A Sink for Good Measure

For several of my tiny house heros The Kitchen Sink was the first purchase. It was their way of saying "Hey, I'm really going to do this thing! I'm going to build myself a tiny house." And then things started to fall into place for them.

My Tiny House Started With a Window and I felt pretty lucky that I'd found My Beautiful Arched Door, too. Since I'm a rather superstitious person, and I wanted the good luck to keep coming my way, I decided I'd better find myself a sink, too.

One morning I came across a beautiful hand-hammered copper sink on Craigslist. When I called the number the man who was selling it said he was on his way downtown and he offered to bring it by so I could take a look. I decided if he was determined to get his asking price I'd have to let it go. I am hesitant to pay more than I've budgeted since I know how budgets creep. I really can't afford to let that happen.

On the other hand, I know that a handful of beautiful things really matter. For me, the parts of a house I interact with daily - the sink, windows, door, knobs, pulls, and latches - are the parts that need to be beautiful and functional. It's like my cousin explaining that it's okay to buy jeans, t-shirts, and socks that don't speak to your soul, but you've got to have good shoes and a coat you love.

Fortunately, when I offered the man the amount I'd budgeted for a sink he accepted. He lives in a floating home, but he thought my tiny house was novel anyhow. When he saw Bayside Bungalow, the tiny house on wheels I'd rented for the year, he was pretty impressed. He liked the idea of his tiny sink finding a place in my tiny home.

My copper sink is large enough and deep enough that I'll be able to do dishes easily. But it's also small enough that it has moved with me three times now. First to My Summer Garden Cottage, then to my Home Sweet Yurt, and most recently to Sweet Pea. I love knowing that the next time I move it will be to install it in my vardo! I've begun scouting for a copper faucet that will match my sink. It seems the only way to do it justice.

So it seems My Tiny House Starts with a Window... and A Beautiful Arched Door... and a sink for good measure. With these three pieces guiding the character of my gypsy wagon, I think it's going to be lovely!

Let the Tiny House Treasure Hunt begin!

My Beautiful Arched Door

The summer before last I had My Summer Dream Job: Tiny House Design-Building. It was brilliant, lucky, backwards, or some combination of all three that I had the chance to build a tiny house for someone else before I built my own.

While I was finishing out Tandem (which is now located at Caravan - The Tiny House Hotel and available for nightly rental), I soaked up as much information and muscle memory as I could so that someday I would be ready to build my tiny dream house. And I started scouting Craigslist for materials, just to get a sense of what was out there.

I wasn't going to actually buy anything since I knew I wouldn't be building that summer. I definitely wasn't going to buy anything large!

But a friend invited me to visit the ReBuilding Center on a Saturday afternoon in August and I saw it.

My door.

An arched door with an arched leaded glass window and an arched frame, too. The fella I asked about it said it had been there a couple weeks. The price was more than I'd been wanting to pay for a door, but it was just what I wanted.

I decided to sleep on it.

And I didn't sleep well because I was nervous about making the commitment... but even more nervous someone else would get MY door. So I reserved a truck through Getaround and was at the ReBuilding Center before it opened on Sunday morning. When I walked in and told the guy I was going to buy that arched door he grinned and gave me a discount. The man who helped me load it into the truck said arched doors are rare but arched doors with frames in good shape are one in a thousand. I feel lucky that we found each other despite the odds, my door and me. So My Tiny House Started with a Window and then, all of the sudden I had a beautiful door, too. With an arched door and an arched window, my house was definitely taking on a life of it's own. And a shape of its own. When I found my arched window I was already pretty sure my house would be a vardo, but finding my arched door sealed the deal.

Then I started getting a little nervous because I didn't have A Sink for Good Measure, so my scouting began again...