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Michiana Chronicles writers bring portraits of our life and times to the 88.1 WVPE airwaves every Friday at 7:45 am during Morning Edition and over the noon hour at 12:30 pm during Here and Now. Michiana Chronicles was first broadcast in October 2001. Contact the writers through their individual e-mails and thanks for listening!

Tiny House, Big Life

As we kiss summer goodbye and head back into our homes with their clanking furnaces, cozy blankets and pie, it’s a good time to consider the connections between our houses … and ourselves.

Some of the biggest ideas in home-building right now are quite … small.  Tiny, actually.  It seems like everyone, suddenly, is talking about tiny houses. And yes, that’s actually the term – not downsized, not small, but … tiny. The average size of a house in the U.S. is 2300 square feet, and tiny houses are about 400 – and sometimes more like 70.

If you’re new to the concept, tiny houses are what happens when you mix Architectural Digest with Cute Overload to make adorable living spaces, brilliantly designed.  Tiny houses tap into cozy childhood memories of blanket forts and tree houses -- spaces made just for you and your very favorite things – maybe the books you love, a nap-softened pillow, and some delicious snacks.  There’s a website called TinyHouseSwoon.com, and I defy you to scroll through those images without gasping in delight at the gingerbread trim, the cunning cabinetry, the loft beds with skylights for stargazing.

The tiny house movement goes far beyond cute, though.  It springs from the financial collapse of 2008 and merges with design goals of sustainability experts to ask challenging questions: How might we tread more lightly on the earth, and on our own finances, to make space for what we truly value?  Author Ryan Mitchell calls this “voluntary simplicity,” and the thinking pushes past material stuff. Consider this: If it took you only seven minutes to clean your house, what else could you do with your evenings and weekends?  Adventures? Heart-to-hearts with beloveds?  Long novels?  Check, check, and check! Now ask yourself: If you weren’t spending close to ½ of your income on mortgage or rent, like most folks in the U.S. do, how much less might you work, and how much more might you do with your family, or for your neighbors and community?

Where do you find these transformative homes? You make them.  Yup – people like you and me.  Sure, plenty of the tiny houses you can find online and on TV shows like Tiny House Nation are crafted by experts, but most of the do-it-yourselfers are first-timers, tapping into free blueprints and local volunteer resources. Tiny-house building is less construction site and more Lillipution barn-raising, and opens a door for the new tiny home-dweller to say to those who helped out: now, how may I give back to you?

Strikingly, women are at the forefront of building and living in tiny houses; women seizing the opportunity that culture often denies us – to build our own lives, with sweat, skill, intellect, and satisfaction. Dee Williams chronicles this process powerfully in her scrappy memoir, The Big Tiny.  Williams is unromantic about the challenges – warped boards, stripped screws, zoning headaches.  But tiny-house building is about problem-solving – and she credits it with saving her life.

Folks are putting tiny houses on trailers, liberating themselves for travel and teaching others about the movement wherever they park.  Green-minded inventors are re-purposing shipping containers and pallets into snug dwellings for themselves, for the homeless, and to re-populate blighted lots in cities that could use an instant infusion of creativity, beauty, wit, and warmth.

That communitarian effect of tiny house living seems a bit counter-intuitive; it’s easy to focus on the structures themselves, instead of what lies beyond those tiny house walls. But if you have less room in your home, you live more largely beyond it.  If your friends won’t fit in your living room, you gather with them in cafes or brew-pubs, fueling the local economy with money you’re not spending on a big-house mortgage. If you live in a tiny house with others (and, yes, people do), you seek solitude not in a closed room but on a walk along a river path or in a city park – making your body stronger and your city safer with every step. 

It’s a happy little paradox – smaller houses remind us that our real address, one we share, is the world itself. And that idea … is pretty big.

April Lidinsky is a writer, activist, mother, foodie, black-belt, organic gardener, and optimist. She is a Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at IU South Bend and is a reproductive justice advocate.
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