Think Big, Live Tiny - Part 9

NOW, WHERE TO PUT IT?

The building process goes quickly. Johanna explains that Tiny Houses fall between the cracks of all the bureaucracy that normally stands between you and your new home. Because they are on wheels, and therefore moveable, they are not technically classified as a house. Therefore, they do not need all the building permits and inspections that can hold up the building process, sometimes for months. She assures me though, that my home will be built to code as she has been doing for 35 years with conventional homes. She wouldn’t know how to do it any other way. And I can tell you, 12 years later, my house is as solid as the day I took ownership (even after a 5.7 earthquake the other day).

I will be in my Tiny Home for several months before I realize I don’t have a deed for it either. Hmm? I don’t even have a title like you would have for a car. The only thing that remotely denotes ownership is the trailer registration, which I had promptly turned in so that I wouldn’t have to pay a yearly registration fee, since I had no plans on moving it once situated. There is also the issue of insurance. To this day I live dangerously, as I have been unable to procure any type of Homeowners insurance. In most states you are able to get RV insurance, but in Hawai’i there are virtually no RV’s and therefore no insurance available.

All those pesky details aside, I am thrilled that I will only have to wait three months to take up residence in my new home. I can’t wait to get out of the studio I currently sleep in, with one eye open for cane spiders and centipedes.

Telling my girls that I will no longer be moving back to Rochester does not go well. I dashed their hopes that we would once more all be living in the same state. When I moved here in 1994 Michelle and Alicia were both freshly out of High School. They felt that I abandoned them, and perhaps I did. It wasn’t my intention of course. I honestly felt that they were adults now, going on to live lives of their own and that left me free to explore other options in my life. But perhaps because of the distance, my absence was sorely felt and I have been dealing with the fallout every since. I had been hoping to rectify some of the damage I had done to our relationships by moving back. However, my intuition regarding big changes in my life has always been so strong and served me so well in the past two decades, I can’t stop listening to it now. And it is pushing me loud and clear into this new home.

I had signed the papers, put down a large deposit and we were a month into the build when it occurred to me; I had better find a place to put my house when it was done. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this is one of the trickier parts of Tiny Home owning. The same crevices that it falls between in the permitting process also apply to the parking of it in a somewhat permanent place. It doesn’t classify as a traditional house. Johanna told me they started with theirs parked in their driveway until a neighbor complained. The building inspector came out, looked at it and scratched his head.

“Can you just put it somewhere that no one will see it or complain about it?” He had said with a shoulder shrug. He really didn’t know what to advise either, there were cracks in the system, big ones.

Johanna and I. Hmmm, where to put it?

Barrie and I – further discussions (with MacKenzie looking patiently on).