our house and homestead, had quickly grown to a kind of obsession.  Living in a small apartment less than an hour from our land, we were constantly dreaming of, planning and researching the homestead we would build.  The homestead wasn’t a far off goal, like retirement, or even the maybe someday goal of having children.  Rather it was always just an arm’s length away and so, it was never far from our thoughts.  It’s exhausting, wanting something so bad, knowing that if it was simply a matter of our own hard work and endurance we would succeed.

tiny house in progress

And then I was laid off in March 2012, a few days before I turned 30.  Mike works full-time on rental properties we “own” through high interest private financing. They don’t make us much now but neither of us likes working for other people and we don’t mind hard work so they’re pretty much our best bet for a retirement plan.  My job was our main income source.

Being laid-off was a devastating blow to our plans.  So we did what we do in times of crisis: we took long drives and discussed all our options, testing the strengths and weaknesses of different plans and affirming that the sooner we were living on the land, relying on our bodies and wit to be self-reliant, the happier we would be. On one of these drives we stopped at an used RV sales lot and found a camper that would cut out a lot of our building budget but it could mean we were on the land as soon as possible, with electricity and plumbing (sort of, we have to truck in water).

We purchased the camper, moved it to the land and began building a room addition onto the side of the camper to give us more space.  In retrospect I would have saved our money.  Sure the camper has certain advantages in being ready-built but it’s not built for the two of us, our two 60lb dogs and two cats.  It’s so cramped that it’s hard to keep clean.  The bathroom is not comfortable and without running water it’s not convenient.  We have to get the holding tank pumped every two weeks at $40 a pump.  We have to run the generator five hrs a day to keep the batteries charged.  We catch cupboard corners in the head every other day and the materials are so cheap that door moldings are falling off. The camper is dark and increasingly musty as apparently all of the creatures breathing inside it create condensation (according to the owner’s manual) which along with boiling water for coffee and tea, cooking, and the heavy spring rains, are soaking the dark insides of our cupboards. 

reclaimed tongue and groove interior walls flew together
gifted from Mike's awesome uncle 

The room we built is beautiful, full of light and fresh air.  It is strong and sturdy and we’ve got about $300 into because we’ve mostly used materials from the land.  We will be moving the camper off the land as soon as possible because the room we’ve built is so pleasant it’s made the camper intolerable.  The composting outhouse we built (post to follow) is by far more comfortable and pleasant than the camper bathroom and has greatly improved the quality of our lives.  The two benefits of the camper have been that we had a roof over our heads while building the room turned tiny house and that the health department officer who came to the land for the deep hole test for the onsite water treatment permit didn’t question what we’re doing with wastewater.  If we'd only had the room and the composting outhouse we would have been in violation of Health Board regulations and I don’t know what would have happened. 

reciprocating roof

So, I would not buy the camper if I had it to do over.  But this is part of the process right... learning from our mistakes and adjusting our future plans?  And I find it comforting that we can build a 9x13 room out of scrap material and forest floor timber and fall in love with it so much that we’re giving up living space in the camper because we only want to be in the room.  I think that bodes pretty well for the 12x20 house we’re building.