SURPRISE 😮😮😮 !!

If you’ve been following this blog, you know we’ve been looking for a lot to land our Tiny House of Steel for months, nay, YEARS. We searched high and low, made bids on acres long and short, but our efforts were thwarted by big builders with more money who outbid us each time.

We wanted to buy land with a well on it and enough room to park to the THoS (with hopefully not-too-nosey neighbors.) And now, FINALLY, we found some! We can’t believe our luck! 1.6 acres of gorgeous land at the foothills of mountain wilderness.

And (SURPRISE) it also comes with a 119-year old solid stone house!!! It’s got no plumbing, no electric, no heating system but we couldn’t walk away from it.

So, what we’re saying here is: In the 5 months or so since our last post, this earth-shattering event has occurred (especially as far as the future of the Tiny House of Steel goes): WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!!!

Whole lotta rock’n’roll!

 

 

beautifully keyed in brickwork

put a level on that

and more stone!

Now we’ll probably have to rename this blog “TinyHouseofSteelANDBigHouseofStone dotWordpressdotcom”, and guess what – we’re OK with that!!

As many hopefully-not-too-disappointed fans of the very concept of tiny houses will recognize, in a post-2008 Great Recession economic reality, the whole debt/mortgage-based home ownership idea seemed outmoded, even impossible for an artist and a writer to afford, all thanks to, well, see if these guys can explain:

Banks wouldn’t lend to us, home foreclosures quickly got bought up/flipped, and very quickly even the quiet Hudson River city we called home had gentrified beyond our reach. We went from being priced out of the housing bubble to shut out of the post-bust recovery. The Tiny House of Steel was our way of gaining some control over the ability to define what “equity” and a roof over our heads looked like. Even if it meant that roof was a steel shed on wheels.

Then, this came along. It turns out, there are a few exceptions to what feels like the rule.

The REAL in “real estate” – How our jenga blocks are stacked!

And a generous exception it is! With a little over an acre and a half, there’s plenty of room for the THoS and this major new project to work on. Our lives now seem to be running on parallel tracks: The land and well on the property will allow us the space and freedom to continue working on the THoS, AND, the self-sufficiency of the THoS will allow us to work on the house, especially with power from the solar panels/battery/generator system. Meanwhile, we’ll have to stay in our apartment for a few years while we work on all this.

Our whole intention with the THoS was to try and move ahead with our lives with the least amount of debt possible. In the years we’ve been living in an apartment, we’ve been scraping together some savings and now we’ve managed to buy the land/home outright.

So, for those of you who’ve been following the DIY aesthetic of the THoS as it’s being built, you can look forward to the same kind of step-by-step decision making that allowed us to make a home out of the tiniest means at our hands. And we’ll be able to use some of those hard earned skills to improve the whopping 1,152 square feet of the not-so-tiny house of stone!

Here’s to a future still building, still saving, still making every use of every square inch we got. Last night, we toasted with our friends: “May your well always be full and your septic tank empty!” Let’s drink to that!