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!