Let’s start at the very beginning…a very good place to start. It seems that everywhere you go these days, people are talking about Tiny Houses And there is no doubt about it, they are fascinating.

I am rapidly becoming an authority on Tiny Houses…not by reading or watching House Hunters, but by doing. I, with the connivance of some outstanding friends, am walking the walk and talking the talk.

I am living in my own Tiny House. Admittedly the T.H. is not quite ready for me yet, and I, I don’t hesitate to tell you, am not yet ready for it.. but I have moved in – ready or not!

First things first. You need a place to PUT the Tiny House and that can be touchy. States have all kinds of reservations about the best way to regulate them…Learn them BEFORE you buy one.

If you are exceedingly lucky, and sometimes I am, you will find that you have a collection of amazing friends and family who are willing to work their collective butts off to put things to right.

David Traub and Jay Winger have been on my BMF list for a lot of years, and man did they ever step up for this! I’m now sharing hearth and home!

My collective family joyfully accepted the offer of wildly practical help and began the actual work of choosing the size and style of home we wanted.

You want to know about Tiny Houses? I’ll tell you about Tiny Houses.

They are VERY small!

More than that, they are GREAT disciplinarians, and I feel that every young person, starting out on his/her own, should take a course in how to live in one.

What it comes down to is this: There are two ways to deal with everything. You either put it where it is assigned, or you throw it out. There is no room for your casual “Oh, I’ll put that away later.”

Unless you learn that lesson early on, you will never accomplish happy living in a Tiny House. A thing goes where it is supposed to go or it is taking up space assigned to something else.

People who have actually LIVED on a boat, tell me that Tiny House living is like that. If you have three people living on a boat, you don’t take on four forks for example. You only need three. And you don’t buy anything new unless you plan to throw something out.

I hear you howl and I feel your pain. But you haven’t learned about Tiny House pain until you discover the kind you get from hitting your head on a cabinet you’ve hung too close to the floor – or the sink – or perhaps, the bathroom facilities.

For reasons totally aesthetic – meaning not practical – I hung the medicine chest right opposite the toilet.

DON’T DO THAT!

Every other time I got up I banged my head, I had a bad headache all the time! Practicality finally won out. But let me win that battle for you. FACT: Your head is more important than aesthetics.

Here’s another bit of information you will need – everything is also something else.   Prize example? Your dining table. That is also your desk and your prep surface. So when you finally decide that you are capable of feeding two friends at dinner at one time, you must first clear off the computer which resides rather smugly on the table. My large screen computer lost an uneven battle with a laptop simply because it took up too much room – and required a large, separate keyboard.

Daughter Celia, who is the expert on Tiny Houses, due to her stint as a field producer on Tiny House Hunters, tells me that the secret for success in Tiny House Living consists in large part in your ability to work the outside into your plans. To that end, she is shopping the internet for ways to store some of my larger cooking utensils in the garden without calling attention to them.   That means things like the Foreman Grille and the “cooks everything” electric pressure cooker and the juicer and the blender and…well, all the gadgetry you couldn’t resist and must now find a home or be put up on Craig’s list.

One of the wonderful things about Tiny House Living is that the American marketplace is ready for you. Stores are devoting entire sections to all kinds of wonderfully imaginative items that will simplify your life. For the first time in my life, I have made a plan to go to IKEA.

Lisa, a former neighbor and a friend, tells me IKEA has room after room already made up to help get the best, most efficient use of a Tiny House. Tomorrow, we will go check that out.

Meanwhile, there must be something like 25 boxes still sitting around the house, taking up space that isn’t there,

I am attacking the problem mentally, and thus far all that has accomplished is another headache. Somebody pass the aspirin.

Where there is this kind of activity, there must be pictures. So here are just a few. At least one before I moved in and a few several days later. Progress has been made – just not enough.

Next month a complete unveiling…I hope. Trust. Think. Come on. It COULD happen.