Tiny Houses

We've lived in the parsonage for a year and a half.  When we moved here it was a challenge for me; I didn't have any pictures of what the interior looked like, and of course we were moving half a country away and didn't know anyone in this area so it's not like we could call up a friend and ask them to swing by and take a look at the place for us.  I knew it was small, that's about it, although I was told it had a 'good sized' kitchen.

Since we were living in a much larger house at the time, I thought a lot about this - wondering whether we should pay to ship certain items or not, about the cost of replacing an old, beat up sofa with another old, equally beat up sofa, that sort of thing.  I wondered about these things, and we ended up renting a seventeen foot moving truck and somehow fitting a medium sized house into it and travelling two days to here, unloading it, and somehow fitting it inside this very tiny house.

I'm not very good at estimating size, but I would imagine our old house was probably close to 2000 square feet, if you include the basement, and this house is probably 1000 square feet.  Over the time we've been here, we've fit into it pretty comfortably, in fact my husband and I are confident that if we had a small basement, or even a nice, big shed for storage, we could happily say that this house was big enough for a family of five.  

One of my hobbies is wandering around the minimalist blogs and looking at people who fit large families, or any family, really, into tiny little houses.  They have all these fantastic techniques to do it, too and it's really inspirational, but of course we can't use half of them because this house doesn't belong to us and we can't structurally change it, and even if we could it would be too expensive.  But we've reduced a lot of our belongings and that's something you can do with any budget.  Really, though, we've mostly just found ways of storing stuff - under the beds, under the sofa, in every crack available, the stuff that we need to live our lives.

It's unlikely that this will be our last church, and therefore our last parsonage.  There will be other houses to fit five people into, bigger people, and maybe even smaller houses.  I have friends who live with their families in big, beautiful homes with many bedrooms and of course on occasion I wonder what that would be like.  But when I probe that feeling to it's root what I'm really asking for is a place to just tuck all of my stuff out of sight - I have these things, and I don't want to have to look at them, and a big house allows me to own them but also ignore them, while a small house makes me choose.

And on a less philosophical note there are other benefits to a small house.  It's easier to clean, it's harder to lose things in, when my young children go to another room to play I don't need to trail after them because I can hear them just fine from where I am, there are no stairs to gate (a real benefit now that the baby is scooting about).  And there are negatives; if I burn something you can't escape it, there is no privacy, when the cats run about crazily after dark you think it will wake the children.

And I suppose, if push came to shove, and David and I suddenly built a house, we would build a bigger house.  I suppose.  But it would never be as big as the average house size that everyone talks about, the giant (to me) four bedroom monstrosities sitting on suburban lots everywhere.  That's too big for anyone.