Renewable Resources

When I was a little girl, my grandmother’s friend Maria told me “Your hair is so beautiful. You could sell it.” She should know. She was a German gypsy and she was kidnapped for her beautiful hair when she was a child. Her captors drug her out to the chopping block and released her only after hacking off her think, long hair.

I squirmed when I heard Maria's story and had no interest in selling my hair. But years later I learned about Locks of Love, a company that uses donated human hair to make wigs for children with cancer and alopecia areata. I was considering a career in medicine and, through a job shadow with a dermatologist, I had the opportunity to meet a woman with alopecia areata. She was frustrated by the disease, but I was impressed by how confidently she carried herself. I could only imagine how hard it would be for a little girl who had not yet developed this woman’s poise.

So as a high school student I donated 10 inches of my hair to Locks of Love and sported a bob. A couple years later, as a sophomore in college, my long hair was once again getting unruly so I donated ten more inches. The stylist at the salon gave me a free hair cut when she found out that I was donating. She told me, “Some little girl will be very lucky to get your hair. You should keep donating as long as you’re able!” I grinned at my new chic haircut in the mirror and joked, “Yeah, I guess my hair is a renewable resource!”

So I kept donating. I donated my hair to Locks of Love again right after I graduated from college. Then again three years later. And again three years after that.

Today I made my sixth donation to Locks of Love! I went to my favorite stylist, Sadie at Eclipse. Sadie had to separate my hair into pigtails to chop them off since we wanted to maximize the length. Now I have a cute new doo for spring. Sadie is fabulous, isn't she? My hair will go back to its wavy ways as soon as I wash it again, but it's fun to have a chic look as I head out for my much-anticipated spring break tomorrow morning.

Six donations has been my goal ever since donation #3. They say that it takes between six and ten ponytails to make a wig. My hair’s thick, so I’m going to assume it would take six of my ponytails to make a wig. So I've taken really good care of my hair so that I could keep donating. I’ve given myself permission to do whatever I want with my hair after this donation. I might keep it short or dye it purple. I might even grow it out and donate it again. I’ve noticed that with grad school a few silver strands have worked their way into the mix. I won’t be able to continue contributing to wigs forever. Eventually my hair will change and it won’t work for wigs anymore. (But Locks of Love assures us they still accept donations of grey hair and sell it to off-set the cost of manufacturing wigs.)

I’m (almost) 62” tall (5’2”). In the past 15 years (half my lifetime) I have donated 60” of hair. So I’ve donated (almost) my height in hair. I think that’s pretty cool. I’m grateful that I’ve been able to share a little bit of myself in this strange way.

Human hair is a precious renewable resource! Have you ever donated? If so, what was your experience like?

Let's Not Discount Kids' Tiny House Designs

When I facilitated a tiny house workshop for a group of fifth graders in January I was impressed that Ten Year Olds Design Awesome Tiny Houses! So I was excited when I found a New York Times article recently entitled “Envisioning Tiny Apartments, No Bathroom Required.” As you might imagine, the article addressed what happens when kids design tiny living spaces.

To help set the stage, let me explain as the article did, that the Museum of the City of New York is hosting an exhibit called “Making Room: New Models for Housing New Yorkers” which features micro units. The kids had a chance to tour a full-size model of a 325 square foot micro apartment. (Think: walking through an IKEA model apartment in the showroom.) Afterwards, the youngsters designed tiny houses in a studio station set up with craft supplies.

Journalist Vivian Yee states: “The results, inevitably, were almost all unlivable — some lacking toilets, another entirely filled by a grand piano — as their young creators grappled with the grown-up problem of too little real estate for too many things.”

Why would Yee say it's "inevitable" that children are creating "unlivable" spaces when adults have created thousands of preposterously unlivable houses? Besides, many of us feel a nice sense of contentment in simple structures like a child's tree fort! I’m disappointed that Yee smirked at the kids's designs since kids ignore critical pieces of a “normal” house. I wish instead she had recognized that in many ways kids are much better tiny house designers than adults are.

At least Yee recognized that "too little real estate for too many things" tends to be a grown-up problem. Kid designers are not usually obsessed with cramming all their precious possessions into the space. Instead kids hone in on the essence of what makes a place feel like home. They only include the spaces and the objects that are most important and most exciting to them. It’s true that a grand piano might not be the best fit for a tiny house, but I did have an adult friend request an upright in her dream tiny house. I assured her that as long as she didn’t move often, we worked out the weight balance on a sturdy enough trailer, and she made good friends with a piano tuner it would probably work out.

So yes, some of the kids “forgot” to put in a toilet. Then again, I know adult tiny housers who purposely left out a flush toilet and are instead using a bucket potty. There are even a few architects now experimenting with a boarding house model that does provide a toilet in each micro unit but instead locates them in shared restrooms. A design team comprised of ten-year-old designers probably could have come up with that solution a whole lot quicker than a group of adult architects. Kids probably can’t understand why adults are so anal retentive about toilets and so obsessed with potty talk! Why focus on that when there’s so much good stuff to design!

It’s true that kids don’t always understand the constraints of physics so their structures might not hold up. (Then again, some engineers don’t seem to understand physics either!) And it’s true that kids don’t tend to have a very good sense of proportion and scale. So they may not realize they can’t have the grand piano and the trampoline.

However, I think it’s important that when we ask kids to think about the sort of space they’d like to live in we don’t dismiss their choices. Kids are remarkably flexible and they have an incredible capacity to think beyond the status quo. Their imaginations are more powerful than their logic, but design is all about problem-solving. Logic isn’t always going to come up with the answer and precedent isn't either. We shouldn’t be trying to convince kids that we need our future housing to look like what we’ve already created. Let’s not stifle the creative energy of our future designers and architects – especially when they’re working on space-efficient designs!

Well, Hello, Tiny Housers!

Two days ago I received a plethora of Facebook requests from people I haven't met yet. That seemed odd, so I checked my blog and realized that the Sightline & Grist on Living Large in Small Spaces article that Alyse Nelson wrote last December was picked up by the Tiny House Blog. All of the sudden This Is The Little Life had lots and lots of visitors! (Those of you who sent friend requests, hang tight. I'm working on it! This was the last week of classes for Winter Term and finals are next week.)

If you're new to This Is the Little Life, welcome. My post A Year of Little Living is chock full of links to other posts which will give you a sense of all the adventures the Little Life has taken me on in the past year and a half. Here are a few of my favorite posts:

• Trailer Lust
• Shrinky-Dink Porch
• Tiny Houses Turn Their Backs on the Street
• A Vision for Tiny Cohousing
• Tiny House Build Week: Lessons Learned

Please note that you can subscribe to receive blog posts. Those of you who subscribed in the past couple of days received a batch of updates this evening. One of the casualties of not having internet in my yurt is that I'm better at writing blog posts than I am at actually getting them posted. I like writing - whether it's blog posts or journal entries - during tweelight (the morning equivalent of twilight - the silky-blue morning time when the bird start tweeting). It's so nice to sit with my thoughts, my kitty cat on my lap, right as the world is waking up. Without an internet connection I can't post right then and start finding out what all of you are up to either. But I love that quiet time. Anyhow, that's why sometimes you'll receive notifications in batches. I recognize this is not ideal, but remember you can spread out reading them, too!

If you haven't yet, be sure to check out the cool businesses I've partnered with: Portland Alternative Dwellings, UrbaNest NW, and Orange Splot. And if you'd like to be part of our tiny house community join the Portland Tiny Houses facebook group and the Tiny House Network google group. Cheers!

How Tiny is Too Tiny?

A friend recently shared a link to Grist article entitled "There is such thing as a too-tiny house, and this is what it looks like." The Grist article fed from a PetaPixel article by Michael Zhang which showed bird's eye images of Hong Kong cubical apartments. The photo shoot was commissioned by the Society for Community Organization to draw attention to cramped living conditions in Hong Kong, which was rated as the most livable city in the world by the Economist last year.

I imagine my friend sent this link along with the single word "Thoughts?" because he was curious about the reaction of an enthusiastic tiny house dweller. Over the past year and a half I’ve downsized from an 832 square foot 2-bedroom house to a 121 square foot tiny house on wheels to a 113 “round foot” yurt. (Check out Oh, the Joys of Homeownership, Tiny Home Improvement, and Home, Sweet Yurt to learn about these places.) These days I feel like I’ve found my limits in terms of both actual size and amenities. I’m currently designing my own tiny vardo on wheels, which will probably be right around 100 square feet. Yet I have all sorts of ideas to make this wee space comfortable and highly functional, even though it will likely be even smaller than my current abode.

I am well aware that people in big cities throughout the world – and particularly in Asia and Europe – live in apartments that would raise the eyebrows of most Americans. Tiny housers like me often look to these little spaces around the world for inspiration. (I'm especially fond of Christian Schallert's Lego Apartment, a Transformer Apartment in Hong Kong, and, of course, Graham Hill's Life Edited Apartment.) However, in some cases people live in spaces that are uncomfortably cramped. The spaces profiled in the PetaPixel article seem uncomfortably cramped to me. Rather than being efficient, these spaces feel claustrophobic. This crowding feeling is definitely exacerbated by too many people sharing a small space. I’ve even heard of situations in which people have to resort to sleeping in shifts! I think a living space is too small when it restricts rather than liberates people’s activities and lifestyle.

What do you think? What would be too tiny for you? Have you ever tested your limits with tiny-ness?

I Still Don't Leave Home Without It!

When I first moved to Portland a friend introduced me to her system of keeping track of all the essential things one needs when walking out the door. I wrote about it in Don't Leave Home Without It. For more than a year this system worked well for me.

However, last December I lost my pod when it fell out of my coat pocket when I was biking up a hill. (Of course, at the time, I had no idea where I'd lost it. One moment I was paying for brunch with a friend and ten blocks later I was locked out of my yurt!)

It was horribly distressing to lose all my essentials in one fail swoop. I had to get a new key from my landlord, cancel my debit card and REI credit card (after I'd finally memorized the numbers!), and replace my brand new business card holder. Fortunately, I was able to put it into perspective when I realized that in more than I year I hadn't lost these things. In the past I would have misplaced these items separately multiple times in the same timeframe!

I thought my beloved pod was gone for good - and I was just about to go through the bother of getting a new driver's license - but exactly two weeks after I lost my pod a local coffee shop called me to say they had it. From the looks of it, it had been run over by a bus, but some kind soul had turned it in. My bus tickets were missing and my chapstick was smashed all over everything, but everything else was still in it. Even the cash! (See photo above.)

I used a different little pouch as a temporary stopgap measure, but I missed having a pretty pod. So today I stopped into an import store with a hunch I'd find what I was looking for. And there it was, my brand new pod. Ta da! Here's to many more months of keeping good track of the essentials.

Tiny House Workshop Weekend

It was a pleasure to be part of the Portland Alternative Dwellings Tiny House Workshop this weekend, along with Derin of UrbaNest, Brittany of Bayside Bungalow, and Chris and Melisssa Tack of Tiny Tack House. Tiny house enthusiasts from around Oregon and Washington joined us at the Historic Kenton Firehouse for the workshop. A few workshop participants even travelled internationally from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada! Thanks for dedicating your weekend to tiny houses everyone. We're so glad you did!

The two-day workshop covered everything from framing and tie-downs for mobile structures to the “sticky wickets” of how wee structures are addressed by code. We were lucky to have so many experienced tiny house designers, builders, and dwellers present to share different approaches. Dee Williams led most of the workshop sessions and asked us to chime in throughout. I'm so glad we've been Partnering with PAD. In one session Derin used a life-size model to demonstrate his super energy-efficient building strategies. In another session Brittany shared information about her greywater system and humanure composting system. Chris and Melissa described their kitchen layout, appliance selection, and how the two of them share the small space they designed for themselves. I addressed regulatory considerations, moving a tiny house down the road, zoning and building, and creating tiny house community. On the second day we wrapped up with a visit to Pod 49 to tour a tiny house.

It was a treat to meet more tiny house enthusiasts and to learn about everyone’s ideas and hopes. It’s so fun to see the tiny house community grow!

Hello, Ford District

A couple weeks ago I started a new job, as the Planning & Communications Coordinator for the Ford District, and I’m thoroughly loving it! I found out about the opportunity at the end of last term when Mike Tevis of Intrinsic Ventures sent an email over the urban planning listserv saying that he was offering a dream job to an ambitious planner. Intrigued, I contacted him and we chatted on the phone for a few minutes. He introduced himself as a property-owner with a vision to create a transit-oriented, mixed-use hub in central Southeast Portland through adaptive reuse and some ground-up residential. He was speaking my language.

When Tevis told me that the Ford Building is one of his, I was instantly excited. I’d been to Ford Food & Drink for team meetings for my Site Planning class and I love the vibe there. The Ford Building was built in 1914 as a factory for Model Ts, and the building today retains much of the gritty charm of an old factory, but it has been updated and modernized. It now houses 90 small businesses including artists, entrepreneurs, and independent professionals. (Everyone from messenger bag manufacturers and branding experts to hair stylists and artisan pickle makers!)

When Tevis and I first met, he told me he wants to do new construction to add housing to his properties, too. I told him about micro apartments and he was instantly on board. “Your generation is so smart!” he told me. “You have already figured out that it’s not about all the stuff but about having a cool place to call home and everything you need nearby.” I grinned. I love the synergy of a city. I know inner-city living isn’t for everyone, but I think a place like the Ford District will be home, sweet home to folks like me who want to live the Little Life in an urban environment.

I met with Mike Tevis the day he closed on his latest acquisition, The Dairy Building, and he invited me to walk through it. That sealed the deal for me. I could see in an instant that this building with its incredible exposed beams and natural light from a plethora of skylights would be phenomenal when Tevis is done with it. “I love old buildings,” he told me. “They’re better this way!” Some people would have had trouble seeing through the pigeon poop, but Tevis envisions the potential and I can see it, too.

At Friday at the Ford, I had the opportunity to meet some Ford Building tenants, including Nutcase, Old School Stationers, and Fat Pencil Studio. Several of my classmates joined in the fun, too. Thanks for coming out to mix and mingle, fellas! The Ford Building has an amazing community of talented folks and I can’t wait to meet all of them. Want to hear about the next Friday at the Ford and other Ford District happenings? Like Ford District on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

My work in the Ford District will be the perfect counterbalance to Partnering with Portland Alternative Dwellings for tiny house, ADU, and pocket neighborhood consulting. While the latter are great infill options for existing neighborhoods, the Ford District is an opportunity to create a more urban mixed-use area right next to the light rail, streetcar, and Clinton bicycle boulevard going over Portland’s new transit bridge. Our cities need both type of space-smart, resource-efficient housing, so I’m excited to help make both happen here in Portland.

Sunshine, Ice Cream, Bike Lights & Everything That's Wonderful

Today was utterly gorgeous. One of those February days that makes you feel like you’ve been resuscitated. After a long winter that first fresh breath of sunshine is just what we all need psychologically to remember that we can make it till spring. The yurt warmed up quickly so I turned the heat off. I was tempted to open the windows, which I closed up after A Month in the Yurt, but I know this is just a tease. When the time comes to open the windows up again I’ll be ready for it!

I gave myself a break from my to do list. Instead I found myself taking care of things that make me feel content but that rarely make the to do list during a stressful week like the one I’d just finished up. Farewell mid-terms! I found myself cooking, doing a bit of spring cleaning, sorting my inbox, catching up with loved ones, and having conversations with perfect strangers. I suppose it’s silly that I still spent any time inside at all, but sometimes it feels so nice to putter about, putting everything into place in my Home, Sweet Yurt, while the sun streams in the skylight and the tunes blast from my little Makshift Stereo System. In the afternoon I headed to the Bike Hub, Portland State’s bike cooperative and installed fenders and light on my bike. I’d made it this long without fenders but any Portland bike commuter will tell you they’re necessary. I do believe they’re right. I had lights already, but they weren’t very powerful and I decided it was worthwhile to get some brighter ones.

Then I celebrated the sunshine by treating myself to ice cream. Raffi celebrated by lounging in a puddle of sunshine. What a lovely day!

Living Large

The past week I’ve been housesitting for Eli and Noelle of Orange Splot, so I’m living large in their three-bedroom house. It’s been fun to be in the Cully neighborhood again and to see the progress at Cully Grove.

I’ve been joking that while some folks vacation by spending a week in the yurt, I’m vacationing this week by trading my yurt for a “normal” house. It feels luxurious to have hot running water instantly available and a gas stove to cook on. Things that I used to take for granted when living in the tiny house I now appreciate completely. This gratitude for simple pleasures is a neat change to observe in myself. Especially since I realize that I don’t need to be in a large house to have these luxuries again. The tiny house I lived in last year had a gas stove and running water. Once I did a little Tiny Home Improvement I also had greywater infrastructure.

I’ve enjoyed Downsizing from a Tiny House to a Tinier House and living in my Home, Sweet Yurt. It’s been a great way to stretch myself, to test the edges of my minimalism, and to get a sense of what I can live without. For instance, I’ve been getting along fine without water infrastructure, but it sure would be more convenient to just turn on the tap and then have my greywater automatically water the plants outside without me having to do it manually. I suppose I could set up this water infrastructure for the yurt but haven’t done it. I have, however, planned running water and greywater into the vardo I’m designing for myself. (Although I prefer cooking on gas the 1-burner electric cooktop I’m using suits me just fine, so I’ll probably go propane-free for my own tiny house).

This week it has also been nice to have enough elbow room to entertain. I hosted a game night with a couple classmates and brunch with my Planning Workshop team. Since moving into the yurt I’ve usually had just one friend over at a time. A couple months ago I had my friends Eleanor and Mike over for dinner but it wasn’t nearly as easy as Entertaining in the Tiny House. Once it’s warm enough to dine outside it will be more pleasant, but during the colder months the yurt is not well suited for entertaining.

The downside of the extra space is that I’m losing it. Really. There are so many surfaces that I’ve misplaced my cell phone several times! I also feel bad cranking the central air since it’s heating the whole house when I’m only in one room. This three bedroom works well for a family of three who need a home office, but it’s far more than I need as a single person.

Spending a week living large has helped me put my Little Life into perspective again. I’m looking forward to getting back to the coziness of the yurt (and especially to the wonderful light of the oculus), but enjoying the infrastructure of a fixed house this week has also confirmed that I want my vardo to be less rustic. It was a treat to have this vacation and I hope Eli and Noelle have enjoyed theirs, too!

Partnering with Portland Alternative Dwellings

A few months ago Dee Williams and Joan Grimm of Portland Alternative Dwellings gave me the heads up that they would be restructuring their company. With Katy Anderson, PAD had been doing design and building work for tiny houses, but Katy has moved on to other projects so Dee and Joan decided to focus on workshops, education, and consulting for tiny houses and pocket communities. Check out the new PAD Tiny Houses website!

I was delighted when PAD Tiny Houses asked me to join them as a Consulting Partner and a team teacher for some of their workshops. In partnership with PAD I’ve already had the opportunity to do consultations with several folks dreaming about tiny houses. They live across town (howdy, Cully!), across the country (hello, New England), and around the world (cheers, Australia!) It’s really exciting to have Dee Williams to bounce ideas off and double-check my work as I do concept and schematic design work.

PAD has also partnered with Derin and Andrea Willimas of Shelter Wise, a tiny house building and energy-efficiency consulting company. We had a great time presenting together last fall at the Build Small, Live Large Summit, which got us talking about working together in a more intentional way.

Today all of us gathered to discuss our working relationships and scheme about shrinking the world. We’re excited about the upcoming Tiny House Workshop later this month (join us!), building a tiny house at the Casa Verde festival in April, and participating in the first ever Tiny House Fair hosted by Yestermorrow Design-Build School in Vermont in June 2013. Stay tuned as we carry out our plans to make the world a better place, one tiny house at a time!