Into the Future!

A little update from the road - don't worry, we are still alive :-) we wrapped up an epic 30-day road trip some time ago in our trusty van. We saw so many beautiful west coast scenes like this one from a stretch of Hwy 101 in Oregon - so magical. We also made it to the desert and the Grand Canyon before landing in Colorado!

Life in the van was simple- not too unlike our life back home in the Airstream. We lost track of days pretty quickly, and there was even an entire night where we didn't know exactly which state we were sleeping in. Ahh, the luxuries that only life on the road can bring :-). But eventually we started craving a real bed and indoor heat, especially as we crept toward our childhood hometown and our families. 

We spent the holidays with our loved ones, and Agnes enjoyed stretching out in a real house after life in the van. And now...we are headed into the future!! Seriously, they are already a day ahead of us in New Zealand, so we are taking that time-warping flight to see what's going on in the 'morrow land, kiwi-style. We'll give you a full report from the future. Until then, Happy new year!

A Tiny House Goes Home

There was much to celebrate last weekend on Bainbridge Island, where our friends are forging their own tiny house adventure! It doesn't seem like so long ago that Meghan and Christian bought a flat-bed trailer and started framing out a tiny cabin on wheels in hopes that they would someday move in and live small. They are nearly done putting the finishing touches on their home and the time came to hitch it up to a big truck and haul it down the road to it's new home. I joined several of their friends to offer moral support and take pictures :). Having suffered through my own anxiety about hauling the Airstream for the first time, I knew a little about what they were going through! But, their house weighs about three times as much as our Airstream, and is quite a bit taller -- so I'd say they had a much bigger challenge on their hands! 

First, we drove the route and measured for low-hanging branches that might hit the tiny house. There was a bit of branch trimming to be done. We also measured the power lines! Fortunately we didn't have to cut any of those...

Then everyone got distracted for an hour or so by the massive amounts of apples just dripping from the trees and the fact that this cider press was just sitting there, so everyone started picking fruit and pressed a gazillion gallons of cider!

Time to get serious! The house was hitched up and they were on the road. I am always amazed and what big trucks can do. A serious hill up a gravel road was the first part of the drive this rig had to tackle, and aside from the stress on the driver (Christian), it went up no problem! Freddy (in green above), set up a Go Pro camera on the truck and made a fun video of the move if you want to see more!

Flowers, apples, and champagne. All you need to move a tiny house!
(Plus one big-a** truck!)

And friends, of course!

And because this is an Airstream blog,  here's the tiny shiny coffee trailer I found comfort in at the Bainbridge Harvest Fair the next day :)

Goodbye Summer, Hello Big Adventures

It took us nearly all summer to get the party lights up, but we did get them plugged in just before Fall began, and we did have a party!

Some big changes are coming up for the Blue Moon residents. J, myself, and the furball Agnes are packing up and going adventuring for awhile! We've decided it's time for some travel, so in just a few weeks we'll be climbing into our trusty van and beginning a long road trip. I know it would be way more awesome and blog-worthy if we were hitching up our Airstream to Trusty Van and taking it with us, but in truth, we are light travelers, and we don't need to take our tin can home with us. The van will be our even tiny-er home on our road trip. We're planning on about five months - part of that time we'll be in New Zealand! Blue Moon will be here waiting for us on our island when we return to living in it in the spring. Here's some pictures from the end of a beautiful Airstream summer, and a nod to what's ahead for us...

Partying Airstream - style with other tiny house friends - all of them are nearly done with their own Tumbleweed Tiny Houses! Sorry you got the floor Andrew :-/

New Airstream resident (outdoors)

I have pretty strict standards for what counts as a Beach Day. You have to actually lie down on the beach and relax. Walking the dog on the beach doesn't count, and driving by for a quick look at the beach does not count. So, 12 is maybe not quite as many beach days as we had hoped for this summer, but as J puts it, "That's nearly two weeks of just lying on the beach!"

Savoring Summer's last blooms from Lopez Island

Mmm Peach Cobbler in the cast-iron skillet

Full Disclosure Time: So, it's time to face some behind-the-scenes of the blog realities. The first of which is that we have this room full of stuff (it's like our "shed" of sorts). We have done a TON of downsizing over the last two years - just yesterday we took another sizable load to the thrift store. We're not big purchasers either, but we do own a lot of toys. You know, like two complete sets of kayaking garb (one for each of us), two complete sets of ski gear, a whole bunch of rock climbing equipment, camping gear, spare bicycle parts...you get the picture. These of course are things that adventurers cannot part with, and some of them will last a lifetime. Another reality is that almost all of the stuff pictured here would actually fit in the storage we designed under our bed and under our couch, and that's where it started out, but...in the winter we started to see mildew growing on our stuff that we put under there :(

So, as adventure awaits us we'll be sorting, packing, re-sorting and organizing all of this gear and deciding what to take. Skiing in Colorado and surfing in New Zealand, down coats and swimsuits! It's taken me awhile to stop stressing about this big change, the unknown future, and the open-ended-ness of it all, but i'm coming around :)

You may not see very many Airstream-related posts over the next five months - or very many posts at all depending on how much fun we're having! But have no fear, the Blue Moon Chronicle will carry on in some form or another, and if nothing else, come spring of 2015 we'll be back to all-things-Airstream!

Airstream Skylights

There is definitely a Fall breeze in the air. I love the changing of the seasons, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't sad that summer is ending. It's been a quick one! As August comes to a close, we decided to tick a few more things off the Airstream list. Now that all of the essential projects are done, it's actually a lot more fun to accomplish things on our little aluminum home because there's no pressure to get them done. But when our Airstream's skylights arrived the other day (that's right, SKYLIGHTS!!) we didn't wait more than a day to put them in!

60's Airstreams like ours came with 3 roof vent covers that could be propped open. The raising and lowering mechanism on all of ours must have long ago stopped working because they have been held on with duct tape ever since we bought it. We just never took the tape off and they never leaked (why mess with a good thing, right?) The photo above shows two of ours- they were kind of gross looking. Ever since I read about Moonraker's new skylights, I have been totally envying them, and wanting to replace our vent covers with them. We finally pulled the trigger and bought custom Maxim Airstream skylights! Wowzer, are they well-made! I told Jacob I think they are the most durable thing on our Airstream. We sent Maxim photos and dimensions and they were very helpful. Here's how it went...

Goodbye dark...

Hello light!

The view from up top. I am standing through our first skylight, and you can see the other two old roof vent covers (also a lot of pine cone debris!)

Ah, we just love to put holes in the roof of our Airstream. The new skylights do not open and close, but after a year of living with the roof vents permanently closed, we realized that is not really all that important to us.

These puppies are worth every penny, mmm mmm!

Morgan arrived just in time to verify that there are in fact 3 skylights :)

J putting the last one on. 

We are really enjoying the extra ambient light that comes in through them- it will be awesome in the more gray months, for sure. It's also fun to walk by the Airstream at night because when the lights are on inside, they glow through the three domes on the roof now!

In other news, while Morgan and I traveled to the big city for her Birthday Brunch and Baseball game, J surprised me by taking on a project we kept wanting to do but never got around to; refinishing our Beechwood countertops. After a year of heavy use, our countertops are still awesome, but without some kind of sealant they are just absorbing moisture and stain way too easily. We went back and forth for quite awhile about what to put on them for some kind of permanent protection and finally settled on polyurethane (we don't ever cut food right on our countertops). Obviously that requires sanding and some stinky-ness from the finish. So J cleared our countertops, covered up the essentials and went to work sanding and sealing.

Glistening with polyurethane. He and the dog apparently had a little campout and slept outside that night so as not to inhale fumes. Well, J slept, and Agnes took to protecting the grounds by chasing off deer and staying on alert most of the night. She slept pretty well the next day...

The countertops do look lovely and any hesitations I had about sealing them in with polyurethane are gone. We are pretty hard on our surfaces - things are always spilling, there's always a meal being cooked, and without a dishwasher, there's nearly always washing going on. It's so nice to just see the water bead up and be able to wipe away the stain from a runaway strawberry without leaving a permanent pink spot on the counter.

Well, we're off to go enjoy what's left of the crabbing season! 

A Year in an Airstream

It's hard to believe it's been a year since we downsized our life and hauled our aluminum home up a mountain to live in. We did it to stop paying rent, save money, and to own the roof over our heads for the first time in our lives. Looking back, this year has been full of challenges, from power outages and frozen pipes, to losing our wonderful canine companion, Maggie. I could never have predicted all the little bumps in the road that this year would present us with. But I've learned that whether your house is tiny or large, things still break and need to be fixed, the roof may spring a leak, and life unfolds generally the same. We said we'd live in the Airstream as long as we were happy doing so, and while winter tested us to that motto, we came through the other side and are enjoying the rewards of another beautiful island summer in our tiny home. It's easy to forget the tears I cried when the first winter rainstorms hit the island in October and our roof leaked right onto our bed at 3am, or when the pipes froze, the propane ran out, Maggie got sick, the driveway got snowed in, Jacob was away... But it's also so easy to just remember the good times – baking for the first time in our Airstream oven, the sound of our first night of summer rain on a tin roof, and the moment when we realized that the Airstream was pretty much “done” and we didn't have to work on it all-weekend-every-weekend anymore.

I've noticed I spend a lot more time outside because of living in a smaller space. I want to go running or take the dog for a walk more often, which is good for all involved. We still have people over all the time – small space is no excuse not to entertain. We are honored by all the compliments we've received when people visit our Airstream and leave saying how inspired they are. I feel lucky. Lucky to have lived another adventure (remember when we lived in that Airstream on that island??) that will surely become another story worth telling.

We've been asked by many people how much money we've put into our Airstream. Including the purchase price of $2,000, we've invested a total of $6,000 over the course of the year and a half we've owned Blue Moon. Of course that includes hundreds of hours of free labor by ourselves and some key friends and family! That came out to an average of about $150 per month that Jacob and I each contributed to making Blue livable again, which is about all the extra cash we had each month at the time when we were still paying high rent, and had a lot of debt. Living in the Airstream this past year has changed that, and for the first time in our lives, I think we both feel financially free – something I wasn't sure we'd ever feel! Making the big change to give up our wonderful beach side rental house, downsize to only owning one car (ride your bike!), and generally focus on what's possible was very scary at first, but now going back to a mortgage payment or buying a new car is almost scarier. We won't live in our little aluminum home forever, but I know we'll never regret this adventurous year, and we'll take so many lessons learned from living Small, even if someday we end up living Bigger.

At the moment the future is uncertain what's in store for us beyond September, but one thing is for sure, we'll always be hitched to Blue Moon.

This year of tiny living, and the previous near-year of remodeling would not have been possible without the love and support and helping hands from so many people, and we want to thank a few of them here...Michael, Diane (mom), Morgan, Andrew, Jim Lawrence, ...and of course, all the people who we know and those we don't who read this blog! Documenting our adventure here has been a way to measure our own progress when we needed to see it to keep us going, and your encouragement has let us know we we're doing OK even when our motivation was low and Blue was still full of mouse poop. So, keep reading, you (and we) never know what will happen next in the Blue Moon Airstream Chronicle...

Tiny House Friends

We recently took a trip over to Bainbridge Island to go check on our friends, Meghan and Christian (in green/blue below). They have been pretty busy this winter building their own Tiny House on wheels! It was pretty exciting to see their house nearing completion. The trip turned into a bit of an island reunion and SJI-ers came all the way from Oregon to meet up there for the weekend, including Andrew! Andrew (with pups below) also just started in on his own Tiny House, and I am beginning to think a)we must be a bad influence on our friends, b)we're all crazy, and/or c)soon we'll all be living on a large piece of property parked side by side - yay! :)

How many people (and dogs) can you fit in a tiny house?

I'm so inspired by our friends intentionally embarking on these challenging projects --we all have our own reasons for having done so-- but what a neat thing to create one's own home. These folks are digitally chronicling their experiences as well and if you're bored at work I recommend checking out their blogs: Meghan and Christian: Does this come in small and Andrew: La Cabañita Chiquita.

In other news, we made these groovy rounded corner shelves to go on the far side of the bed. The coolest thing about them is that they are removeable! The whole unit can be un-clasped and lifted off to provide more room to work down there (all of our wiring/converter etc is housed underneath this one), but at the same time sort of covers up all that stuff when we don't want to look at it.

We also removed the (brokenFallingApartBecauseI'veHadItSinceDormDays) floor lamp that used to be in that corner and replaced it with a nice wall-mounted sconce that is original 1963 from our Airstream! I know, it's amazing, we managed to not break it all this time in storage and we finally installed it.

Before:

After:

Oh yeah, we got a new duvet cover, and much to J's dismay, more fluffy pillows! Wohoo! And believe me, I'm not trying to trick you by taking the Before photo at night and the After photo during the day -- it really feels so much brighter back there with the light-colors and the new bright light.

Rocky the bear still rules the bed

Also, if this post wasn't exciting enough for you, here's J in his new gnome sweater :)

Now if that doesn't just make your day, I don't know what will!

Spring Light

It's hard for me to believe we made it through the winter in our Airstream, but the daffodils outside are living proof, literally! We've officially entered spring, and I couldn't be happier to say farewell to frosty nights, frozen pipes and the four letter word that starts with the big R (rain). While there are still many wet days to come, I'm sure, spring comes with such relief that the long nights of winter are truly over. September doesn't seem so long ago when we were pondering whether or not we would be able to maintain our sanity living in 180 square feet throughout an island winter. With some help from friends during the cold spells, a handful of vacations when we needed to get away, and more than a few bottles of wine, we came through all right. 

Sunny spring days turn into beautiful west side sunsets at the lighthouse.

First daffodils harvested! LOTS of joy!

We also finally got around to ordering some 12v lights and installing them. The idea behind keeping our wiring 12v was to have overall less draw and someday have a rooftop solar panel setup on the Airstream. But somewhere in this whole project, the lighting situation got too complicated and we threw our hands up in the air, capped all the wires sticking out of the wall, just got two floor lamps and plugged them into our outlets. Mid-winter we decided to tackle the lighting saga again and spent a ridiculous amount of time poking around Amazon searching for 12v track lighting that we liked. We finally ordered some and they got lost for 35 days with FedEx. When we finally tracked them down, to our dismay we discovered we'd somehow ordered regular household voltage lights, not 12v --- arrrgh! So we threw our hands up in the air again, returned the lights, and settled back in to life with our floor lamps. The kitchen sink was still a very dark corner (therefore I was not responsible if there were still food chunks on dishes after I cleaned them), and J was always moving his bedside reading lamp over to the kitchen counter top to have better lighting for food prep. The only light we ordered that ended up working out was a cheap, 12v task-style light with a switch on it that we had gotten for my side of the bed so I could read. 

 

So we decided to just order a few more of those and be done with it! J wired them into the kitchen area on Saturday!

I got one over the sink (yay!!!! and also ewwww I need to clean the sink now that I can see all the grime in it...)

And J got one right over his chef prep area and the stove. Seriously, once you get light, there's no going back to living in the dark. We got rid of one floor lamp and it feels like a lot less clutter. I was worried about having all the lights be on their own switches instead of being able to flip one switch and have them all come on. But I actually like having the option to turn each light on or off, especially since we don't have any dividing walls in the Airstream. It's nice to keep the lights off at the sleeping end of the trailer if you're just hanging out on the couch reading, or if one of us is still asleep back there (that would be me). 

My favorite new Airstream addition is this chalkboard/mail holder/key and coat rack thingy. I ordered it on etsy from The Wooden Attic, and it's awesome! Current chalk art above is by J. I've learned you can never have too many hooks in the Airstream. There are also slots on top of the chalkboard that hold mail, DVDs, pens and of course, the chalk! Fun to write messages on and free's up our counter from piles of mail, keys, hats, whatever :)

Some spring days are still quite gray. But Agnes doesn't care what the weather, it's always a great day to be at the beach in her mind. Thank you for all of the kind words, phone calls, and emails when we lost Maggie. She will always be in our hearts. We are able to smile and laugh now when we think of her and it hurts less. Agnes is our fur-ball of good times - she has been always been good at that, so thank goodness for her! Here's hoping spring reaches you soon, wherever you are.