The art of waiting and what “not doing anything” really means…

Many months have passed already. Spring has come (kind of… wait, did it really?) and later on we had a little bit of summer warmth and in the meantime autumn has arrived with colorful trees and it’s signature golden sunlight. It still is a challenging year. Not only weather wise of course… But boy, did we feel the repercussions of the moody weather. The long winter, the storms, the never ending rain. Our garden suffered and we lost some of our harvest. For Sam particularly it was challenging. Luckily the garden recovered for a big part and did provide us with delicious herbs, flowers, vegetables and fruits. But simultaneously the wet days kept us from starting the build (even though we anyway still miss quite some windows before we can start). The farm demands a lot of work too, so the wait did not feel like sitting in a doctors office for hours reading a fashion magazine from 5 months ago, until you’re finally called in. It could be called “productive waiting”, where sometimes only at the end of the day we noticed, that another week has passed without any work for the Tiny House being done (including writing about it on this blog…)

Our trailer became a playground for plants and various flowers. Our fireplace disappeared under a layer of weeds, still holding the memories of warming fires in the wintermonths. A romantic sight for sure, but also one that made us start blaming ourselves for dawdling so much. And let me tell you, if you are ever in a situation – in a building process or any other situation in life – where blaming yourself seems like the “right thing to do”: don’t. It isn’t. It is not helping and it usually does not make you move any faster. It is something I had to learn the hard way these past months and I am glad I got to learn. One usually has their reasons for stopping or slowing down. Sometimes they are more obvious and sometimes it is a complex construct of different reasons. But either way, being disappointed or frustrated with yourself is not a smart choice; it is hurtful, unfair and paralyzing. Or at least that is how it felt to me. You start to forget what you are doing and why you are really doing it. Kind of like a picture that you stare at for too long and then it just becomes a “mush” of various colors.

Sometimes you need to make a step back and re-evaluate a situation or a process. For us that also meant to remember, why we build a Tiny House in the first place. It is not something we do for someone else, to please anyone and there is in the end no hurry or deadline. We do this for ourselves, it is our adventure, our project, our future home. We can take all the time we want. We did not make a promise to anyone other than us; so if a 3 month building-process turns into a 15 month-building process, that is one way or another a natural development (I guess in the end, it is more natural than building a House – even a tiny one – in 3 months). Promises can be altered without being broken.

So we learned the art of “stopping”. Stopping with blame, worries or even feelings of shame or inadequacy (yes, this post got deep fast). Which for me meant laying in the sun, observing changing cloud formations, improving my Macrame-skills and of course baking lots of sweets while Sam got really good in carving animals out of wood and spending a lot of time with his other passion-project: the garden. There was even time for an epic 4-day hiking adventure with my cousin Joris. In other words we allowed ourselves to rediscover just “going with the flow”, trusting and waiting for the right moment to get back into our building adventure.

We also noticed, that we get to give our current home in the Pavillon more attention. It is now after all already for over a year our “temporary residence” and we feel at home here. But some things were clearly still remains from the time where we thought, we are going to live here for about 3 months. So we dedicated a bit of time and energy in some slight remodeling and updating and we realized: a little goes a long way. From a more comfortable water/sink system to more shoe storage and some new hanging plants (macrame skills fulfilling their purpose). Even something that you might consider a “waiting room”, gets to be cozy and inviting.

Some concrete Tiny House – development after all

Throughout our “stopping-experience”, Sam still started to study and learn a lot about framework thanks to some good Youtube-Channels and it was nice to see him approach this significant (and to me rather challenging, heck, let me be honest: boring) part of the build playfully and with curiosity. He noticed that for this, SketchUp is the better program than Sweet Home 3D, which we used for the interior and exterior design (and which works wonderfully for interior-design-purposes). SketchUp on the other hand is designed to plan out a structure in the smallest detail; you can use multiple “layers” in your sketch like for example a wall frame, an exterior wall and an interior wall. This makes the program more divers and detailed, which is a plus for designing a house “on paper”; for Sam it felt basically like creating an “Ikea-like-blueprint-instruction” based on which we will later build the actual house 🙂

And finally a few weeks ago we bought two more valuable contributions to our house; one of them being our door! A lot of searching on secondhand online platforms payed off – and we found this very affordable glass-door. We have a super enthusiastic co-habitant who was instantly ready for the adventure, to go pick them up for us (as we are still both not driving – another thing that we haven’t found the time for yet). It is not exactly the kind of door we originally envisioned, as we had the idea of a big nice glass-sliding-door, but that is another thing we learned already a while ago: compromising is a valuable quality. As well as knowing, where you absolutely don’t want to compromise (we both agree that this is a decent big couch to lounge on).

So, it turns out, that while you think you’re doing nothing and just sitting and waiting around, you are actually doing a lot. One thing being to recover, regain energy (sometimes you do need to regain energy simply from spending so much time thinking about your project. It sounds silly, but we found that to be true) and in the process generating new brilliant ideas for your project. And isn’t that so much better, than rushing through something that you spent a lot of time looking forward to?

So throughout a Tiny House-Build (and other intense phases in life): Be kind to yourself. Be patient. And be mindful of the tiny steps. I am sure (I will update on that a few months in the future) that they are the ones that make the journey so unique and special and teach you maybe the most valuable lessons along the way. As the “Tiny House concept” is showing us: it is not always big that matters, sometimes tiny provides the essential 😉

Other things we learned along the way:

• A house is way more than just rooms that need to be planned. It has so many details we need to pay attention to, like: where does the old paper storage go? And where do we put Yuki’s “food-station”?
• An outdoor kitchen is awesome and has to be included in the building plans moving forward.
• If you need help, just ask for it. Don’t feel like you first have to do others a lot of favors, before you can be granted one. It all evens out in the end. Don’t worry.
• Communication is key. It is a cliché fridge card saying. But it is absolutely true.
• Hiking in a thunderstorm: quite adventurous and also super dangerous. Don’t do it.
• “How I met your mother” has aged rather poorly but does the trick when you just want to relax and shut off your “worry-brain” for a bit.