Browsing Tag

adventure

Revisiting Vision

You know how sometimes you get so deep into something that you’re not really sure what you’re doing?

Well, that’s where we’ve found ourselves the last few weeks. Not at all unhappy with the life that we’ve chosen. On the contrary; I’m (Hannah) extremely happy on the homestead. It brings a lot of joy and peace to my life.

But between milking goats, making cheese, feeding chickens, fixing fencing, and working full time, one can tend to get overwhelmed with the day-to-day.

So, I figured now was a good time to revisit our vision. The same vision that we had when we started this whole adventure together. Maybe see where we are lacking, and where we’re doing really well.

Photo Credit: Elizabeth Groth

Are we cultivating creative, adventurous, and imaginative minds?

Creativity has to come out in problem solving around the farm – we wanted to build a root cellar, but didn’t have the time or resources to build the one we were envisioning, so Ryan dug a hole in the ground, and we bartered for a large freezer from our neighbor, and we’re going to bury the freezer: root cellar! Adventure for me looks like trying new recipes, maybe they fail, maybe they work. Or butchering chickens or milking goats for the first time. Or attempting to develop an online business. Ryan is currently working on finishing my dream library in our living room.

His creativity and imagination (and thoughtfulness) is making our home even cozier than it already is.

Are we finding joy in knowing and interacting with the people we live around?

Yes. 100% absolutely. This one is easy. Have I mentioned our neighbors?

Are we sharing what we have with others?

This is actually something we’ve talked about lately. We’d like to be more generous in the way that we think. There is a family here in the valley who are some of the most generous people I’ve ever met. They have us over for dinner and when we leave, they always give us a bag of natural, herbal goodies. They are the most hospitable people; hosting folks in their home constantly, cooking great quality food, and giving away so much of their time and resources.

We want to be more like them in the way of generosity. With our mentality on serving others, and giving where it’s needed and asked for, and even where it’s not. We don’t want our lives to be about ourselves.

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.” – Charles Dickens

“For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” – Paul in Galatians 5

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.” – Jesus in Mark 9

Are we appreciating music & art more fully?

Hah. No.

Definitely could be more intentional about this. I was chatting with my sister recently (she’s an artist who just recently completed her senior art exhibition) and she recently had her senior art exhibit. She shared with me that when most folks view or experience a work of art, their first thoughts and questions are always “how?” related.

“How did you make this?” How is this held up?”

She feels the need to address the “how” questions first thing, so that the viewer can move on to the “why” questions.

I love this. & I also feel like the season I’m in right now has been more of a “how” season. That is fine – and needed. I need to know “how to” milk a goat, “how to” make goat cheese, and “how to” butcher a chicken….etc.

But I love the thought of a season dwelling more on the “why”. I think that this will bring more art & music into our lives naturally.

Isn’t that what art is? An expression of the “why” of life.

Are we developing knowledge and creativity in horticulture?

In smaller ways, yes. We’ve spent time foraging & harvesting from our land this fall. Since we moved onto the farm and just got going in July, it was too late to start a garden, but we’ve started to think about and plan for what we’ll grow next spring/summer. We’ll definitely be learning more about this in the next year.

Are we acknowledging and appreciating the existence and creativity of the God of Israel?

This one is convicting to some extent. We cannot help but acknowledge the existence of God. We’ve both seen and experienced too much to be convinced otherwise. However, there are seasons where God just seems to go silent. We see this in the Bible, we can look around and see that this happens with others, and we experience this ourselves. This is part of the reason for this vision revisiting. We just sometimes find ourselves doubting whether or not we are actually doing what He would have us do. Life has seemed like an up-hill battle for us since we met. We’ve listened for God’s voice and at times, He has spoken very clearly, and we’ve acted.

Then, in the silence, we tend to doubt what we heard in the light. Which, is not something we’re supposed to do, but we struggle with it.

We don’t believe in the prosperity gospel.

But we hope that we can evoke the favor of God to some extent, through our obedience.

And at least sense the Spirit of God in our daily lives more.

But this article contains a lot of truth about our generation & here is an excerpt that concludes it nicely::

Stay wildly ambitious. The current world is bubbling with opportunity for an ambitious person to find flowery, fulfilling success. The specific direction may be unclear, but it’ll work itself out—just dive in somewhere.
Stop thinking that you’re special. The fact is, right now, you’re not special. You’re another completely inexperienced young person who doesn’t have all that much to offer yet. You can become special by working really hard for a long time.
Ignore everyone else. Other people’s grass seeming greener is no new concept, but in today’s image crafting world, other people’s grass looks like a glorious meadow. The truth is that everyone else is just as indecisive, self-doubting, and frustrated as you are, and if you just do your thing, you’ll never have any reason to envy others.

#nosetothegrindstone

Are we encouraging others in their journey to discover themselves capable of creating a simple, fulfilling, self-sustaining lifestyle?

I would hope that this would happen, but I guess the only thing that we can control is to live this out for ourselves and make friends along the way. Which is what we attempt to do.

There are many other points from our original vision for what our life could look like, and maybe I’ll revisit them at some point.

Ryan: It’s encouraging to look back and see that even though we envisioned our lives being different in a lot of ways, all of our goals still apply. And we’re achieving/practicing most of them. Even though we’ve been discouraged at times when things haven’t worked out according to our vision of how they should go, God has still been faithful to the things he’s spoken over us, and in a lot of cases [like the tiny house (plan A) or the purchase of land and trailer (plan B)], His provision has been greater than we had envisioned for ourselves.

For now, we’ll just leave you with this verse that we are convicted & challenged by often.

“If you get rid of the yoke from those around you, the finger-pointing and malicious speaking, and if you offer yourself to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted one, then your light will shine in the darkness, and your night will be like noonday. The Lord will always lead you, satisfy you in a parched land, and strengthen your bones. You will be like a watered garden and like a spring whose waters never run dry. Some of you will rebuild ancient ruins; you will restore the foundations laid long ago; you will be called the repairer of broken walls, the restorer of streets where people live.” (Isaiah 58)

Photo Cred: Elizabeth Groth

December 1, 2015

Country Living, Simple Living, Tiny Living

Westcliffe CO: And Back Again

You people aren’t going to believe this. Some of you are going to think we are nuts.

And you’re definitely correct about that.

We’re moving back to Westcliffe – the land flowing with milk and honey.

Well not quite. At least about the honey part.

We’ve had quite the adventure over the past 2 years of marriage. We got married and started building a tiny house and lived it in for a few months, we moved to Westcliffe CO after dreaming about it for a couple years. We attempted to make it work (financially) in the small town – and figured out in order for us to get anywhere in life, we needed to make some substantial money first (otherwise, we’d end up living in cycles of poverty for quite awhile) – we moved to Brighton CO because Ryan got a job working in the oil fields in Northern Colorado.

Well, as you’ve all noticed gas prices are way down from what they used to be.

And while this is wonderful for lots of people, this has put his job at risk. In fact, he was pretty much guaranteed a lay off in the next few weeks/months. Since we are young and used to change, this hasn’t exactly shaken us too much. On the contrary – it feels like freedom to us in a lot of ways.

Most people know someone who works on the oil field, and you know that their work hours are unreal. Ryan has been averaging at 110 hours per week that he works (2 week on, 1 week off rotations). There are 336 hours in 14 days. 220 hours he has been working, 116 (58 a week or 8 hours a day – which always ends up being closer to 6) hours are spent sleeping, eating, showering, traveling to and from work, and anything else that comes up in life: like spending time with your wife.

Needless to say, we’re kind of DONE with oil field lifestyle.

So while this bring a tad of uncertainty back into our life, being the oldest children that we are, we both find some excitement in that.

Which brings me to the title of this post:

We are moving back to Westcliffe!!!

LOL

I’m sorry, I can’t help but laugh and roll my eyes at us. So its totally ok if you are too :)

Our goal in moving away to Brighton was to save some money so that we could *someday* move back, buy some land, and live simply. Well, this move back is certainly quicker than we thought it would be, but I suppose that’s life.

We are in the process of purchasing a piece of land in a beautiful valley (a couple lots over from this picture), with amazing neighbors who are already well on their way to living the homesteading lifestyle that we’re interested in. On the land and what we will live in is an…. (get ready to laugh and roll your eyes again)….

UNFINISHED TRAILER!

LOL! (Maybe I should have named this blog post “Déjà vu“…)

I couldn’t really believe it either when we started looking at this lovely piece of mess (sorry, no pics yet). I told Ry, “I’m really not sure I can do this again…”

I remembered last time we lived in a shed(tiny house), without electricity, without water, without a kitchen or bathroom… I mean, HELLO: I wrote an entire blog on it!! But before we saw the inside of this creature, we went through the things that were needed in order to make it livable:

Water
Electricity
Warmth
Functioning Kitchen & Bathroom

When we finally got into the tiny shack, we realized: it’s not as bad as we thought it was!! While it definitely needs some TLC, and a couple of major changes (like digging a well), overall, we don’t feel overwhelmed by everything that needs to be done. And that’s saying something.

Another question we’ve wrestled with: “can we/should we finish the tiny house?” And this is something we are still wrestling with. Because at this point where we are at with it is still: unfinished. Is it better to put money into tiny house or another unfinished housing project? Well, “what one requires less cash & stress?” is going to be the winning answer.

I haven’t found very many other tiny house people with a similar story to ours: except Casey and Jessica Friday (recently had their tiny house stolen). I empathize so much with this blog that Jessica recently wrote about why they won’t be living in their tiny house. While we do have several of the things that the Fridays no longer have at their disposal (land, lifestyle..etc), I totally get the basis of what she’s getting at here. The whole point of the tiny house movement is what? SIMPLICITY. So that’s our focus moving forward: do the simple thing.

So here’s to many more future blog posts about building chicken coops, milking goats, making cheese, and sharing life (and cows) with neighbors in our precious lil mountain town. Here’s to not many more moves, but an acknowledgement of “that’s where we are in life”.

Here’s to the kind of simple living that is sometimes more… complicated :)

(linking up with Leigh Kramer– because what I’m up to these days is moving and living the nomad’s life)

March 4, 2015

City Living, Simple Living, Tiny Living

The Realities of Living in an Unfinished Tiny House

I (Hannah) have had several people recently ask me questions about living in an unfinished tiny home. I finally sat down and replied to someone with a really long email about the whole experience.

If you are considering moving into a tiny house that is not yet finished, perhaps you should read this. Or not. If someone had tried to tell me this information (oh wait… they probably did), I/we would not have listened. We wanted/want to live our own adventure – hard times and all.

Without further ado, a story about living in an unfinished tiny house as told in a reply to a question via email from Hannah’s perspective (Ryan may add his thoughts later on).

Alli,

Good to hear from you! I’ve really enjoyed the Tiny House community on Instagram.

Ok. “What was it like to live in an unfinished tiny house?” This is gonna be long. Prepare yourself.

When we first moved in, we ONLY had the bedroom built. Like, just a 10X10 (or so, I don’t remember exact dimensions right now). Pics on website, on “Tiny House and Wedding Update” blog post or the “Our Tiny House” page. We eventually finished the entire exterior, but this was while we were living in it.

A tiny bit of back story: we got married in April 2013 and a week before we were married the housing situation we were planning on moving into together, fell through and we were forced to scramble last minute to find a place. We found a month-to-month rental place that was 240 sq feet (great practice for Tiny living). We knew that in July 2013 we either had to make a year commitment to the rental place, or find somewhere else to live.

Around the beginning of June, we found a great deal on a gooseneck trailer that we bought. So our thought was to start building immediately and move into it at the end of July when our lease was up.Everything worked out: we found somewhere super close to where we both worked to start building. An amazingly sweet elderly woman had a few acres right in the middle of Golden CO (where we lived at the time) and allowed us to park the trailer (and all of the extra stuff that comes with it – turns out building materials take up a LOT of space) and start building.

We did get the bedroom somewhat livable before moving in..meaning it was framed with plywood and some tarps to keep out the rain. VERY basic. We ran an extension cord out from her shed to charge cell phones, laptop, and power tools, and kept water bottles around and used her hose to refill. But we didn’t have room for a kitchen, it was just the bed. She allowed us to keep our clothes in her garage, so that became our closet. We didn’t have any food storage options, so we just went to the grocery store every morning for breakfast, fast food (ugh) for lunch and dinner. We’d come back to the tiny house after work and work on it in the evenings before bed. We showered at my office which was like 2 miles away and used the bathroom at a gas station close by.

The lady whose land we were living on eventually took pity on us (I believe her words were, “no one should have to live like this”) and invited us to use her kitchen and bathroom. So at that point we were basically living with her, without living in her house. She allowed us to use part of a fridge and freezer space, kitchen to cook meals each day, and bathroom to use and take showers in. This significantly improved our quality of life, as you can imagine.

The building process took us SO much longer than we anticipated. We moved in in July, and I was under the impression that we were going to have the whole tiny house down before winter.

October hit and the temperature started dropping significantly, especially at night. Although we did make significant progress, we didn’t have electrical wiring or insulation done yet. Tragically, the elderly woman passed away very suddenly, and her family decided to put the house and land on the market. For 2-3 months around that time, we lived in friends basements, guest bedrooms, and cheap hotels around the Denver area. We decided to move to a tiny mountain town 4 hours south of Denver at Christmas, and moved the Tiny House down there as soon as the family sold the place.

Summary

Overall – yes, I can honestly say that I am slightly scarred from the experience of living in the tiny house before it was complete. There may have been other factors involved with that time period being difficult, like we were VERY much newlyweds, basically moving into a shed after being married for 3 months, living a “3rd world country experience” yet still trying to keep up with our “1st world” jobs and community. Or the fact that when we were dating and first married we had like $300 and had no idea what we were doing as far as building something this enormous – did I mention that our tiny house is HUGE? Like 250 sq feet. Needless to say, it made me feel fairly unstable and made both of us stressed out in general, not having somewhere to just CHILL and recoup. To be living in a construction zone, always having SO much to do: that list only gets longer and involves more money.

All that and I still say this: I really hope that this doesn’t scare you away from building a tiny house or even living in it unfinished.

I know that for who my husband and I are (we’re both firstborns) we needed to do this. If you are even considering building a tiny house, I feel like you will understand this somewhat. Even if it causes some scarring :) you can heal from it and learn a ton.

Where we are at now:

The tiny house is still down in the mountain town on some other friend’s land, in the unfinished state we left it in. It is PACKED full of building materials. We basically ran out of money and realized that we needed to spend a few years being a tad more strategic in planning our future. We moved back to the Denver area, took great jobs, and are living a fairly focused life just working and planning for the future. My husband works 7 days a week in the oil field and he has 1 week off every once in awhile so he is planning on going down there every so often to finish the house. We still have high hopes of finishing it, and we just realized that we had to be a bit more strategic if we wanted to remain sane :)

Advice (take it or leave it) for those considering living in an unfinished Tiny House:

– Work on finishing the inside first. That’s what you’ll be living in. If the outside just has tyvek for awhile, and it looks like crap, but you have electricity, insulation, drywall and a bed and chair (:sigh:) and the inside can be a refuge for you, it will help you keep going when you feel overwhelmed.

– If you do move in without electricity and water, and its basically like a shed, simplify your lifestyle. And by that I mean cut out as many extra activities as possible. I don’t know if you work, or how much, or if you are super involved in your community, or hang out with friends a ton, or have your own business, etc… but the more of these “other activities” you can temporarily cut out during the time you are building and are forced to live a highly rudimentary lifestyle, the better. Almost like meditating or something, just make your focus the tiny house for a little bit. I think that if I would have been able to do this, I MAY have enjoyed the process a tad more. If I could have just woken up each morning, not had to think about how long it would take me to actually be ready for the day (grab clothes from garage, go to store get breakfast, drive to work take a shower, awkwardly have wet hair and toiletries at work…etc) but just wake up, enjoy living a slightly “pioneer-ish” lifestyle for a few months.

– Have a back up plan. If/when the tiny house takes longer than you anticipate, have a backup plan in place so that its not this extreme pressure to complete the massive project before the first frost or something. We both didn’t handle that pressure very well, me more so than my husband. I think the unknown for me was almost unbearable. Not knowing how long I’d have to live like this was really difficult. If you set deadlines like, “if we don’t have the inside livable by November 1, we are moving into this apartment.” That way, when things get hard, you can just tell yourself, “Hey, I got 2 months of this and then we’re either going to be living in a functional tiny house, or this other housing situation.”

– Passion vs. Practicality. I read an article in the paper that talked about 10 ways passion could kill a new business. Basically, that emotions can block logically decision making. We just wanted to build this freaking house and at times this basically stopped us from creating a realistic timeline or putting a plan in place. So, for your overall health, be willing to set aside excitement for the finished product for like a few days, and maybe talk to some people in your life that you trust to help you come up with a practical plan for executing this fun project.

Questions for those considering moving into a tiny house that is unfinished:

– Where are you located?

– What’s your story? Are you married? Single? Do you have kids?

– Where do you work? What is that environment like?

– What is your background in construction? (for the record, mine was NOTHING when we started)

– What kind of budget that you are working with?

– Whats your timeline?

– How did you get involved with tiny houses?

– How have the people in your life responded to your dream of building this tiny monster? ;-)

Hope this helps somewhat, and I’m super pumped for you guys who are building or thinking about building!

If you are reading this and you are considering building a tiny house, or if you are considering moving into an unfinished tiny house, tell us your story! We would really enjoy connecting with you.

And if you’re ever in the Denver area, let us know. We’d love to have you over for tea :)

September 22, 2014

Country Living

Westcliffe, CO

If you know anything about Ryan and I its… (1) that we enjoy watching the thrilling nineties show, Northern Exposure (yeah, go ahead. watch it. you won’t be able to stop. and you won’t have a clue why), (2) that our Tiny House has taken much longer than we thought…. (3) and that we’re slightly obsessed with a lil town called Westcliffe. How to describe Westcliffe… – elevation is just under 8,000 in town – population is around 800 – there’s a movie theater in town that plays movies on Friday and Saturday nights. – on Halloween, the kids Trick-or-Treat in the downtown businesses. – there are about 10 churches in town. – when you get finger-printed at the sheriff’s office, there is a jail cell in the next room. – there is a strong Mennonite and Amish presence (there is also a bakery). – there are no building codes in Custer County (:cough: more.tiny.houses.coming. also more details from Ryan, because I’m sure that statement is more complicated than I just made it sound). – the elementary, middle, and high school are all in one building. – the only chains are: Subway, Family Dollar and The Post Office. Anyways. More posts to come about this magical place because long story made short/even longer by other blog posts later on…. We’re moving there :)

November 27, 2013