So, We Moved In

Huzzah the last(?) post! After years of building, many Bunnings trips and an unreasonable amount of sanding, we finally moved into the Miette in February. It is now October. So, what have we been doing for the last eight months?

Well, apparently the building never really stops.

In an attempt to summarise, what has been a year since we last wrote, strap in for a whistle tour of highlights.

Making the Tiny Actually Liveable

In February, we’ve bundled all of Erny’s gear inside, but we were definitely with not much storage. Everything was pretty much everywhere. Over time though, inside, Lys has become something of a shelf master, installing floating shelves made from some very pretty blackbutt (the same wood we used for the windows), some rouge plywood and a gorgeous eucalyptus offcut we picked up from a gentleman near Mollymook when we picked up a thicknesser planer.

The last few months has seen Erny painstakingly installed the plywood cupboards and Lys diligently oiling them, so now we have inbuilt storage with hanging space. Luxury. Our beautiful curved Tasmanian blackwood benchtops runs along both sides of the house and our $10 Corian sink has finally been christened (with running hot water!), washing fruits and veggies for dinner.

It is pretty darn good.

The house has also slowly become more functional in all the boring-but-important ways. We installed LED strip lighting basically everywhere, which instantly made everything look much swisher and, more importantly, meant we could actually see what we were doing at night. We got the fridge working, another excellent Erny find, installed the range hood and HRV, and finally put in the smoke and carbon monoxide alarms.

As a sidebar, can’t quite remember how much we talked about the HRV on here, but essentially they are systems that move stale air around a room or house the prevent stale air, moisture build up and temperature. This prevents moisture build up and mould. These systems are most often used in Passiv Haus and sustainable housing designs but honestly should be used in more builds. Think of them like the mechanical lungs of a house to help your home breathe. We got ours from Energy labs with Stiebel. It cost us a pretty penny, but is decentralised, meaning that it doesn’t have centralised ducting and saves space. Air direction is changed every 40 seconds and is filtered so we can breathe easy 😊

If we ever do another build, this is definitely something that we will include in the design going forward.

The rangehood has also worked well, since cooking in a small space always brings out the concerns of lingering smells. Our learning here is that, even though it is more effort, an externally ducted range is the way to go, in apartments, houses or even tiny homes.

As you may be able to see in the above photo, we have a portable IKEA induction stove which has been working surprisingly quite well. Lys does miss the two burner option but being able to move it around, being an easy clean does have its advantages.

It’s been really lovely making tea in the morning, having a late night snack from the fridge, turning the LED lights on at night. It really is the small and the mundane that makes you realise that we actually live here, in something that we’ve built with our own two hands, now.

Electricity Storage

We had already run the cables through the walls but a huge game changer were the batteries. The Miette is now basically one giant iPad. Post a wedding adventure we stacked Bel’s car with 4 batteries from the hardware store from the depths of the Southern highlands. This was one of the things that we knew that we were going to purchase new. Honestly, Erny is the one who actually understands the inner workings of it all, one day we may actually document the process for posterity. For now, the electricity flows, gets stored, and heats up our hot water making us very happy.

Unfortunately, we don’t have solar yet, unfortunately, but we’ll get there… soon. And another thing we don’t have? Stairs.

Instead, we continue to precariously climb up and down a ladder every morning and night. At some point, this stopped feeling like a temporary solution and simply became how one accesses the bedroom.

Cosmetics

Somewhere between installing cupboards and climbing the ladder for the thousandth time, we also started decorating. Erny’s niece’s artwork went up on the wall, alongside Lys’ neon Paint and Sip attempt, which has somehow earned permanent exhibition status. Erny’s WUCC photo is up too, so the walls are slowly filling with things that actually mean something to us rather than just hiding screw holes. Erny also bought some speakers and the cutest little mini amp, which means the Miette now has a completely disproportionate sound system for such a tiny space.

Our parents very generously gifted us a projector as well, so we can lie in bed and watch Living Big in a Tiny House and Never Too Small in HD.

Greywater

Outside, the reed-bed greywater system has been quietly doing its thing. We planted it with Juncus kraussii, Juncus usitatus, tall sedge and Carex inversa as these are hardy wet water plants often used in river bank regeneration. The plants have settled in delightfully well. Lys has been dabbling in permaculture, which has meant we have gradually started thinking less about water as something that simply enters the house and disappears down a drain, and more about where it goes next.

Eventually, we’d like to use more of our greywater to help hydrate the back garden through increasingly hot Australian summers rather than simply treating it as waste. The Your Home guide to wastewater reuse was a useful Australian starting point. We also watched this reed-bed video and spent quite a bit of time reading the greywater resources from Oasis Design.

We’ve also been referring back to the Oregon State University Permaculture Design course, which is partly responsible for conversations about drainage slowly becoming conversations about soil, water retention, plants and where everything flows next.

Two water tanks have joined the setup, catching water from the roof whenever Australian weather decides to move from absolutely no rain to all of the rain at once.

A Few Learnings: The Tiny House Is Tiny

Living in the Miette has confirmed one fairly predictable design feature: it is small. Which is very obvious, but needs to be said. Storage comes at a premium, although the cupboards, floating shelves and storage loft have made a huge difference. Having people over for dinner is still a bit of a logistical exercise unless we can spill outside, and almost everything we bring into the house needs to justify the space it occupies. We’ve had to learn how to be flexible and to tidy up regularly because small spaces leave nothing to hide.

It has however, has manifested itself as a lens to which we focus our interests, we treasure everything that’s in the tiny, and most of our hobbies center around hiking, climbing and sport. From this experiment, one is often reminded how few possessions one needs, less in a minimalist sense, more in a eudaimonia (a fancy word for human flourishing) and ikigai (the japanese word for a reason of being) sense. And, just from a practical perspective, the less you carry the less burdensome it is when you have to move.

More on the construction side, another learning has been how been how satisfying it is to live somewhere when you know exactly how everything got there. We know where the studs are because we put them there, and we have a million photos to remind ourselves of that fact. We know which pieces of timber fought us, which jobs required multiple cups of tea, and which things we got slightly wrong before watching another YouTube video and trying again.

And last but not least, we’ve also learnt that we are sandwich press people, not toaster people.

Off on Another Adventure

And now, just as we have properly started living here, we are actually leaving. We’re heading to the UK for a few years while Lys completes her Master’s in AI Ethics & Society. After five years of spending so many weekends building, fixing, sanding, measuring, oiling, wiring, plumbing and making yet another Bunnings run, it feels very strange to suddenly be packing everything away.

We are not entirely sure what we will do with all those weekends. We’ll probably spend a lot of them hiking. There just won’t be power tools and the sweet, citrusy smell of Douglas fir in the air. More trips to the pub and less trips to Bunnings is definitely in our future.

A huge thank you to our friends and family who helped us build it, lent us tools, taught us things, held things while we screwed them in, brought us food, listened to us talk endlessly about tiny-house problems and generally supported this slightly ridiculous project.

And an especially big thank you to our parents, who somehow went from helping us build a tiny house to making sure said tiny house had a projector.

For now, the Miette stays in Australia while we head off on another adventure.

Catch ya later, Lys & Erny