A week ago today my fiance Isha and I got the keys to our new home and we're eager to tell you all about it!
But first, a little backtracking to catch up anyone who has just recently started following along. I met Isha when he was about to become The Guy Next Door. I was living in my tiny house The Lucky Penny at Simply Home Community and Isha came on one of our Tiny House Community Tours. We happened to have a tiny house available for rent and he was ready to try out tiny house living, so he joined our community shortly after.
As I described in my chapter of the book Turning Tiny, being invited to live at Simply Home Community, the first tiny cohousing community, was a dream come true. I'd been envisioning tiny cohousing since 2008 and wrote a blog post about it called Lina's Vision for Tiny Cohousing in the summer of 2012. Simply Home Community has been an incredible place to call home for the past two and a half years. I've grown a lot myself and I've helped grow other things (from our garden bounty to friendships to our organizational systems). And with community dinners, Solstice and Halloween parties, projects, and movie nights, it's also been heaps of fun!
Isha and I really enjoyed living at Simply Home Community, but as we talked about longer term plans, we decided it might be best to create a new tiny house community that would enable us to have additional flexibility as our family grows. The ideal vision we came up with was to purchase a piece of property with an existing house, potential for an accessory dwelling unit (converting a garage, carving out an attic or basement apartment, etc.), and room for at least one tiny house. (Especially since we have two tiny houses between us now: The Lucky Penny and T42!)
The fabulous thing about a set up like this is that we can live in community with other great people as we have been doing, but we can also have additional flexibility about how we use the spaces: We could live in one of our tiny houses, the ADU, or the big house. And we could have dedicated shared common space in whichever space makes the most sense. Maybe someday we'll live in the house and T42 will be the common space. Or maybe we'll live in a tiny and the ADU will be common space. And meanwhile, friends can live in the other units. So many options!
We had this vision in mind but we didn't expect that we'd manifest it so quickly! A couple months ago Isha spotted a property that seemed to meet our criteria. It was a beautifully renovated 1920s home with the possibility of creating a functional ADU, a fenced yard with garden beds, and we already knew some of the neighbors. So we checked it out, decided it would be an awesome fit, and placed an offer. Everything came together so quickly we were afraid to jinx it. Indeed, at a few points we didn't think it was going to work out, so we were keeping it on the down-low. But it did work out in the end and we're thrilled!
So we told our landies at Simply Home and savored our last month there. We're still neighbors so we look forward to remaining connected with the awesome peeps there. (And if you have a tiny and want to live in an amazing spot, get in touch with them!) We got the keys to our new home a week ago and moved our stuff on over. I'll tell you more about our Minimalist Move in a future post. Meanwhile, let me assure you that it's super strange to live in a big house while we're finishing up T42. (I've got a post brewing about that, too!) I look forward to sharing this new part of the adventure with you as we create a new tiny cohousing community!