After A Week Long Send Off, My Round the World Trip kicked off with eight days in Maui visiting my sister Sarah who has split her time between Hawaii and Alaska for many years. What an epic way to start this adventure! There was mist falling when my sister greeted me at the Kahului airport on Maui a week ago, so she teased me about bringing the rain from the mainland. We headed straight for Paia where she presented me with a young coconut and a lei, accompanied by the chant for the gifting-of-a-lei.
A number of circumstances collided recently to compel me to move the Lucky Penny to my property in Walla Walla where I have a ground bound small house called Valencia Cottage. So on Tuesday trusted tiny house movers Linh and Stephanie Pham helped me move the Lucky Penny safely from Portland to my place in Walla Walla.
As I packed up recently in preparation to travel cross country in my Honda Fit, I did some downsizing… It was harder than it had been during my last couple of moves because this time I had more stuff. I’d been living in a bigger space…My apartment was a studio, but it was still about 6 times bigger than the Lucky Penny! I talked with several people about the experience and a handful of them said “oh my goodness, I need to do more of that!” So I’ve decided to offer a 6-week Downsizing Tune Up…
A number of circumstances collided recently to compel me to move the Lucky Penny to my property in Walla Walla where I have a ground bound small house called Valencia Cottage. So on Tuesday trusted tiny house movers Linh and Stephanie Pham helped me move the Lucky Penny safely from Portland to my place in Walla Walla.
In late December, I had a lovely session of reflection with a journal and bean cakes at the tea house at Lan Su Chinese Garden in Portland’s Old Town. This was the second time I’d gone there around new years. Twice may not be a tradition, but hopefully this will be!
When I was in high school I attended a leadership workshop which emphasized the importance of visioning. The keynote speaker lead us through an exercise in which we closed our eyes and imagined what we would like to have happen with our programs in the coming year. Then he encouraged us to think bigger, about what we wanted to have happen in our lives and in the world. He then had us gather up in small groups to share these visions with others.
When one of my group mates, a redhead named Stephanie, described wanting her kitchen to smell of cinnamon I was delightfully surprised at how easy it was for me to imagine myself into that space. She had certainly taken to heart the instruction to be specific in our visions. It was the sort of place I wanted to spend a rainy afternoon. (To this day, inspired by Stephanie’s vision for her someday kitchen, one of my favorite design exercises for the workshops I teach is to explore sensory experiences. What do you want to hear in your home? What do you want to see?)
After sharing our visions aloud with others, we took time to write them down. We were encouraged to doodle and to use color. Then we signed our names to them. Our (truly) motivational speaker told us that those who share their visions are significantly more likely to achieve them. And those who write them down are even more likely to achieve them. And those who sign them are even more likely to achieve them. (There’s this thing about accountability, it turns out. And when this workshop speaker said that people who capture their visions in writing are significantly more likely to achieve them, he meant it. There’s scientific evidence behind each of these elements of capturing. By the time I learned about these principles in my social psychology classes in college I had been employing these tricks for years.)
I left that leadership workshop when I was sixteen years old with a vision, tucked into an envelope, which I knew was a gift to my future self. I decided to do this visioning thing each year. And while it’s taken different forms over the years, I have continued to do visioning at new years and other pivot points.
I found that teenage vision tucked in its envelope a couple months ago when I was settling back into The Lucky Penny. I spent a day on a winding journey down memory lane as I looked through the scrapbooks I had meticulously created back in the analog days of high school and college. And I found myself laughing and tearing up as I discovered how much of my vision has remained the same over the past twenty years. Even more fascinating, I found that most of the things I had jotted down have happened:
Finding, attending, and graduating from a college that was just the right fit for me
Owning a home of my own
Learning to grow a garden full of flowers and food
Attending graduate school in a fascinating field
Living in an intentional community
Designing and building my own home
Living abroad
And yet there are also things I didn’t know to hope for that have also happened. I didn’t know that I’d love my college enough to stay for another six years as the community service coordinator. I didn’t know that one of my roommates would become one of my best friends. I didn’t know that Yestermorrow would become one of my great loves and that I’d get to be a teacher there as well as a student. I didn’t know that tiny houses would become A Thing and that the first house I’d design and build for myself would be on wheels. I didn’t know I’d create my own company which would enable me to travel, teach, consult ,and design. Nor did I know that I’d help to create two of the first tiny house communities in America. What adventures these have been!
As I noted in my 2019 Recap and 2020 Look Ahead, this has been a time of big transition for me. And so my visioning has stretched out this year, to capture this pivot point. Cataloguing what I have learned about myself and listening for intuition and inspiration about the future. (Amusingly, those things I jotted down decades ago that haven’t happened I’m still hoping and working to manifest. Many of these things have made it onto a permanent Life List, another visioning tool, which I loved doing at Wild Women’s Weekends in Walla Walla. I’m so curious to see what else the Universe is scheming!)
For the past nine months I’ve been using the Daily Greatness Journal. And it’s amazing to be able to see what I’ve already accomplished!
This past year I’ve been using the Daily Greatness Journal, which was recommended by my coworker Chelsea in our quarterly accountability meeting (imagine that!) It was amazing to me as I launched into the fourth quarter of using it this weekend how many of the goals I set nine months ago need to be updated since I’ve met them already.
This year my fairy godsister, Nell, recommended the Year Compass, which was created by some folks in Budapest and is available as a free tool - if you haven’t yet done your visioning for the year ahead and have a hankering for it, I’d highly recommend this guide. The week before last I sat in a teahouse with a kindred spirit, two copies of the Year Compass, and two pots of tea. After jotting them down we went to Everett House for the first soak of the new year to let those hopes and dreams really soak in.
This past weekend I spent with my auntie as we told each other stories from the past and we both did some visioning for our futures. She is looking ahead, too, so it was an honor to swap 5 Minute 5 Year life plans. (This is the quickest version of visioning I know. I invented it on a college search with a friend. Just set the timer for 5 minutes and jot down whatever your friend says about what they imagine over the next five years. When time’s up, it’s your turn! This technique has yielded some profound results when I’ve done it with friends, colleagues, and family members over the years. So fascinating to look back on these ones!)
As I my vision for this year (and beyond) crystalizes, I’ll likely share parts of it here. (That whole accountability thing.) Meanwhile, I’m curious to see what YOU envision for this year. What are you hoping for? What are you excited to manifest? Which tools do you use for visioning? Feel free to share in the comments.
So many ways to envision the future! I’ve been enjoying a happy smattering of them during this transition. Check out the Year Compass if you’ve got a hankering to do some January visioning!
This paper was originally written by Lina Menard of Niche Consulting LLC in June of 2012 as a term paper for a course she took as part of her Masters of Urban and Regional Planning Masters program at Portland State University. The course, USP 510: Planning & The Housing Market, taught by Dr. Lisa Bates, focused on the intersection between planning, regulation, and affordable housing. This version of the paper was updated in January 2015.
Well, that was a nice 48 hours of elation before the details came out about Portland's Declared Stay on Tiny House Evictions! Turns out there's a limit of one tiny house or RV per residence, which means no tiny house communities. Oh, sadness! In a nutshell, while the city is figuring out permanent regulations regarding tiny houses, they won't enforce Title 29.50.050 (which prohibits occupation of recreational vehicles) as long as:
his past weekend I had the opportunity to teach two sessions of the Tiny House Collaborative Tiny House Community & Zoning Workshop at Earth Day Texas (EDTx) in Dallas, Texas. Lee and I co-taught since BA was the coordinator for the tiny house village at the event.
This past weekend I connected with my colleagues (and friends) BA Norrgard and Lee Pera to teach a Tiny House 101 Workshop in Washington, D.C. Our twenty students joined us from various locales ranging from down the street to Florida to Brazil! I look forward to teaching a Tiny House 101 Workshop again in June in Denver, CO with BA Norrgard. If you'd like to join us, please register now so we know you're coming!
People often tell me that they'd love to taken one of our tiny house workshops but they can't afford it. I respond by telling them that if they're serious about building a tiny house they really can't afford NOT to come to a workshop. The few hundred dollars they invest in the workshop will save them significant time, money, and heartache since they'll gather information and learn from other's mistakes. Fortunately, my friend and colleague Alek recently wrote this post about the benefits of taking one of our Tiny House Collaborative workshops. So in case you're not on the Tiny House Collaborative mailing list, I am cross-posting it here. Enjoy and feel free to respond in the comments. Thanks!"
Here we go again!
On Friday Isha and I rented a truck from one of our landies at Simply Home Community and drove over to Iron Eagle Trailers to pick up our trailer. For those of you who haven't yet built a tiny house, this is the equivalent of a groundbreaking. It's a big deal because getting the trailer to the build site is the very first thing we do to make the build real.
When we arrived at Iron Eagle we were amazed to see how many tiny house trailers there are in the yard right now! Dozens of folks have ordered their trailers and will be picking them up shortly, so it looks like Isha and I will be in good company with our build this summer! Iron Eagle has gotten so backlogged on tiny house trailer orders the past couple years that this winter they actually built a few extra so they'd have them in stock when tiny house build season began. Right now they have a handful of 20' trailers, 24' trailers, and 28' trailers available, so you could pick up a tiny house trailer tomorrow! (Tell Rob I sent ya to get a discount, too!)
We gave our 24' long, 8'5' wide PAD series tiny house trailer the once-over and then signed our paperwork with Mary in the office. Rob helped us get the trailer connected to the truck but we then discovered The Hiccup. (See A Tiny Move for My Tiny House for more about discovering The Hiccup): we realized that we had a 4 prog light connection on the truck and a 7 blade RV style connection on the trailer.
Fortunately, there's a hardware store just a few blocks away that sells the adapter. Unfortunately, they were sold out of have the adapter we needed. Fortunately, Isha was able to figure out which parts we could use to piece it together and when he handed them to Rob, Rob said "Okay, just give me a moment!" Rob came back less than 5 minutes later with a Frankensteined contraption that worked perfectly to connect the truck lights to the trailer lights.
And we were off! We swung by Winroc SPI (AKA Paragon Pacific) to pick up the insulation for our floor system. It was raining by then (of course! thank you, Murphy!) but we managed to get our insulation strapped down to the trailer (and our eyes peeled for rainbows!)
Then Isha and I parted ways for a couple hours. I dashed off to do an on-site consultation for a family exploring the possibility of putting an ADU on their property. Despite the rain, we had a great time talking through their options.
Meanwhile, Isha drove our tiny house trailer down to our build site, Green Anchors, where Matt helped him get oriented to the tiny house cluster. There are 7 tiny houses under construction at Green Anchors right now and one other bare trailer besides ours. Matt says there are at least five more coming. It's so cool to see this exponential growth! The year before I built The Lucky Penny at Green Anchors, there was one tiny house (Nicholette and Mitchell's tiny). The next summer my build buddy Laura Klement and I built our tiny homes side-by-side. Last summer there were a handful of tinies constructed at Green Anchors. And this year there will likely be a couple dozen. Woohoo!
Friday evening Isha and I reconnected at Green Anchors to tarp our trailer and get me oriented to site. We celebrated our trailer delivery - and date night - with dinner at Proper Eats. Today we'll be getting ourselves set up on site in preparation for tomorrow's T42 Build Blitz.
And so it begins! (If you'd like to help out with our build, please let us know when you can join us!)
It was a pleasure to have a chat a couple months ago with Sierra Dickey '15, a fellow graduate of Whitman College who wanted to write a story about me and my little house, The Lucky Penny, for an upcoming edition of the Whitman Magazine. Even more exciting, my old friend Matt Zimmerman Banderas '04 who is a very talented photographer, was assigned the job of coming to my tiny house community, Simply Home Community to take photos for the story. The story, called Living on the Green Side, just went live and I'd love to share it with you. Thank you, Sierra and Matt, for helping me share my story and thank you Whitman for the people and experiences you provided that have helped me live this happy little life!
Read Living on the Green Side by clicking this link!
Yesterday, on a gorgeous spring morning, my landie Jake and I rode our bikes down to the Native American Center at PSU to attend the Small Scale Developer Bootcamp hosted by Eli Spevak of Orange Splot, LLC and John and Jim from Incremental Development Alliance. These three incredible people teamed up after meeting at an event last year. Eli told Jim and John that Portland has lots of people eager to make our neighborhoods better places through creative, community-oriented small scale projects. They scheduled a one-day bootcamp for the summer of 2016. But as more and more people contacted Eli with questions over the winter, he realized the demand for this information was even greater than anticipated, so he convinced John and Jim to bump the training up. They agreed and had the opportunity to present to a sold-out crowd of more than 100 people yesterday!
The event actually kicked off on Tuesday evening with a set of presentations by small scale developers at The Zipper, a fun new food court with local independent restaurants created by Kevin Kavanaugh of Guerrilla Development. It was fascinating hearing about all the small-scale residential, live-work, incubator, and mixed-use spaces that have been created. A special focus of the bootcamp was missing middle housing, a term coined by Daniel Parolek to describe the mid-density housing that most American cities quit building many years ago and now sorely lack. Daniel was there for the bootcamp to describe missing middle housing - you know, like fourplexes, garden apartments, rowhomes - and its role in our urban fabric.
Yesterday the ten sessions included topics like:
It was heartening to see so many people in Portland eager to learn about how they can play a part in making better neighborhoods by filling the gaps in our urban fabric with missing middle housing and small mixed-use projects. It was also fun to recognize so many faces in the room and meet new people. I'm glad I was able to participate and I look forward to seeing what happens in Portland over the next couple years as a result of the Small Developer Bootcamp!
