I feel like that happened to me tonight. With a TV show. (I realize how ridiculous this sounds, just wait)
My husband is out of town traveling for business. When he is gone, my over-acheiving self goes into overdrive and I spend very little (if any) time relaxing. I usually catch up on cleaning, laundry, Etsy orders, errands, etc. Well tonight, after doing a myriad of other productive things, I decided to watch a little bit of TV. I launched Netflix and remembered that he made me promise to not watch "Orange Is the New Black" without him, so I decided to browse through the popular shows. I stumbled upon a show called "Tiny" and was intrigued. It is an hour long documentary about a guy who builds a tiny house.
I'm thinking, "oh, I can relate to this."
Boy, was I WRONG!
Tiny houses are an actual classification (if you will) and are so small it kind of blows my mind. Some of the houses are barely larger than 100 square feet!
I know... let that process for a minute.....
To put this in perspective, the popular method to begin building a tiny house is to buy a trailer, the kind you use to haul your four-wheeler or lawn equipment around, and use that as the footprint for the entire house.
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The documentary was so interesting. They had interviews with many other tiny house owners, and listening to their reasons for wanting a tiny house was both inspiring and humbling at the same time. Right off the bat, it would seem like the main draw for having a tiny house would be the environmental aspects of it, and while those benefits do apply, for most of the people being interviewed that was not the reason they chose to have a tiny house. It was really centered around the kind of life they wanted to live. They didn't want to be stuck in the cycle of a giant house they couldn't afford full of stuff they couldn't afford and to pay for these things they couldn't afford they had jobs they hated that kept them from the very house they were working to pay for.
When they put it like that, it really makes a lot of sense. Ok, so onto the fate part.
Last week, a co-worker of mine lost his house in a fire. Basically everything was destroyed by either fire, smoke, or water damage. They were left with nothing.
Can you even imagine?
I'm not even talking about clothes or furniture or any of that. All of that can be replaced. But think about those old photo albums from your parents, or a special family heirloom you inherited, or perhaps an urn of ashes from a deceased loved one or pet.
Gone.
Destroyed.
Forever.
It was heartbreaking to hear this news. Fortunately, I am blessed to work for a company that is more like a family than a business, and we overwhelmed them with donations of clothes and school supplies and gift cards within the first fews days after the fire. But those donations cannot substitute for those irreplaceable items.
It really gives you a perspective to reflect on. Both the tiny houses and the complete loss of a house. It makes you wonder what you have hidden under the bed or in the back of a closet that maybe you don't need anymore, or maybe you don't realize how much you would miss it if it was gone.
So, I am now inspired to go through our house and purge what we don't need or don't like anymore. But more importantly, I am inspired to love this house, all 1075 square feet of it, for what is it. It is not a tiny house, or even a small house by some standards. It is modest, yes, but generous on space when you consider what others are living in (by choice, or not). And you know what? If I don't feel like we have enough storage space, maybe I don't need to be storing so much stuff.
I encourage you to wander through Tumbleweed Tiny House Company's site and the Tiny House Blog. Am I moving into a 184 square foot house? No. Am I telling you to? Definitely not (unless you want to). But I do believe that we could each learn something from these tiny houses.
"The best things in life aren't things" - Art Buchwald
