MiniMotives

A Little Winter Update

Aside from going stir-crazy sitting in one place we have been checking off items on our ‘to-do’ list this winter.

Build kitchen

Move tiny house

Put together RV Travel e-course (80% there)

Write book (25% there)

Design house to build (images attached below)

Not go crazy (so-far, so-good)

The eCourses

I presented my ‘trial run’ version of my ecourse last week to a small audience down at our…

Have You Ever Wanted To Travel Full Time?

I hope so! I really wish everyone could take a little more time to explore!

We’re trying to do our part. While back in Boise, waiting on spring, we’ve been collecting information to share with others in an effort to shortcut the process and empower you to get out and about, faster!

Class #1 – Preparing – February 5th https://www.facebook.com/events/724852357878371/

In the first…

Tell me about the best job you’ve ever had.

I do like to work. A little too much, I think. The truth is, have enjoyed every single job I’ve had. That is saying a lot once you find out what those were. I have been paid to gut fish, euthanized kittens, decorated cakes, and analyzed sunshine… Working has always been a release for me. I enjoy engulfing myself into a cause. I’ve had to learn how to become particular over time. Historically,…

What Are The Three Most Important Things Kids Should Be Taught In School?

Let me just take a swing at this from my non-school aged kid mom perspective ;-).

I know not everyone has it as easy as we do. Our kids are smart, all by themselves. Our three year old was doing basic addition and subtraction like a pro just now. So well that I was surprised and had to google ‘when kids start to learn basic math’. Most sources indicated that it is between 5 and 7. They…

What Would You Do If You Won The Lottery?

Let me start by saying I believe I have won the lottery. Not literally, unless you count a scratcher stocking stuffer ;-). I have lived an incredible life though, and I do appreciate that, I hope as much as I should. James is a wonderful, honest partner with heaps of integrity. Together we have two healthy and brave children, who, so far, love us to pieces. My dream dog in every way. I’ve…

Best Deal of the Year!

Once a year I do a really big sale on my plans and classes.  If you know a tiny houser then you know that ‘stuff’ is not generally necessary/wanted.  The way I see this, it helps get affordable presents for ‘stuff-adverse’ receivers as well as helping me give my kids a memorable holiday season.

For the rest of November I am running a 75% off sale on my eCourseswhich include 8+ hours of…

Well, it’s done, the tiny house is all buttoned up and in a warm blankie for the next year or two.  It wasn’t easy but I hope it was worth it!

Here’s how you put a cover on

It goes without saying that I am a bit scared to get on the roof.  Just over 6 years ago I fell off this very roof and broke my back and foot!  James, being the brave and awesome partner he is opted to jump up there (not…

Minimalist Kid’s Birthday Parties

I always want to post about our birthday successes after our birthdays! Miles just turned 3 (can you believe that!), so here goes!

There are several reasons we are minimalists.

I like my creature comforts as much as anyone but I try to keep them in check and see if the juice I really worth the squeeze on every purchase. We consider if we will get enough use out of whatever it is to justify the…

Let me officially introduce our next new project! …because we apparently can’t stop… 😀

This is our ‘What If’ Workshop

We’ve been searching for a name but we keep defaulting back to ‘Big Red’. The kids call him Clifford.  it’s our new (to us) 16×8′ utility trailer.  Hopefully by the time we are done neither Big Red, nor Clifford will make sense (I don’t like the color red…).  This trailer once…

Tiny House Moving Update!

I haven’t moved my tiny house in over 5 years!  When we moved it to it’s current location I had no idea how long I could leave it there.  I may be asked to leave within the week, maybe a year, maybe not at all… it really didn’t make sense for me to lay down a concrete pad for it because that’s a big cost with that would be potentially unnecessary and unused.  So, I parked it on the dirt, put it…

35 Things I Feel Are Important To Do By 35

Happy birthday to me!  I read this article once, when I was 30, about 30 things you should do by 30.  While entertaining I read it with a bit of sarcasm.  Things like ‘own your own umbrella’, ‘start your 401k’, ‘have your career well under way’ (what does that even mean!).  I don’t know, maybe those are good things but I still don’t have an umbrella and I’m ticking over 35 today!  Perhaps that…

What’s Happening With The Tiny House??

The million dollar question… What’s happening with the tiny house?

In short, I don’t know exactly.

What I do know:

We’re keeping it.

We hope to live in it again, soon.  Legally.

It’s moving.

What’s been going on

We knew, when we set off on our big adventure last year, that when we came back we have some things to work out.  We were served a code violation two Octobers ago.  This resulted in us…

Hidden Dining Table Project

We’ve been remodeling again! This time a bit bigger of a place, but not much!  We had the challenge of designing a kitchen and trying to fit a dining table into a very small (~400 s.f.) space.

This was our solution

We opted to go with a kitchen island design because it looked better than an ‘L’ shaped kitchen in the space.  With that came the opportunity to maybe fit in a hidden dining…

I am absolutely sorry for the last blog post that you may or may not have seen if you subscribe to this blog (It’s gone now).  I was not hacked but apparently James was.  Also, apparently he was set as a contributor to this blog.  So someone hacked into his account and published some sub-par English (like I have any room to complain!) post about something or another… I am sorry to be a cruddy email in your inbox though and thank you so much for those of you who let me know so I could handle it!  It has been fixed and I’ll do my very best to not let it happen again!

Quick Recap!

So, 13 months, to the day, is how long we were on the road.  And 39,998 miles (I’d like to just round that up bat I can’t do it).  In that time we were able to hit 45 national parks (all of them in the lower 48 excluding 4 island parks accessible only by boat or plane).  We can all, including Denver, say we’ve been to 48 of the 50 states.

I did technically take a computer but it was not easy to hook it up to the internet (I attached via phone).  Then, every time I did my computer wanted to update.  So any time I wanted to write a blog post I had to basically wait 2-4 hours and hope I remembered enough to scribble it down.  As you can see, I think I wrote about 6 blog posts the whole time we were out and that was from my phone (its not easy to blog via touch pad!).  I’m sorry for that but it was a lot more fun exploring the country!!  Hopefully, if you wanted you were able to find us on Instagram where I still updated.

We left in the middle of some hot and heavy tiny house discussions and it’s pretty much been tabled the whole time we were away.  We are very happy to be back thought to finish working through the nuances and hopefully make it easier to live tiny in Idaho at least!

Before That Happens Though:

We have to find a home base.  The thought of mooching off any family while we figure it out is not appealing.  We have great tenants in our ‘real’ house and have no ambition to kick them out just so we could live there a little while.  We can’t occupy the tiny house. Short term (or long term) rentals are astronomical in Boise right now. (Click here for a special link to Yahoo about our hometown)

This left us with one logical answer.  When James moved in to the tiny he never fully downsized.  He just kind of put his things in boxes and then built a basic, detached garage for his ‘real house’, then stored all of his stuff in there.  So we’re converting that garage into some temporary housing for our family of four!

Our Anniversary

We didn’t just end our trip 13 months to the day after take off, we also ended it one our anniversary.  Every year we take a family photo in front of our home as a snapshot of the year.  I am glad to get another picture with ‘Lil Beastie! (our camper).  Here are our anniversary photos to date, I wonder what next year’s will look like! ha!

We lead a pretty cool life, I am so glad I, on a whim, started taking these pictures!

Year six, can you believe we were on the same vacation as the picture taken one year earlier! 🙂

Year Five, new home on wheels for a while

Year four, no new family members!, yea!

Year three, Miles is just about done cooking!

Year two, surprise baby Hazel!

Year one, the day Denver came to live with us!

First date – who even gets this picture??

Now The Downsizing Begins Again!

James has been hardcore into the real downsizing efforts.  A year on the road has been pretty eye opening for both of us on what we really need (spoiler: less than what we currently own!).  Honestly, I have cleared the tiny house of several truck loads of stuff!  Our kids have grown up in a year and they really don’t need all the baby stuff we had.  James has gone through box upon box.  We’ve taken two truck loads to the dump, were planning a yard sale for anything else.  Whatever doesn’t sell will be donated to start a new life elsewhere.  Hazel and Miles have been going through all their stuff, they are excited to earn money from their toys AND plan on hosting a lemonade stand for cool refreshments.  I absolutely cannot believe the amount of STUFF we have accumulated in our tiny little places!

Building Anew!

After this weekend we really get going!  We will be adding a kitchen, a custom playhouse/fort for the kids, and doing all those little projects that take a garage to a home for a family of four and their dog!  I will try to do updates because its totally relevant to ‘tiny homes’ and living in small spaces.  Sometimes Instagram is just easier for me because it’s quicker (and can be done from my phone).  I will definitely update on the legalities once that conversation gets going too.  I am happy to be back and ready to rock this world again!  In the mean time here are some of my favorite pictures of our adventures!

Also, this is not the end of our travels, we absolutely plan to make it to those four parks we skipped and are already planning our trip to Alaska (my last state) for next summer followed by celebrating James’s 40th birthday next fall in Hawaii!  We should be able to see all these amazing National Parks before too long!

Oh, P.S.

Our cat is mad we are back.  Did you know we had a cat? It’s probably because I am a dog person ;-).

He misses his bachelors pad and all the fancy parties he used to throw! While we were away we had an RFID cat door programmed to his microchip so that he could enter and exit the house at will (but nothing else could).  We set up a camera pointed at his food so we could make sure he was alive and eating.  Any time the food got low we would order another bag from Amazon and have James’s sister or mom run over and fill his dish.  Pretty sure he enjoyed that set up a whole lot more than he enjoys our company!

The Pictures

Tetons NP

Washingtons Peninsula

Cascade NP

Mt. Rainier NP

The Oregon Coast

Crater Lake NP

Redwoods NP

Patricks Point, CA

Everglades NP

Bug watching, She is the best at finding lizards, frogs and catipilars

Bryce Canyon NP

Death Valley NP

Suguaro NP

Florida dog beach

Grand Canyon NP

Yosemite NP

California Free Camping

Zion NP

Zion Hike

Utah Farm

Mesa Verde NP

Black Canyon of the Gunnison NP

The dop of the highest sand dune in North America, Great Sand dune NP

Petrified Forest/Painted Dessert NP

Painted Desert NP

Spring in Death Valley NP

Death Valley

Death Valley Dunes

Joshua Tree NP

Saguaro NP

White Sands NM

White Sands NM

Big Bend NP

One of MANY awesome aquariums (this one is in Mississippi)

Mardi Gras Parade in New Orleans!

Cocoa Beach with Poppy

Furthest South Point in the US

Disney’s Animal Kingdom

Disneys Magic Kingdom

Florida

North Carolina

Playgrounds across America!

Mammoth Cave NP

Smokey Mountain NP

Random Virginia picture (such a pretty state!!)

Shanendoah NP

Shanandoah NP

West Virginia

Washington DC

Wild ponies!!

Birthday Boy in Maine

Furthest east point in the US

Denver could not contain himself around that much water!

thousand Island area in New York

Hot springs

Sibling bonding

Denver got a lot of this!

He learned to fake his first smile and I caught it on camera!

Sand dunes in Michigan

Teddy Roosevelt NP

National Grasslands

Idaho is kinda pretty too 🙂

Learning new tricks

Glacier NP

Teton NP

Mt. Rushmore

Badlands NP

Rocky Mountain NP

Happy Campers!

Colorado bonding

Great Salt Lake

Spiral Jetty, UT

Great Salt Lake

We’ve had so much fun traveling

I was going through pictures today and it’s so weird, Hazel and Miles were such babies when we started in this road trip 11 months ago! Miles has learned to talk on this trip. Hazel has attempted to learn manners, and learn how to pee in the woods. James and I have learned a lot too. Like, we can make anything work if we try hard enough. Who doesn’t want the kind of closeness that comes with knowing everyone’s bodily functions!? (It’s really not that big of deal!) We’ve all grown another year older on this adventure.  One birthday at Rocky Mountain NP (Denver), one at Niagra Falls (Macy), one at Stephen King’s house in Maine (Miles), one in Newport, RI (James) and one a the Grand Canyon (Hazel).

Denver though, he’s getting old. His muzzle has gone from grey to white on this trip. I swear we catch him rolling his eyes at us sometimes. Mostly when we set up the camera to verify that the A/C is doing it’s job while we are out having a blast at some attraction that wrongfully doesn’t allow dog beasts.  We’ve been pretty good at suspending life’s realities and living in a fairy-tale.  Some of those things have a more clear solution now (like the tiny house situation).

Looking Ahead

If I am being honest I still have no idea what our life looks like in one year. I know I will still have about 6 months to figure out what the heck we will do for the kids’ school in a year. I have no idea what state, or states, we will be in. Or what our home will look like, or where it is for that matter! I’m not certain how many cousins my kids will have. How close our families will be. Who knows what my kid’s favorite foods will be. If they will like winter or summer sledding better…. I’ve just got very little idea.  I am finally ok with that!

What I do know that James and I have bonded on this adventure more than we ever could have otherwise, so we’ll hopefully still be a pretty close family. We’ve gotten over a lot of fears together. I know we have a lot more that we want to do still, even if we aren’t sure of the real direction just yet. We’re starting to think of our next steps.

Some days, like this morning, Hazel sits in the potty and tells me about how far, really far, away the couch is (and I know she has no real idea). Miles asks if he can please sleep with us because it’s ‘too dark’ in his bed, 4′ from ours. I tell them how some kids have a door or two between parents and see the confusion cross their face. Why? I know why, but I don’t want that, yet.

This chapter of life is beyond amazing.  We do know that it’s not over after this loop, not by a lot. I’m going to cherish it forever. James and I are starting to think about what the next chapter holds though. It’s exciting. It’s scary.  We are already making plans for Alaska next summer and Hawaii next winter.  We have to handle a few things back in Boise between now and then because we have approval to not worry about out tiny house until June, that’s not very far away.

What’s Next

Idaho just passed a bill that will make it very difficult for me to legalize my tiny house, in city limits, until the next code cycle.  James want’s to build out that lot anyway.  I think I am going to buy a nice piece of property to move the tiny house to where it would be legal, build a big deck and call it home for our family a while longer while we work out building out the empty lot the tiny house currently sits on.  I’ve been working on a plan for how that could work and I’ve got some fun ideas going:

Who knows really… something will happen.  For now, we still have 5-6 months on the road ahead with some of the best National Parks yet to come!

Just for fun, my most favorite states so far (we’ve been to 45 of the 50 in the last 11 months) are: New Mexico, Virginia and Wyoming.  In that order 🙂

Here are some of my most favorite memories from our epic field trip (there are a lot more on Instagram),

Be well!

Our First real stop, The Great Salt Lake

The Spiral Jetty, I’ve always wanted to see this in person.

There have been some unbelievable family bonding moments, to just be still and quiet and look at rocks and snake grass together while enjoying the sunset. Beats a TV show any day of the week!

Awe inspiring views, even for a 3 year old!

Happy Campers!

Animal Friends of all kinds

Exploration together

Checking off goals! This moment on this date was planned before we even found a trailer to rebuild.

Dirty days

Dirty Days

So many rocks have been thrown into the water!

Air hugs all around!

Family classic from our camp exploration.

Tug-o-war!

Petting unicorns.

Sand

Meeting heros

Birthday parties

picnics at famous locations all over!

Sibling love.

Giant robots!

beautiful forests

As far east in the US as you can go.

Ocean exploring

Fun in the most unsuspecting places!

Holidays

running to and from the waves

Free stays in the most beautiful places!

History lessons

Still days.

Slowing WAY down to see the world

Sticks, always sticks!

Tornado/hail/wind/flood warnings!

Figuring out WHY they are called the smokey mountains

Still visiting with family for the holidays!

Extended stays at my favorite cousins house!

Family holidays with the best kinda family!

So many slides!

Flying back for GGs funeral.

Snow days in Georgia.

Florida sunshine!

Manatees!! In real life!

Amazing Disney.

Making it to the furthest southern point in the US

facing fears!

Sharing our world with family!

Waves, waves, waves!

Meeting up with the grandparents!

Hitting historic events in historic places!

Big ole oak trees!

Family sight seeing

Watching this guy RUN his heart out!

Slow experiences

fast fun

Great patios!

and back yards

learning new things together

Having fun together!

Amazing sunsets!

Fun.

discovering

smiles like this!

watching these two play in the best backdrops

learning what really gets the kids excited!

And them learning what gets us excited! (glass bottle building!)

Letting everyone be themselves

making the dog pose 🙂

Being silly together.