Here is a more detailed follow up post...

Yes, we both still live happily together in the house. It's been almost 3 years and things are still going well.

People have asked about us about the lack of space and if it causes us to get on each others nerves. We really enjoy each others company so the answer is no. We're at work/school as much as anyone else and we also meet with friends and go places. Our joke when someone asks about privacy: When we need privacy, we simply turn around so that we don't see the other person. I think that you need a sense of adventure and humor to live in a place this small after having always lived in larger places. We are also aware that most of the world's population lives smaller than Americans do. Some people would think our place is big for only 2 people!

What we've changed:
Our 2 person sized antique settee (it fit through the door!) was donated to a thrift store and we now have sectional seating. This seating also serves as a guest bed for the occasional out of town visitor. We've had 3 overnight visitors so far, obviously not on the same weekend.

We haven't invited many people over for dinner since we've lived in this house though, and we kind of miss that, so we're thinking of who and when. We have added a few kitchen appliances since we moved in. We started out with a refrigerator, stove top, juicer, dehydrator and a microwave. I've added a blender and a slow cooker. We're ready for anything now.

Last years garden was great and this year's is shaping up too! Funny thing what some fertilizer can do!! We're growing beets, carrots, chard, kale, spinach, corn (I didn't know that many ears grow on each stalk), peas, green beans, zucchini, cherry tomatoes, pumpkins, cucumbers, onions, potatoes and wild flowers. Recently we were out there weeding, hand tilling in the compost we've made from our kitchen scraps and yard cuttings and planting seeds. It's looking great!

We've painted the house interior to off-white so that it's brighter inside during Seattle's (many, many) gloomy, grey months. I'm so glad that we originally installed the operable skylight. In the winter it adds lots of light and in the summer it keep the place cool inside with the aid of opening the sleeping loft window.

This past summer we also painted the house exterior a light brown. The redwood exterior didn't stand up well to the Seattle elements and needed to be better protected. We gave up on the clear coating that we've redone 2 years in a row. We'll add a window trim color this summer.

Last weekend we changed our desk setup. We had thought that we'd both need desk space so along one wall of the 'living room' we had a desktop and two chairs. I never used the desk and Jeff has found that a standing desk works better for him. We took out the desktop and nearby kitchen counter, cut the long desktop at a 45 degree angle and installed it as the kitchen counter replacement. Jeff loves it and now we have room for an arm chair to sit and read in between the front door and heater which makes me happier.

It snowed a couple of times in Seattle last winter but inside our house it was a 65-70 degrees though outside was as low as 28 degrees. We used the Dickenson wall mounted boat heater in the evenings if we needed more heat, but used a wall mounted, low energy usage, Envi convection heater convection heater at other times. It's safe to leave on while we're gone so the interior never got chilly.

We've talked about replacing the outside vent on the front of the house with a stained glass window that opens. We either need to find the right size or one of us needs to take a class and make one. We currently have a fan connected to that vent that goes from inside to outside intended to remove the warm air in summer time. We've used it only once since the skylight seems to do a better job and the fan is noisier than we'd like.

We'll try to post more frequently!

Jeff & Arlene

Quick Update on a Warm Seattle Day

Well, we haven't posted anything in quite a while. Busy life up here, but people often ask for an update. We get questions like, "are you still living in the tiny house?", and sometimes from skeptics, "so, uh, how is it, living in there?"Well, we still love it. We built it and it means something to us in addition to being a good place to live.

Perhaps this isn't the best picture for summer, but when the snow piled up in January, we stayed cozy inside and spent about $50 for heating and hot water all winter. Our life is simpler and we see things differently than we did before started this journey in 2009. No, we probably won't live in it forever, but certainly for a few more years.

An Update on the Garden

This being only my second attempt at gardening, I think that it's going quite well. In a previous post on gardening I listed what I was going to plant. Almost everything grew like weeds.

The photos were taken on May 25 and June 27.

I did have a couple of problems though. Bell pepper, corn and cucumber seeds never sprouted. And I bought bell pepper and basil plants, but the things aren't growing, though the pepper plants are creating vegetables.

I did see a few slugs when I first planted but stopped watering the plants after the sun went down. The little creatures then went elsewhere.

For fertilizer I've been using a liquid concentrate made from seaweed and rabbit poo (thanks to our backyard rabbit Bluebell, whom I gladly share vegetables with).

I had two surprises this year. The first is that if you let microgreens grow, they don't stay so micro. (Duh.) I found this out because I planted too much lettuce, microgreens and chard. We couldn't eat it, or use it in smoothies, fast enough. I've given bags of it to neighbors, Lorraine and Brandon at the gym and the folks at work.

The second surprise is that I bought a seed packet containing 'mixed microgreens'. This must mean 'left over seeds; we don't know what they are since we won't list them on the packet'. Since cutting microgreens was more difficult than grabbing some lettuce, I let the stuff grow. We were happily surprised with unplanned broccoli rabe, bok choy, beets and radishes.

The only plants that died were the mail order heirloom tomatoes. Those tomatoes run $6 to $8 lb in the store so I was excited about these. They arrived wilted, small and really quite sad looking. I did what the instructions suggested to revive them, but they didn't make it. I replaced them with regular local plants and next year will only buy locally.

What I've learned so far:

Plant less lettuce. It seems to grow from seed easily and very quickly.

Do more research on what to plant when. As I plant new things I'm paying more attention to the season it grows best in. My mache' lettuce wilts in the heat but the greenleaf and redleaf lettuce do fine.

An Analysis of the Tiny House Blog Network

Do you have a tiny house blog? When you write something, how many people read it? One way to make a guess at how many folks read it is how many folks comment on it. But if 3 people comment on it, dose that mean only 3 people read it? No. Generally, more people read than comment.

How about followers? Maybe you have statistics that say 40 or so folks "follow" your blog. So does that mean 40 people read your post? Maybe, maybe not. The number could be smaller since of those 40 followers only a fraction will read every post. But the number could be higher because other bloggers may read your post and write about it (generally linking to your blog or the specific post). This may bring other readers to your site.

So lets talk about links. There are two basic kinds of links in the blogosphere. First are the links in blogrolls. These are static, meaning they don't change much. They are also generally strategic - meaning as bloggers we make choices about who we link to (for this post I will not talk about the politics of links, but I might in a future post). The other kind is a citation link. If anyone writes about this post in their blog they will likely follow general blogger etiquette by linking to it. They might say it's all hog-wash, or that it's interesting, but generally most bloggers link to a post that inspires or influences them in their own post.

And those links form a network. I used a tool called the Issue Crawler to capture the network generated by blogrolls and citations to make a visualization of the blogs that form what is called a topic network. The topic, is, of course, Tiny Houses. Where are you on the map?



So let me tell you what the map means. (Download a large version here).

First, the map captures the top 50 nodes (blogs) in the Tiny House Issue Network. The size of the node is based on the number of in-links (either from citations or blogrolls). Below I have posted the top 93 sites and the number of in-links that Issue Crawler could find (which may not be every single one). The size and position of the nodes are related to how many in-links that blog has received.

If you make money from advertising (Arlene and I do not) than site traffic is important to you and site traffic is, as we say in statistical parlance, positively related to in-links. That just means that more in-links you have, the more traffic you are likely to have (other things being equal).

I haven't done a formal analysis of this network, so I don't have much else to say about it for now. I will say that some sites on the map (like Wikipedia) may or may not be relevant to the topic network. We could probably make arguments on either side for including this or that site, or not including them. That would depend on the analysis.

So, are you on the top 10 list? Top 93? Issue Crawler only lists and plots sites that have two or more in-links from other sites within the network - so we have a list of 93 blogs and their ranking. Tiny House Blog has a very high number of in-links, so it is central to the map. But some of those links are not from the collection of 93. So the numbers on the map may not match the within-network ranking.

But, anyway, here is the Tiny House Issue Network ranking:

Actor Rankings (core network and periphery, by page)
1 - tinyhouseblog.com - 47
2 - tinyhousedesign.com - 42
3 - tumbleweedhouses.com - 34
4 - resourcesforlife.com - 31
5 - tinyfreehouse.com - 27
6 - michaeljanzen.com - 26
7 - rowdykittens.com - 25
8 - thistinyhouse.com - 22
9 - comingunmoored.com - 21
10 - smalllivingjournal.com - 21
11 - tinyhouseliving.com - 19
12 - ninetinyfeet.com - 18
13 - wordpress.com - 17
14 - paddleways.com - 15
15 - storyofstuff.com - 15
16 - thetinylife.com - 14
17 - tortoiseshellhome.com - 14
18 - shedworking.co.uk - 13
19 - jaystinyhouse.com - 13
20 - smallhousestyle.com - 13
21 - tinypallethouse.com - 12
22 - tinyhouseforum.com - 12
23 - diyfreedom.com - 11
24 - flickr.com - 11
25 - tinyhousejournal.com - 11
26 - apartmenttherapy.com - 11
27 - tinytexashouses.com - 11
28 - littlediggs.com - 11
29 - tinyhousevillage.com - 11
30 - mobilecottage.blogspot.com - 11
31 - togetherweareone.com - 10
32 - rosschapin.com - 10
33 - thegreenestdollar.com - 9
34 - theyonderosa.blogspot.com - 9
35 - energystar.gov - 9
36 - greenaerie.blogspot.com - 8
37 - livinglargeinourlittlehouse.com - 8
38 - otherpower.com - 8
39 - relaxshax.wordpress.com - 8
40 - zenhabits.net - 8
41 - microcompacthome.com - 8
42 - lodge-on-wheels.com - 8
43 - kithaus.com - 8
44 - relaxshacks.com - 8
45 - smallhousesociety.org - 8
46 - sustain.ca - 8
47 - martinhousetogo.com - 8
48 - notsobighouse.com - 8
49 - tinyhousetalk.com - 7
50 - juliajanzen.com - 7
51 - weehouse.com - 7
52 - inhabitat.com - 7
53 - moderncabana.com - 7
54 - freecycle.org - 7
55 - truckingpilgrim.blogspot.com - 7
56 - claytonihouse.com - 7
57 - accessahut.wordpress.com - 7
58 - dwell.com - 7
59 - npr.org - 7
60 - time.com - 7
61 - cusatocottages.com - 7
62 - en.wikipedia.org - 6
63 - sonomashanty.com - 6
64 - tinyhouses.net - 6
65 - kmswoodworks.wordpress.com - 6
66 - portlandalternativedwellings.com - 6
67 - claytonhomes.com - 6
68 - littlehouseonasmallplanet.com - 6
69 - projectrollingfreedom.wordpress.com - 6
70 - jenkinspublishing.com - 6
71 - realestatejournal.com - 6
72 - buildingwithawareness.com - 5
73 - projectrollingfreedom.com - 5
74 - felinedesigninc.com - 5
75 - small-house-building.com - 5
76 - lloydkahn-ongoing.blogspot.com - 5
77 - ultimatemoneyblog.com - 5
78 - metaphysics-for-life.com - 5
79 - ebay.com - 5
80 - josephkenyon.com - 5
81 - rocioromero.com - 5
82 - off-grid.se - 5
83 - cobcottage.com - 5
84 - contests.apartmenttherapy.com - 4
85 - coyotecottage.com - 4
86 - cottagecompany.com - 4
87 - bluhomes.com - 4
88 - slowingdown.wordpress.com - 4
89 - ted.com - 4
90 - thescraphouse.wordpress.com - 4
91 - powellriverbooks.blogspot.com - 4
92 - edavies.nildram.co.uk - 4
93 - goyurt.com - 4

The next project is the drapes

Now that I've painted, I've figured out what I want to do for drapes. I was looking for a woven material so we'd let in lots of air and light. At night we can close the honeycomb blinds for added privacy and darkness.

What we have hanging now is liner material, like bleached muslin, scavenged from some old drapes. Yesterday I bought off-white burlap for the drapes and oatmeal colored linen-like ribbon to be used along the sides and bottom (to give a bit more contrast from the walls). I might also add a couple of 1.25" diameter simple, wooden buttons to each window so we can hold the new drapes open.

I need to sew along the cut edges of the fabric to prevent it from unraveling then it'll go into the washing machine until it's softer. I'm told to expect a little shrinking too. I'm curious to see what it comes out like because I haven't worked with burlap before. The price was worth gambling on though. I paid $10.50 for 9 yards of fabric (on sale) which should be enough for all of the windows.

An update on the garden

The first cycle of everything has been planted and is sprouting like crazy. In my quest to see if I can grow all of my own food, I ended up planting:

peas
cucumbers
string beans
melons
squash
soybeans
micro greens
beets
carrots
bell peppers
poblano chiles
fractal-like cauliflower
2 different lettuces
4 different heirloom tomatoes
cilantro
basil
scallions
some edible flowers as well as
rosemary
lavender
peonies
lily of the valley
hollyhock
and wildflowers to bring bees and hummingbirds.

These pictures were taken on May 1st.

An update on the interior

I really want a cottage feel to our interior so I painted it a creamy white (Freshaire Choice non-VOC, 'Poetic Light').

I like the effect of the lights at night bouncing off the walls and ceiling, and even on a grey day, it's much brighter inside even without the lights on.