This Teeny Tiny House

Let's just get right to it: 

I love this tiny rental.

Nobody would ever drive by and think it was anything at all to speak of. (In fact, I drove by when Mike first mentioned renting the place--walked the perimeter, peered through gaps in the blinds--and dismissed it outright!) But now? I adore it! I really do! (In fact, I feel a little badly that we still haven't managed to make a cozier, more homey name stick. "The rental". It's all we ever call it. But, despite the rather cold name, even little Starling feels peaceful here. We can't go anywhere for any length of time before she starts moaning, "Can we go back to the rental now?" In all this change and upheaval, it seems to have become a place of security for her.)

Who would have guessed--back when I was kicking against the pricks and telling Mike there was no way we could fit in 1500 square feet and only three bedrooms--how perfect this little home would be? (Mike really does always know best. I should never have questioned.) 

It just feels charming and unassuming and, I don't know, content with itself. (I don't think it would ever occur to the place to compare or be made to feel insecure by some larger or grander home. Why on earth would it want to be a bigger home when ... it's already its own self? Why indeed. It's attitude has settled on all of us.

Though I suppose we must admit that perhaps at least some of this feeling of satisfaction in our tiny home could be attributed to the fact that the packing up, cleaning up, and patching up our 4500 square foot house has been such an enormous and overwhelming project. It might be that my present mind is incapable of feeling anything but relief to, at least for a small space of time, have only two (rather than five) bathrooms to clean, half as many bedrooms filled with stuff, and only one snug little story. (Once you've tidied the main floor, you're done! There's no upstairs waiting for your attention. No neglected basement begging to be seen too. No hidden areas that I know can’t be ignored forever. It presents the whole of itself to you--a rather appealing sort of innocence--at all times.)

And of course I might not feel so fully embracing if this was forever (rather than temporary). And there are things I recognize make this particular tiny home easy to love (when some other small home might only be discouraging). So I will say:

While I'm happy enough here that the other day Mike wondered absently if we should just scrap our house plans and build a tiny farmhouse, I still feel like we will truly need a good-sized house for the future I would like for our family. I will never again, after this compact little place, like the idea of a lot of space to keep clean, but I do want to be able to gather at our eventual home. I want to be able to host Thanksgivings; I want to have space for out-of-state married kids to come and stay--with grandkids in tow. And I know (from my own family and Mike's) what a large number of people this family of ours will likely become over the next few decades. I want to be able to gather those people in. I want there to be room for them. (Currently we can't even fit the kids we have at the table for dinner. We have some of us at the table, a few at the counter on stools, and one or two on the couches in the living room!) So I'm not fully converted to a forever small house. BUT! I really do adore this place. I'm happy and content here, and it hasn't occurred to me once, since we moved in, to wish we were in a larger home. 

I should also admit: 

We don't have all of our stuff here. If we did? If we were truly trying to fit everything we own in this small space (rather than much of it currently being boxed up in a storage unit), I would likely feel we were bursting at the seems and going to die of clutter. But then, that is part of why I feel such contentedness here, I think! There is much less of our stuff to manage! I think I could grow quite accustomed to a tiny home if everyone could stay on board with having much less stuff! (I feel a little sad just thinking that we will have to leave the simplicity of this tiny place to continue our plans!) 

Also, this house is almost weirdly full of space, within the lack of space. I think we could have found a 1500 square foot house that would really not have been able to work. I recognize that. The way the owner of this house made use of space, fit cupboards and drawers in, and arranged the layout, feels sometimes almost unnaturally suited to us. As if this single man, living here all alone (years before we would ever meet him) remodeled his home with the needs of a family of 12 in mind. Things like: the extra-large well house for storage (and for Goldie to have had a quiet place to home MTC in or for Penny to practice the guitar in peace), the enormous master bedroom (with not only plenty of room for three bunkbeds, but with a decent sized area through a set of French doors where the kids can set up toys and play, the small nook off of the living room where Abe currently sleeps when he is up here with us (and where we will eventually fit a little loveseat so there are more places to sit around here), the well-insulated room in the garage perfect for food storage and for the pots and pans and so on that we can't quite fit in the kitchen, the flat area above the closet in our little bedroom that I can boost the kids up to for a tiny spot to play that feels private and adventurous (the downside? I can't get up there myself and have no idea what toys are left scattered behind when they request I lower them back down), the entryway with its large closet for everyone's shoes and coats and extra space for muddy rainboots to be lined up without being right in the main area of the house, and even the extra, mini bathroom in the garage (that nobody wants to use because they think it's creepy) but that really serves in a pinch when you have all12 people home and both house bathrooms in use!

Honestly, I sometimes look to the heavens with one eyebrow raised questioningly and wonder, "Did you? You didn't. Surely not! You wouldn't have had us (and our need for a temporary place to stay on our journey to settling in Logan) in mind as this house was created. Surely that wouldn't have actually been something you worked into your purposes! That would just be completely crazy. Only ... here it is. Like a friend that's been waiting all this time—tea kettle on and plates set out—for us to finally come and visit."

Of course it doesn't really matter if this house was made a way station for us long before we'd even determined to build on the Logan land. It's just as happy that, when the time came to move forward, God said, "Ah, I know just the place that will work for this step of the journey!" and lead us to it.

And I might be overromanticizing the charm of this home (am I though?). There are some imperfect things: 

It would be really nice to have a laundry room rather than a stacked washer and dryer in a closet. It's either fold laundry and put it away every day (the goal) or have piles of it folded across the dresser in my bedroom (often the reality).

And I joke with everyone that asks about the place that we are "crammed like sardines" in here. And at times that really feels true. Especially when the neighbor kids come over to play. There is nowhere you can go that isn't within hearing distance of everyone else in the house. But, in truth, even at our old house, the kids tended to always gravitate to where everyone else was. It's rare, no matter how large of a place we are in, to not have the kids mostly just gathered around, so, in that way, the day-to-day business of "kids under foot" isn't really very different. (Only the fact that there isn't the possibility for anything else is different. :))

Also, we don't really have a lot of outside space. Which seems rather funny when we are surrounded by open space! (It's just empty and green anywhere you look!) But mostly it’s all fenced pasture (in fact the fence behind us is electric!) and the yard at the rental is actually quite small (its greatest shortcoming being that it does not have a single shade tree), so it isn't like the farm--where the kids will have plenty of space to run and explore to their heart's content. But! At least Mike put up a trampoline and swing set. And Starling goes out there many times a day to spend a little time jumping and enjoying the view. (And we live on such a quiet road that our kids have taken to sometimes riding four wheelers up and down the street!)

Lastly, the mosquitos are quite bad. There's no way around that fact other than just accepting it and getting on with life. 

Anyway, that's all for now. (And likely more than enough.) I love this temporary home though and, as much as I dreaded the thought of two moves and of having to have a limbo place between selling the Pleasant View house and building on the Peaviner Land, I really feel just so happy to be living in this darling little home for now! And it's funny how your perspective changes. I've driven these roads between College Ward and Young Ward many times over the years of my marriage to Mike. And they were always just ... roads. Roads and old houses. I honestly don't think it occurred to me to pay any attention to whether or not the place was at all lovely. In fact I might have been startled if someone asked me if the place was! (Like being asked about the eye color of someone whose face I know well and realizing, with a start, that I've never consciously paid enough attention to know!) In fact, someone once said to Mike that driving out here made them feel a little depressed. And perhaps I could see that. Broken down fences, old silos and barns. But now, every time I drive on any of the roads between town and our house, I just see space, and green, and fields, and farmlands and, I don't know, it feels almost too marvelous to be true. How did I not see it like that all along? I don't know. Maybe it had to become a part of my own story first, but I think it's absolutely beautiful!

I'll end with a few recent pictures from around the rental:

Six girls in one room sounds crazy, but it's really not. The younger three girls do pretty well going to bed together on their three top bunks (though sometimes they begin jumping back and forth to each other's beds when they should be sleeping) and I think it makes them all feel safer getting to go to bed by one another. And the older girls just trickle in whenever they go to bed. And, of course, most of the time the "older girls" are just Penny. Daisy is only here now and then, and Goldie, as you know, just left us (sniffle). 

We really need some patio furniture to encourage more people to go outside! Currently there is this tiny bench on the back patio.

Hey Young Warders. You don't look like city kids now. 

Speaking of not being "city kids" anymore! Anders drove a 4-wheeler down the road the other day and came back to report a mother cow just having birthed a baby! We walked down the street about ten times over the next few hours to watch the mom cleaning off her calf, the calf attempting to stand, etc. Eventually the neighbors came, stuck the calf in front of them on a four-wheeler and herded the mom cow back closer to home, but it was really a cool thing to get to see during our first few weeks up here. 

Another thing my kids really love is that there are garter snakes all over up here. We've seen quite a few, and this "baby snake" is the second snake they've caught. 

One of my favorite things of all about being up here? The birds! There are so many birds everywhere! Birds I never got to see back at home! I love birds and it makes me really happy seeing and hearing those enormous sandhill cranes, as well as starlings in great numbers, various blackbirds, magpies, swallows (one of my favorite birds), and on and on. One of the things I have most liked seeing are the huge flocks of ibises flying overhead and landing in great, black hoardes on pastures. 45 minutes away from here I don't recall having ever seen them. And now I see droves of them all of the time! Everyone calls them snipes up here. And Mike joked that I was being snobbish refusing to call them what all the locals through time have called them (he even called them "American buffalo" to make his point--haha), but I'm happy to call them snipes! I'll call them snipes all the live long day without any hesitation! It's just ... I looked up snipes, and these were definitely not official snipes, and I just really wanted to know what on earth they actually were before being at peace with the local nickname! I googled and googled and couldn't be sure! Luckily someone at church finally told me! Black ibis, he said. (Though I'm not sure they aren't "glossy" or "white-faced" ibises. Still, these ibis snipes :) are so cool to watch!

Here is the little play area off the bedroom with the cozy and colorful rug that I hummed and hawed over forever before buying. I couldn't bring myself to buy an expensive rug--especially not knowing if we'd need it in our next home. So, in "economical price range" I eventually found two that I liked a lot but everywhere I searched they were out of stock in the size we needed. I had a hard time letting them go, but the stone tile was really not that fun to play on, so I finally bought this third-place rug from Wal-Mart. (And then when it came it had a strange chemical smell. :( But we aired it out in the well house for a week and it seems good now.) And it is really very very soft! (Mette does love it. She was just grumpy in these pictures because the boys were honing in on the rug we had just set up for her and Summer to play on!)

I love when I walk into the girls' bedroom and see this group of horses that often congregates just outside their window. (Also, it's hard to tell in these pictures, but we have a distant view of the Logan temple as well. Especially easy to see when its lights go on at night.)

One other thing that seems to have been prepared right for us? The one family that lives quite close to us happens to have three kids right around Summer, Mette and Hans's ages (and they have an above-ground pool to boot :)). They all play so happily together and it's so nice for this younger crew to have a built-in set of friends up here!

And that's all on the house for now!

"And the place where it is my will that you should tarry, for the main, shall be signalized unto you by the peace and power of my Spirit, that shall flow unto you."