Building our Micro House

Building our little house has been a huge learning process. Our little home is under 400 square feet. Everything that goes into it has to be very important. Everything has to have a purpose, even if the purpose it just to make us smile. Sometimes we buy something that doesn't work and we have to relace it because everything has to be efficient. Our funds are limited so we try really hard not to make mistakes that cost money.

Patience and hard work has been our daily task. Every day we look at our resources (including our time) and decide what the goal for the day is. Sometimes the project on the house comes first, and sometimes the laundry comes first. All the animals have to be fed and even that takes a learning curve. For example, we started by putting the chickens food in a dish on the ground. Now we have a container that hangs on the wall. This has saved us a lot of money in food.  The laundry is all washed in our washer and then hung on the clothes line (as long as we have good weather). When we can't use the clothes line or have towels we just send the clothes into town. One dollar in the dryer at the laundry mat will do two loads of laundry. Although we don't want to dry all of our clothes this way its nice to have soft towels and options for the other clothes on bad weather days.

Patience has been really important for the family in several ways. First we all got to use a make shift bathroom for the first 4 months that we were on our homestead. We don't like to go into the details there, but we were happy to have a real bathroom. Curtains in our doorways are slowly being replaced by doors and sheetrock is finally going up on most of the walls. We still have insulation to install in some places, but most of it has been installed and what is left to do will come eventually.
Additionally we all have to have patience with each other. We love to spend time together, but here with so little inside space when the weather is bad we get to spend all of our time together. When the weather is good the kids usually still spend all of their time together also. We tell people that we live in dirt, because we do, but the kids seem to find so much to do with that dirt.

Most of all I am grateful for the opportunity to do this project with my family. My kids are covered in dirt almost every day, but they love it. I am exhausted at the end of the day, but I can almost always look at our little home and say look at what I did today. Even hanging clothes on the clothesline can be satisfying.