Small house movement

We've been living in our small home for two months now and it's been a surprising adjustment. We haven't finished sheet-rocking, we don't have plumbing or electricity (other than the generator), and we have only moved a fraction of our stuff in because we don't want to get cluttered while we're still in the construction phase.

cracks forming as the wood dries

The wood stove is drying out our timbers which occasionally pop as they crack and split in really pleasing ways.

The heat from the wood stove warms like no other heating source I've lived with and I love being able to set the three quart cast iron on top with soup or squash and let it cook for hours while I do other things. 

The home we've built is breathtakingly beautiful and we are reveling in our creation.

But the winter winds brought with them another unexpected feeling: we started wanting things, lots of things. I was making mental lists of the stuff we could buy now that we're in our house that will make it feel more like a home. When we moved into our temporary 9x13 room we downsized a lot of our belongings, particularly furniture that we knew wouldn't fit in the house. Now that we have so much space (which is definitely what it feels like even though the whole house is only 480 sqft), we want things to put in it right?

I'm not sure if it's because we've spent the last few years in a self-imposed privation in order to afford building our small home or if it's because we are living in the house we plan to live in for decades and are eager to see it in a completed form or if it's because sleeping on the floor on the "mattress" we pulled from the camper feels too much like moving in the wrong direction (early twenties/first apartment/air mattress). I do know that the list of things I wanted was snowballing out of practicality and affordability. 

Wanting things, particularly things you can't have, is not a path to happiness and contentment.

We talked about it and identified our growing angst and connected it to the desire for things that we just can't have right now. The truth is we don't want that much stuff. Building a small house was in part a financial decision, but it's also a way of life--a commitment to self-sufficiency and a turn away from consumerism--that we whole-heartedly embrace as our way of navigating the world. Of course we still want things, like a bed alcove with built-in shelving and storage, but we want to make those things, not only because we can't afford to buy them, but because we really, really, really love making things.

Honestly, I don't understand not wanting to make everything you can. But then I know a lot of people who don't understand wanting to build your own house when it means no plumbing, using an outhouse even in sub-zero weather, and really intense, difficult labor. 

But who can argue with the results?