Dream Tiny

People dream. It’s one thing that we all have in common. We dream of winning the lottery. Dream of quitting work. Dream of living life to the fullest and wasting none of the time we have here.

I’ve always taken the approach of doing pretty much whatever my heart felt like at the time. Road tripping through my 20’s and 30’s. I’ve sacrificed having multitudes of money for having multitudes of time. It was easy for me. It was just me and whatever buddy that was willing to go along. Amanda spent her 20’s earning degrees – including a Masters and now a PhD(!) – and on any school break, she travelled much of the world. While she’s been to 20 different countries, she has not really explored much of this one.

Amanda and I met in the CA desert town of Joshua Tree, just outside of the amazing Joshua Tree National Park. An inspiring place that we had both been coming to for many years but had never met until mutual friends introduced us. We hit it off instantly and fed off of each others thirst for adventure and road trips.

After one of our longer road trips all over the great American west, we asked ourselves, “why not”? Why not live life on the road. We made a very ill informed and spontaneous decision to just do it. It was easy… to make the decision that is. Then came the realization that we had to actually do things in order for this to happen. But what?! We clearly couldn’t afford to pay rent on two houses (in Pasadena and Venice) while we were gone, so, we decided to take a house with us on the road. We had toyed with the idea of buying a used RV, but, decided pretty quickly that it would be much more fun to build our own tiny house on wheels. I had been following the tiny house movement for many years, and I turned Amanda onto it after we met.

I’ve pretty much always lived a bit of a minimalist life so it was pretty easy for me to pack up and clear out my house. Amanda, on the other hand, had more downsizing to do. Any minimalist would have been impressed with how she handled that – donating and selling nearly all of her possessions. We bought a diesel pickup truck, and loaded up all of our possessions into the bed. We took out the backseat so that Buckley, our dog, had a cozy place to hang out while on the road (he really likes road trips!).

Amanda’s sister lives on a 36 acre farm in Missouri and offered to let us live in her guest house for free and build the the tiny house in the hay barn (to protect it, and me, from the harsh sun and summer rains). We jumped at this idea! First of all, free rent (thanks, Val!!)! But, more importantly, the guest house is attached to a fully functioning 20’ x 50’ workshop that contains all of their dad’s tools. What better place to build a tiny house?

So, here we are – living on a farm in Missouri, turning our dream into a reality. This blog is an attempt to share the adventure with you and maybe even inspire some people to make such questionable life decisions as we have. We would love if you keep reading…

-Anderson, Amanda, & Buckley the dog