“How would it feel to live so light?”: An Excerpt from The Big Tiny

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Dee Williams has inspired tiny house builders across the world, but where did her own inspiration come from? Find out below, in the first of a series of excerpts we’re sharing from her forthcoming memoir, The Big Tiny, due out April 22! In this excerpt, Dee explains her first exposure to tiny homes: in a magazine she read in a hospital waiting room, while waiting for a check up on her recently-diagnosed heart condition:

“I came across an article about a guy who’d built a tiny house on wheels, a house smaller than my garage, smaller than a parking spot. It looked like a cabin that would be used in a commercial for pancake batter, or in a painting titled A Simpler Time.

The article indicated that the owner had built the house himself, a fact that caused me to pull the magazine closer so I could examine the guy’s arms. To my surprise, they didn’t appear to be overly manly or even any stronger than my own. The article went on to explain that he had built the little house and then moved it to a spot behind his bigger, 1,200-square-foot house, tucking it near a low fence and scrub oak tree.

I was curious about Tiny House Man. Apparently, he rented out the big house and lived “for free” in the backyard, while his renters paid the mortgage and utilities. No bills. No overwhelming debt. A house the size of a Tic Tac to clean…

I just stared at it, mulled it over, daydreamed, and then thought: What would happen if I just . . . sort of . . . did that?

What if I sold my big house with its rats in the front yard, the mortgage, the hours of dusting, mopping, cleaning, vacuuming, painting, grass cutting and yard pruning? How would it feel to live so light?

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I wasn’t sure why I was so drawn to the photo, but the best I could figure was that it reminded me of everything I’d wanted as an eight-year-old. As a kid, I’d have been happy living in a tree stump or a tree house, or even in the scratchy little caves that my brothers and I carved out of the blackberry bushes along the fence line of our farm. The point was that I’d have a place of my own where I could hide from my chores or my family, where I could cry my eyes out if I needed to and make sense of the world by viewing it through a tiny spyhole. I had big plans for myself: I’d live in the woods and learn to speak to the chipmunks and squirrels. I’d spend my time examining the small bones and rocks found in the nearby creekbed. I’d make “sit-upons,” leafy sort of seat cushions, just like we did in Girl Scouts, and whittle tiny stick figures for my mother, hoping to make up for running away. I’d do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted and in the end, all the woodland creatures would love me (like the birds, bunnies, and mice who loved Cinderella).

That was my dream life, so perhaps you can understand why the idea of building a tiny wooden house would click for me. Plus, building a house would be fun!

Then there was another voice. The idea of living in a tiny wood house appealed to my inner eight-year-old, but what kind of adult does that? I wondered if Tiny House Man was happy; if he had good friends who would come over for dinner despite the cramped quarters, if they packed themselves into the living room (which was also the kitchen and bathroom), where they’d balance their dinner plates on their laps and play mini Scrabble with tiles the size of their teeth. I wondered if he had lumps on his head from sitting up in the night and smashing into the ceiling. Was Tiny House Man dogged by his decision to live so small, perhaps shunned by his neighbors, who secretly joked about his house; or did people love that he had downsized himself into the equivalent of a toolshed? I wondered what kind of man would choose to live in a house that small when he obviously had other options. He didn’t live in Ireland, where a person might build a little Hobbit hut and live happy as a clam. This wasn’t Mongolia, Africa, South America, or China, where people regularly lived in houses that were big enough to keep the rain off your head and not much more; this was America, where everything is BIG.

…Ultimately I hoped the tiny-house guy was similar to me: a sane person without a big agenda, who simply wanted a way to make sense of the world, to create a new map with a big X in the middle labeled “Home,” even if that meant shrinking his world down to the size of an area rug.”

Visit The Big Tiny page to read more excerpts and order the book!

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