...The End...sort of.

I suppose I've been avoiding writing this post for awhile now, perhaps for fear of disappointing all of you lovely readers or aspiring Airstream-ers. But in any case, I feel obligated to provide the update that we are no longer living in our Airstream! For us, this is a happy occasion because after three years in Blue Moon, we were finally able to purchase a home. We knew that Airstream-living wouldn't be forever, but it feels funny to close that chapter on our lives. It has been strange moving into someplace so conventional after over a decade of renting, traveling, changing jobs, Airstream-ing etc. Trying to fill a much larger space without owning enough stuff to do so, literally. I don't like the term "settling down," but we are definitely nesting, which is fun. Our new house is really a dream come true!

What has been the fate of our beloved Blue Moon you ask? Well, this summer she was home to another couple who rented her while they worked seasonal jobs here on the island. Neither of us are ready to part with our Airstream, so she'll probably come back to us this fall and you may find us sitting out there some morning with the little fireplace on, lounging on our homemade couch and drinking our tea. Just for old times sake. There's a part of me that wishes we could just go on forever living in our Airstream. But a bigger part of me loves having our new space, room for family and friends to visit, and our own big yard to garden and play with the dogs in (we got another dog!)

Clearly Blue Moon's journey isn't over, so while this blog may see less updates, she'll still be around :-) and we'll probably still be tinkering with her! We have gotten so many emails and messages over the years from readers with questions about Airstream renovations, and I am still so inspired by others aiming to live out their tiny living dreams - do it!! It's worth it!!!
Signing off,
H & J, and Agnes

Blue Moon Gets a Closet

Daffodils are blooming, the temps are warming and...we're back to full-time Airstreaming! Although we both had mixed feelings about moving back into Blue Moon that ranged from "yay tiny living!" to "we're 30 and still don't know wtf we're we doing with our lives,"  - but after a few weeks of getting settled in, we're all smiles again. Last fall we tried to by a "real" house - a fixer-upper - and it didn't work out, so in our minds we thought we'd find another house to buy before this spring, but island real estate ain't cheap, so the months passed and we found ourselves heading back up to our mountain-top Airstream abode again. We decided to embrace this tiny aluminum home we own for now, and we jumped in to projects!

We're addicted to creating more storage solutions since we built the medicine cabinet (click to read about it) a few months ago. We've been debating what to do with the empty space where our composting toilet was originally installed (we sold our Nature's Head composting toilet to some other Airstream-ers after deciding we would just use the shower/bathroom/laundry facilities located on the property we're parked on.) I'll humor you with these throw-back photos from our renovation days:

We kept a space heater there for a time as well as our towels. But, the space has mostly ended up being a catch-all for crap. 

So I drew up some plans for a closet to put in as a replacement!

J had recently been working on boats in the Port Townsend shipyard for work and watched a modified tick-sticking technique that the shipwrights use to template the curves of boat hulls when they have to cut new planks. We find ourselves taking inspiration from boats a lot when we work on our Land Yacht. So, to make the template for the closet walls, we got a handy-dandy hot glue gun (dries instantly!) and stuck those little bits of wood onto a squared-up frame.

Onto the plywood it goes for connecting the dots and jig-sawing.

                         

 

sand and poly, repeat.

Putting it all together! We ended up making the closet quite a bit wider than my original drawing, and we love it!


Pretty snazzy stuff :-)

    
I really like how J detailed the clothing rod fixture with hemlock.

    

We finished the whole thing off with a linen curtain and a new dome light over the medicine cabinet to keep things bright. I think now that we're 30, hanging our clothes on hangers is really an adult-like thing to do, so at least we're taking steps in the right direction toward growing up, hehe. 

The other side of the closet does double-duty with hooks and towel rack. My initial design was a skinnier closet that didn't cover any of the window, but when we put the panels up, it just made sense to make it wider. We LOVE the extra space, and neither of us mind the partial window block. It's still an operable window since the crank is on the right side.

We also dug our hometown New Belgium Brewing Accumulation White IPA tacker out of storage and finally riveted into it's permanent home behind our sink :-) 

Happy Spring from our tiny home to yours!

Airstream Medicine Cabinet

We're not living in Blue Moon this winter - a friend had an extra bedroom for rent so we opted for a little bit more space and indoor showers for some time! But, it was a beautiful January weekend, and we couldn't help but head up to the Airstream to work on projects, as we will be moving back to full-time Airstream-ing in a few months. When I initially designed our Airstream remodel, I was adamant about NO upper cabinets - nothing to block the light in such a small space. The original floor-to-ceiling 1960s dark paneling we ripped out of Blue Moon sort of sent me running in the other direction. I knew that meant we would be sacrificing a lot of potential storage that could be up on the walls. So, after a few years of having this mirror leaning up against the wall with toothbrushes and wine glasses stashed behind it, I finally caved and drew up a little design for a medicine cabinet to be mounted to the curved wall, and put it on J's honey-do list.

Above is the setup we've had for awhile now, with a mirror just leaning against the wall.

My design - to include hanging wine glass storage of course!

Essential to all Airstream construction is templating for those pesky curved walls; bring in the cardboard.

J built the cabinet out of pine. He's chiseling out a pocket to inset the door hinges.

The most important part: making sure the wine glasses will fit! We got some inexpensive hanging wine glass wood-moldings and cut them to fit under the cabinet.

Up it goes - riveted to the wall with brackets

Pretty nice! We're gaining countertop space as well as another cabinet!

The mirror features aspen trees painted and carved onto the frame -- it was handmade by a friend in Colorado

Projects like these on a sunny January day make us excited to move back to Blue Moon :-)

Our First House

Another summer of Island Airstream Living has come to a close! Fall is here, bringing with it full harvests, beautiful colors, that amber light that I can't get enough of, and the warmth of campfires now that the dry season's burn ban is gone. I never thought that J and I would call our little Blue Moon home for two and a half years, but home it's been.

In the last few years I have heard so much buzz regarding the tiny house movement and downsizing. I've enjoyed meeting others who are living small and supporting our friends who made the leap also. No, all of our stuff doesn't fit in our Airstream; we have a shed with all of our camping stuff, bicycles, and some collected artwork for the non-curved walls of a "someday" home. But we're comfortable with our amount of Stuff, and I've realized that quantifying what we own and collect is only a very small part of Tiny Living. For me and many others I know, Tiny Living is about getting more time outside because your house is small, achieving financial freedom because you own your own affordable home, and getting to spend more energy/money/time on good food and visiting the people and places that mean the most to you. I love run-on sentences.

That doesn't mean I don't drool over gorgeous architecture, great design, and fancy furniture. In fact, I value those things even more because of their power to create excellent living spaces for people. Living small has made me realize that everything has a value - most importantly, my time. Big spaces often require bigger incomes to sustain them, requiring more hours at work, more hours cleaning and more more more. Tiny living is all of those things, but on a smaller scale. No, Tiny Living isn't free, but it does cost less to heat a small home, to clean and maintain a small home, and buy or build a small home. Living in an Airstream or a cute cabin on wheels isn't everyone's solution to time or money problems, but shrinking your footprint can be a great place to start if you are feeling like life has you spread too thin.

Looking back, moving into the Airstream was J and I admitting that we weren't making it financially. We had some debt to deal with, and island rent isn't cheap. We needed to see a light at the end of the tunnel, so we put the word out to craigslist, and Blue Moon found us. The costs of remodeling the Airstream paid for themselves in one summer of living in it, and more importantly, we felt the financial strain ease off immediately.

The colder weather is coming, and we feel lucky to have options for winter housing if we need them, but for now, here's to you Blue Moon, for being our First House.

Table for Two

We've been pretty happy with the floorplan and layout we decided on when designing our Airstream, however there's one thing that we have been missing; a table for two! We have the one-seater bar at the end of the counter which is used heavily by moi when supervising J while he's doing his chef thing. But, when it comes time for both of us to take a seat, we just head to our couch. Eating on the couch can be tricky, especially when you have to find a place to put your wine glass when someone says "can you pass the salt please." We'd been tossing around the idea of adding a fold-down/flip-up bar to the original bar area to make room for two people to sit. We had a chunk of our birch countertop leftover from cutting out the insert for our stove. So, J cut it to size for our bar addition and I sanded it and finished it.

The hardest part of this project was finding the right hardware to hold up the bar! I had a hard time describing to Google what I was looking for: slide-out countertop hardware? fold-down counter bracket? floating shelf hardware? Drop-leaf table support? (Now we're getting somewhere). Drop-leaf table support for table with no apron? BINGO! Yes, that is apparently more or less what we made: a drop-leaf table extension with no apron - no vertical surface to mount a bracket on. Whew, so that narrowed our hardware choices a lot, given that our "drop-leaf" was kind of large; cantilevering some 21 inches into space, and kind of heavy: 1.5" thick-slab of solid birch wood. No puny hardware for us.

Here's what we ended up with - a pair of drop leaf table
supports made by Rockler, specifically for "larger loads."

Just pull those two black tabs and the counter folds down.

J finishes up installing the fancy hardware. This is what the bar looks like when it's not in use. 

Seating for two! We got a folding bar stool from Ikea that stashes away against the wall when not in use.

We are very happy with our little seating area. The counter is super sturdy (I was skeptical), and has no problem handling dinner, elbows, or our aging hefty laptop.

Also, our hardware came with the latest and greatest Rockler catalog, which we proceeded to fight over who got to drool on it first. I think that it is possibly a bad sign when the best thing that came in the mail is the hardware catalog...? But they have so much cool stuff!!

Airstream Life Hacks

Silly hardware company! This only works if
your walls are vertical!

If you have ever moved into a house that is 50 years old or older, you may know some of the trials we've gone through. Like that moment where you realize that owner #2 (or #3?) must have wired one of the light fixtures bass-ackwards, now causing you unending amounts of frustration. Or that because they just did things a little...differently in 1963, your house will never really be exactly the way you would have designed it. People admire Airstreams for their curves. We admire Airstreams for their curves. J and I have a standing joke whenever he is building something for our Airstream and gets frustrated that it isn't coming out quite square - that it doesn't really matter because the Airstream isn't square! But sometimes we really wish it was. Take for example the seemingly simple task of mounting a towel rack you purchase onto your wall. Screw it in and done, right? Not so in the Airstream! Of course I had to order a towel rack with swiveling arms so our towels could dry better near our space heater (news flash for our Colorado friends: towels do NOT dry in Washington - bleh). The Airstream walls are not entirely vertical, owing to the fact that they are reaching to meet up with those attractive curvy corners. So, if you hang the towel rack on the slanty wall, the towels will fall off those swiveling arms! So began a lengthy project of yet another one of what I have begun to call Airstream Life Hacks, all for the sake of having dry(er) towels:

Wood shims to "level-out" the towel bars. You can see the way the walls slant inward, eventually curving over into the ceiling. Our TV is in the background, on a swivel mount, so it too can be level.

And in other Airstream Life Hacks, I completed my first-ever DIY Pinterest-inspired crafty household project, and no, it wasn't cupcakes. We have precious few outlets in the Airstream, and they sort of are where they are due to the wiring. When we remodeled, one of our outlets ended up being right above the sink! The need to charge cell phones and other USB devices right there was landing expensive electronics right in the dishes, or creating a tricky system of cords that somehow always got splashed with water. All Hail Pinterest, which can solve this problem! 

           

I made a nifty cell phone charging holder out of an old shampoo container - I know, *gasp* How did I do it!?! Well, let me tell you: unemployment, that's how. Yes, still on the job hunt :-)

I may be a little extra proud of this one, so here's a close up. Commence ooos and ahhs.

We also got a magnetic knife rack (probably should have thought of that a long time ago), and good news: knife racks don't care if your walls are slanted! Yay for magnets! Our pint glass rack does double-duty as the occasional flower vase for our abundant blooming daffodils.

The projects continue: I painted the plywood floor underneath the couch to protect it from moisture damage. There is just no air flow under there, and it is subject to a lot of condensation unfortunately.

And Jacob installed flooring inside our kitchen cabinets. We had some pieces of flooring leftover from our initial installation (read: why didn't we just put flooring in the cabinets then??) that he put together to fit in there. The plywood was absorbing condensation, as you can see in the photo above - not good.

So, with our towels happily drying, our cell phone cords not trying to electrocute us, and our plywood subfloor finally protected, we can once more claim to be successfully continuing to Hack our way through full-time Airstream living.

Home Sweet Home

It's hard to believe, but we're back in our little island Airstream after five months of adventures that included an epic west-coast road trip, the holidays in Colorado, and six weeks in New Zealand. We arrived home about a week ago after a meandering mini road trip from Colorado to Idaho to Washington (with a brief stop in Dillon, Montana at the Patagonia Outlet store...). We made a mental effort to try our best not to be dismayed at the potential state of our Airstream before we got there, just in case the place was covered in hibernating creatures or a tree had crushed it. Ok, that's a little dramatic. Fortunately neither of those two things had occurred, there was just some serious mold and mildew to clean out. Ahhhh Washington, you are wet and wild and things just grow too darn well! Out came the respirators, the bleach (yuck), and the scrubbing began. The worst part was that our countertops, which are unsealed on the under side, seemed to have absorbed moisture and warped, now resembling a boat hull! The sink even busted out of its fitting due to the shift. Oddly enough after a week of cleaning, airing out, and heating the Airstream again, the countertops have actually gone flat again! As the Airstream was pretty much devoid of our stuff, we also took the opportunity to do some polyurethane-ing of our drawers before we moved back in, to prevent future mold-takeovers.

So, we are nearly back to our version of "normal" on our pacific northwest island. The vegetable seeds I started last week indoors are already showing their sprouts! Spring came early to the island, rounding out what everyone here claims to have been a mild winter. Of course, the winter our friends finally decide to stay on the island and the weather is half-way decent is the winter we decide to go vagabonding! But that is neither here nor there as J and I have zero regrets about the last five months. New Zealand was a really special adventure for us, and we had so many unforgettable moments there. We met some wonderfully generous and kind people during our trip and saw so much of the diverse landscape that is NZ.

J is already back at work and I'm on the job hunt, soaking up the spring sunshine and organizing Airstream life in the meantime. Even though it's still spring, here's a toast to summer #3 in Blue Moon the Airstream!

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!