Living in a Tiny Home - Part 3: The tiny arrives!
We arrived in the Methow Valley on June 20, 2018. We had booked an AirB&B with the same person who let us park all our belongings in her barn (temporarily). This lovely and kind person was also our neighbor down the hill, and allowed us to bring 2 dogs and 3 cats into her AirB&B. No, seriously, who does that? Amazing.
I had found the AirB&B by chance a month prior, and wondered how the views looked awfully familiar to the ones from our land. Well, it was because she was just down a hill from us as the crow flies!
Peggy was one of the kindest people we had ever met, and we were so lucky to have found her! She turned out to be a lifesaver during the rest of the year, as we did not have electricity for months and had to stash perishables in her fridge in her garage for months, AND we took showers at her gorgeous place all summer and fall!
View from our neighbor’s house down the hill from our property.
We stayed at the AirB&B for a few days, waiting for the money from the sale of our home to be transferred over so we could pay for our tiny home and have it delivered from the Oregon coast! But there were some glitches and the money wasn’t arriving, and we had to move out of the AirB&B because it was booked. We managed to find another AirB&B for a few more days; again, someone was OK with us bringing all the pets! So lucky for us. And by the way, all the cats and the dogs did great, considering it was very challenging for 3 older cats (one with cancer) to adapt to another way of living so late in life. The dogs on the other hand were in heaven, going places and going for hikes every day.
Not without some anxiety and stress, the money finally got into the bank, we managed to pay for the tiny home and for the guy who was supposed to deliver it, all in time for us to spend the last night available at the 2nd AirB&B (also booked ahead since it was close to 4th of July!), and finally get to our land and move into the tiny home!
The guys delivering the tiny home didn’t dare move it into the spot we had created for it, because it required some skilled maneuvering, so we asked them to move it near the well, and then a week later or so we had someone local move it into its permanent spot.
It’s crazy to have a home arrive driven by a truck! It’s surreal and also really fun! We managed to cram everyone in there, and over the course of the next few days, we settled in.
There was a well, but we needed to have a pump installed, as well as a frost-free hydrant so we could connect a hose to it and have water! So for the first 10 days or so, we had to get water from our neighbor, and bring it in with containers. It was like camping really.
They never show these kinds of photos when they show inside a tiny home! This was right after moving, but the tiny home was always messy, because it’s too small!!
We managed to get the company to come out to install an inline pressure pump which worked great all the years we lived there. We had a generator which we ran when we needed to pump water. We still took showers at our neighbor but it was great to have access to water to rinse off, or drink!
It took much longer, months really, to get the electric company to come out and install the electric lines from our neighbor down the road to our property. Then we had an issue with the tiny home not having a permit and the electric company could not legally hook us up. We finally managed to solve all those problems and got hooked into the grid at the end of November!
I still haven’t really talked about living in the tiny home, have I? This series may be longer than I had imagined!
