Advantages to Tiny House Living

It's been 3 months since we vacated our tiny house.  We have 3.75 times more space.  We have 3 bathrooms instead of 1. We have a 2 car garage instead of none.  But still, there are some things I miss...

1) When you live with your partner and you can hear/touch each other no matter where you are in the house, you have a level of intimacy that is not only desired but required.  There is no such thing as privacy.

2) Our tiny house was 2.5 times older than our current condo.  There's something beautiful in the old style windows (huge) and doors (huge).  With a single tiny AC unit, we could cool the place down in about 20 minutes.  I always felt like it was the "house of bricks" in the 3 little pigs story.  No matter how strong the Santa Ana winds blow, that tiny house provides safe shelter.

3) A tiny house is less work to clean.  The tiny vacuum we bought to clean the tiny house is inadequate to care for the expansive upstairs bedrooms in the condo/townhome we now occupy.  And who puts carpeting on a staircase?  Seriously, it's really annoying to vacuum the stairs and that's where most of the dirt accumulates.

4) Smaller carbon footprint.  In so many ways, I feel like the tiny house had a smaller ecological impact.  We had fewer toilets and showers to clean, therefore using less chemical cleaners.  We had less space to cool, therefore using less electricity.  We didn't have a dishwasher, therefore we were able to save on water and electricity AND reuse the greywater to nourish the garden.

5) When you have a dark and depressing (oppressive and cramped) tiny house, you always AND I MEAN ALWAYS want to be somewhere else.  It made it super-easy to go walking, running, biking, vacationing, camping, etc.  It was always fantastic to stay with family or in a hotel because EVERY room was bigger than our house.

6) We had proximity to Los Angeles, Griffith Park, and the LA River Bike Path.  Also we walked through streets filled with artfully landscaped tiny houses.  Here in Northridge, it is decidedly more suburban (sprawling) and the sidewalks are lined with large retaining walls or extreme privacy hedges rather than cute houses with cute yards.

But on the flipside...

1) We have space to spread out.  I've already unpacked the majority of our books and started to turn the closets in the guest bedroom into the library we always dreamed of.  (Thanks IKEA).

2) We can work on our bikes in the garage.  The tiny car we have takes up barely 1/4 of the space, so there's still a lot of room for bicycle storage and maintenance of the growing fleet.  The other day, I was in the garage working on my bike (in the shade) whereas I used to have to do that outdoors on our tiny back patio.

3) With the space comes mental clarity.  Instead of having half my closet in storage and half the clothing in our house, we have all AND I MEAN ALL of our clothes in a single walk-in closet.  This past weekend, we took 3 large trash bags of clothing to be donated.  It's like having more space makes it easier to let go of things that really don't belong.

4) I've been enjoying the larger kitchen and entertaining space.  Even though the stove has electric burners and it's summer, so I hesitate to cook (and heat up the place), we've already had some friends over for dinner and work-sessions.  The expansive dining area makes the table we've held on to for about 10 years finally fit perfectly.

5) The living room is large enough to do yoga.  I took my sister rollerskating and when we got back, we spread out 2 yoga mats and stretched out AT THE SAME TIME.  That's been a dream come true!

6) We can run more than two appliances at once.  The tiny house had such old circuitry that you couldn't run the toaster oven and the washing machine at the same time.  If you did, it would trip the circuit breaker and shut down everything.  You also couldn't wash dishes and take a shower at the same time because the water supply would become unreliably hot or cold.  Flushing the toilet when someone was in the shower was pre-empted by saying, "Bombs Away" which meant -- get away from the water because it's about to get really hot.

It sounds silly but I always wanted to have a wellness center.

I came to a major realization... I don't need to have a 10 bedroom wellness center to accommodate a bunch of sick people.  All I need is a room to accommodate me.  I'm the in-patient.  I now live in a wellness center for 1 person -- me.  And this new place is giving me plenty of breathing room.