Think Big, Live Tiny - Part 15
The not-your-average moving day has arrived. The build has only taken three months, as I wasn’t at the mercy of building permits or inspections to slow the process down. In the infancy of the Tiny House movement, I’m guessing the powers that be were hoping that this was just a fad that would pass and turned a blind eye to the time-consuming process of making new regulations.
I wait at the bottom of my road for the truck pulling my precious cargo to turn the corner. Johanna, the builder, had called earlier to tell me of the hair-raising experience they had getting my 8 1/2 X 17-foot Tiny house off the property it was built on. She was smart enough to hire a guy with a dually truck to haul it for her. Randy had experience hauling horse trailers etc., but even he had sniffed, tipped his cowboy hat back to get a better look, then spit to the side and hitched his pants up a little as he did the math on his project today. I’m sure that forefront in his mind was the two-mile-long, unpaved, pothole-riddled road he had to get it down. Yes, down. To compound matters, the utopian property that Johanna builds her Tiny Homes on is around 2000 feet above sea level on the other side of the mountain that I live on. So my little Hale Maluhia (House of Peace) will be making an 80-mile journey halfway around the island today.
The macho, dually truck with double wheels on the back, slowly turns the corner at the highway as it enters my street. My heart lifts along with the corners of my mouth when I see my new home, on the last leg of its journey. There is something quite surreal about the sight of a house that represents stability, being dragged behind a truck.
Johanna had been relieved when I didn’t want a loft, that meant we could keep the overall height to 14 feet. She was thinking in advance of the electrical and phone wires that periodically cross the streets that we would need to pass beneath safely. So far so good. But my street was one mile long, all uphill, and fairly steep in places. It had three miserable speed bumps and was, what I call, a ‘pretend’ two-way street. We have quite a few of those here in Hawai’i. They think if they paint a dashed line down the middle of the road, we won’t notice that there isn’t really enough room for two cars to pass each other. And shoulders on the side of the road are a luxury seldom found on rural roads like mine. At least it’s paved, but just barely in places.
Johanna drives her small Toyota truck behind the house. She leans out of the window beaming and gives me a shaka. I see that Johanna’s worker Fred, is sitting on the edge of the bed of the truck, that is pulling the house. In his hand he holds a long stick with a V at the end. Huh, I wonder what that’s for? I am directed to lead the way, so I pull out in front. I pick up on the nerves of everyone in this operation and feel my heart beating faster as we creep up the road. Soon enough I see the purpose of the long stick. As we come upon the first houses at the bottom of the road, I notice that a long black wire crosses the street, dipping dangerously low. In my rear-view mirror, I watch Fred stand up, his mission now clear. The truck slows to a crawl as he fits the wire into the V of the stick and lifts it until the tip of the roof of the house is underneath it. He then lets it slide along the roof until it slips harmlessly off the back. I exhale in a rush. I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath. I look ahead up the street. Damn, I had never noticed how many electric and telephone wires criss-cross this street and they all appear to have sunk lower than ‘code’ over time. Our progress is agonizingly slow as we repeat this procedure over and over again. Fred proves to be adept at his maneuver, never making a mistake.
Before we get to the driveway, I should mention that we have had torrential rain for the past week. Storms that turned the road into a raging river, otherwise known as flash floods. This means that the ground is completely saturated. A slippery, muddy mess with standing water in places. The good news – it’s sunny today, and the driveway is concrete. The bad news – the driveway is just eight feet wide, and it curves twice before it gets to the homesite I have chosen. This will take some precision maneuvering. But Randy rises to the challenge, he manages to not let his truck, or the house fall off the side of the driveway. I suck air into my lungs and roll my shoulders. I realize I haven’t taken a full breath in the past 20 minutes. Now the last hurdle, putting it in place on the grass. And we have company. Sandi and Joseph, the owners of the property, and two other neighbors are standing waiting for us. No one wants to miss this spectacle. They smile and clap as the house slowly approaches.
TO BE CONTINUED
