Elisha and I have exchanged a few preliminary plans and I am now waiting for his revisions before I can share our latest design here, which I am confident is getting very close. We will also need to hire an engineer to review the design.
The house has expanded to a massive 700 square feet, so technically speaking it is no longer a tiny house. Perhaps we could say that it is a huge tiny house. We are still playing with the layout of the bathrooms.
My last but one design had four bathrooms for my tiny house! Two mini bathrooms of under 4 feet square each with a toilet and small sink, one spa bathroom with a tub and sauna, and one outdoor shower with sink. However, it didn't really work for the layout.
So the next version will have two full bathrooms and an outdoor shower. The sauna will be in a separate little building, perhaps in the woods somewhere, rather than in the house. My bathroom will have a luxury tub with handheld shower. The guest bedroom will have a spacious shower.
Also, originally I had envisioned a built-in bench along one wall of the yoga room, topped with six cushions and drawers for storage, that would convert to a queen sized bed. However, now I feel that a murphy bed will look better, and provide a more comfortable sleeping solution. That way I can have bookshelves on either side of the fold-up bed to accommodate my large collection of books on yoga, shamanism, and Buddhism.
I still have to figure out how to incorporate the six floor cushions into my tiny home. I have been using these cushions instead of chairs around my low dining room table, Tibetan style. In my new place I won't have a dining room, just stools around my kitchen peninsula, and table and chairs on the deck for eating outside. So I am working on a design for a small couch the size of a loveseat for my living room. The six cushions, when covered with a thin foam mattress and mattress cover, covert into a comfy double bed, which may also be what I sleep on in my truck when I go camping.
For my loft bedroom, I am thinking of cutting my chest of drawers in half so they can be installed along one of the low side walls, and would then have built-in bookshelves for the rest of my book collection. While I have been doing an extensive culling of books, I still have a wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling bookcase full of books. These days I do most of my reading on e-books, but I don't want to give away all of my books, because many are quite special and are probably not available as e-books. Those books I can't give away to family and friends will be put up for sale on Alibris.
It is incredible how much a person accumulates in their lifetime. I decided that it was probably time to throw out my first bikini, the one that my Mexican boyfriend Pedro bought for me in Acapulco when I was eighteen.
I am also going to go through my record collection and select a very few special records, before taking the collection and record player to a place that sells old record players. This record player was my first big purchase - it cost about $400 in the early seventies, which was a large amount of money for a student at that time, and it still works perfectly. And I still have my record collection from that era, about 200 records, a combination of rock, jazz, classical and new age music. I left Montreal in 1976, at which time I stopped buying records, and went to live in Latin America for a few years. My collection is like a weird time warp from 1970-1976, and includes classics from the Moody Blues, Janis Joplin, Donovan, Elton John, King Crimson, Ken Hensley, Simon and Garfunkel, Dire Straits, Rick Wakeman, Cat Stevens, Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Mighty Arrow and Jimmy Cliff, to name a few.
To help with my trouble sleeping these days, my yoga teacher Eliot has recommended more meditation. While I have no trouble falling asleep, I find myself waking in the early hours and unable to go back to sleep as I contemplate with excitement the amazing changes that are evolving in my life.
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