...movable havens for the chemically sensitive.
This site is a continuation of the "Safe House Project" pages at my other website, www.otterishly.com, which describes the process of building mobile, chemically inert houses for chemically sensitive individuals (such as myself). The house pictured below is being built as one of two that are designed to function in tandem as one complete house. This house, which at eight by twenty feet is the slightly smaller of the two, is the bedroom/closet/study. The other unit will comprise the living room, dining room, kitchen, and bathroom. For more information about the inspiration behind the houses, the construction processes and materials used, pictures of the larger unit, etc., please check the other site, www.otterishly.com .  The photo above shows the smaller house (which is
much further along in the building process) in transit earlier this
year. It won't be white, but rather a medium green lap siding with
cedar-colored shakes on the gable ends--the siding is not on yet in the
photo. Here's a crude photo-shopped version of what it will look like with siding:
 (And here's how it finally, actually turned out:)  27 August 2009 Though the house isn't entirely finished, we did make a whole lot of headway lately, so I thought perhaps it was
Time for a Tour:
Enter through the French doors. (Or should I say, "Entrez-vous"?) To your left
is the red wall (the walls are covered with American Clay plaster), and a futon couch that pulls out into a bed. (That's me on the couch, and roughly half of the topsoil of central Oregon on my feet!) The
space was designed to accommodate a queen-size bed that would be oriented
perpendicular to the direction the futon is currently placed, with nightstands under the lamps and an aisle on either side of the bed for easy access. I still
plan to use it that way; however, until the companion unit, which
houses living room, kitchen and dining room is completed, this bedroom will be serving triple duty as bedroom, living room and dining room. So
for now, the convertible futon suits my purposes better than a dedicated bed.
As
you sit on the couch, you face the green wall, pictured below. The picture frame to the right of the door (hi, Petey!) covers the 110 breaker box, and is hinged to allow easy access. (The house is wired with
separate 110- and 12-volt systems. The 12 volt system is currently powered by a 51-watt panel and a couple of batteries that are on loan from the generous Mike Hippenhammer. The lamps near the bed are 12 volt,
so that the 110 can conveniently be turned off at night.)
Above the door is a mediation nook, just two feet deep. It will be accessed via either a pull-down rope ladder, or climbing holds attached to the door frame. Still deciding. Or, er, meditating upon it. ;-)  The path of pebbles and slate leaves that winds through the house and out onto the porch has yet to be finished. (You can see where I started it on the right, near the door. I'm waiting to finish it until there's lots of time to devote to the process--I want to complete that on an art-project time frame, not a construction project time frame.) So, to continue the tour: Go through the door in the green wall...  ...into the study. The desk is to your left, and the closet, with hang-bar and shelves, is on the right.
As you can see, I still need to add trim to the window
in the study, and a light fixture above it. As time and money allow,
the desk you see there will be replaced by a built-in corner desk,
which will nearly double the desk-top real estate. Also, the shelves you see in the picture will be replaced by
a ship's ladder that leads to the hatch for the loft space above.
(What I mean by a "ship's ladder" is also called a Jefferson ladder.
It will have staggered steps, with book storage in back of the steps.)
You can just make out where the hatch is in the picture of the green
wall near the top of this page. The loft is big enough to hold a double
bed, but is more likely to be used by us for storage or perhaps a
reading-nook/hideaway. It's pretty fun up there; nobody can see you,
but you can look out on the world through the 2 x 2 foot window.
Couldn't get a decent picture of the loft, so I leave it to your
imagination....(Think like a kid--that's what it makes you feel like to
be up there.)
Next, walk out onto the porch through the 18" door. (That door is perhaps my favorite part of the house--found it at Pak-it, the local contractor's junkyard and put a window in the upper half. My second favorite part of the house is the other interior door, also from Pak-it. It was reclaimed from Camp Sherman, which was founded in the late 19th century. Judging from the hardware that came on the door and the clear-grain wood, it may actually be that old.)
 In this photo, you can see the aforementioned window that's in the loft space, with the price sticker still on it, like Minnie Pearl's hat. (Thirty bucks at Habitat for Humanity!) The loft extends over the porch and about half-way over the study/closet area. It's about eight feet long. You can also see in this photo that I haven't gotten the siding on the house yet--partly because I haven't yet solved the conundrum of what to use that will maintain the breathability of the walls, be chemically inert, and withstand the rigors of being on a movable structure. Also, I wanted to finish the inside so I could get moved in, and will now turn my attention to the outside. Well, that's it for the walking tour if the house, per se, but here are a few more miscellaneous photos:  This one's taken from the meditation nook at the top of the green wall.  This (poorly-focused) photo
shows the futon folded out, as seen from the study. Note that the
wall hanging has been changed from the piece of vintage kimono fabric
shown in the other photo of the red wall to a Mexican serape-like unit.
(The kimono fabric brings out the Japanese design elements, while the
serape underscores the southwestern U.S. design elements. Don't know if it's
kosher to mix those two styles--but that's what I felt moved to do! It kind of reminds me of this
restaurant in Dutch Harbor, Alaska that always cracked me up: Stormy's
Pizza and Sushi.) Something about the combination of clean, calming Japanese-inspired lines with earthy, Southwest-inspired textures and colors really says "home" to me (even though nearly all of my genes hail from Scotland :-).The piece of wood that bridges the two windows in the red wall is detachable, so that different wall-hangings can be inserted behind it. Or you go with no wall hanging (see below), in which case, you can just make out the stylized outline of the Three Sisters--a few of our local mountains--rendered in plaster. I had intended for there to be more contrast in the two reds, and will probably re-do it in the future. (You can't really even tell that they are different, but one has more white pigment in it than the other.) The idea here was two-fold. The Hopi and Zuni tribes of the southwest used to paint their walls in two colors (two colors far more widely spaced on the spectrum than mine ended up being!), with stylized triangular mountains at the contact, to represent the horizon. I always thought that was really cool, and hoped to use it in a house of mine at some point. The other reason I incorporated the Three Sisters into the walls was to give the house (mobile though it be, and far from here though it may end up) some sense of provenance. (Normally, houses are so...rooted in place. Having this iconic central Oregon skyline incorporated into the wall will keep this house from ever seeming completely unmoored. To mix a metaphor or two.)  Here's a shot of how the porthole window turned out.
(It's almost done.
The galvanized steel around the porthole in the photo will be covered with copper sheeting.)  Below, you can see the green wall pictured as it will look once this room is being used just as a bedroom--with just a chair for taking off shoes, or laying clothes on at night. (That's Rick Pugh the Wonder Contractor standing on the right.) For the time being (until I've completed the companion unit), however, there will be a little gate-leg table there. The chairs store inside the table. This house design could, in fact, pretty easily be used as a whole house--just enclose the porch and put a kitchen there. (I'd hate to displace the porch swing, however!)    We are now looking for a place to park this little house, and its companion unit, starting in mid-2010. Here's what we're hoping to find:
Ideally, there would be electric and water available. (We could potentially haul water--or put in a well if it's something we're buying. Also, we would consider beefing up our small solar system if need be--but would rather be plugged into the grid if possible at this time.) We do *not* need a sewer hook-up, as the house has a composting toilet.
We're open to renting, care-taking, or buying. Thanks, Leslie and Tony
22 December 2009
We found a temporary place to park the tiny house! Since last week, it's been here...
 .
************************* Got parked just in time to get set up for Christmas in the House of Tiny:
The interior is now done, and ready for move-in. (Only thing left to do is siding and exterior trim.) Here are some more shots of the interior, now that it's finished. First, the stone path in the final stages of construction (left), and a detail in which you can make out a few of the slate leaves (right).
Apologies for the dire lack of updates, folks. We've been very busy trying to find a place of our own to buy, where we can park the tiny house in clean air. This has being taking all my time and energy for the last few months. Also, found that I'm going to have give the house a period of off-gassing before I can move in full time. This is generally to be expected, even with the most careful MCS construction, but I had been hopeful that it wouldn't be necessary. (There are materials I could have used for the walls--such as tile, stainless steel, or porcelain-on-steel--which would have reliably rendered the walls inert, and the space immediately habitable. However, I was/am striving for a breathable wall system for the various benefits that that confers. I'll only resort to a non-vapor-permeable wall covering if six months or so of off-gassing isn't enough to render the current wall system inert.) I feel just fine in there for many hours at a time, and even full time if it's a season when the windows tend to be open a lot. But when we attempted to move in in mid-winter, a month or so after construction was completed, it turned out we were jumping the gun a little: it turns out that, with the windows closed, I start to feel mild symptoms of cognitive decline (followed by headache) after half a day or so, even with the low-volume mechanical ventilation system running. (Highly recommended that to have one of those, btw, in a house this small and tightly sealed.) Not much new has been done to the house, though there have a been a couple of minor improvements, such as the addition of a Solatube to the study space, over the desk. Also, we added this cool little shelf/table combo that makes good use of a very small space. The shelf, which is large enough to make a little desk or table for one person, stays stationary; if you want to seat two, just slide the nesting table out a ways to double your real estate. To seat four, pull the table out all the way, rotate the top 90 degrees, fold the top back, and voila--you have a 30 x 30 inch table. Big enough for cards, or dinner for four--provided you use small plates :-). (Table is shown rotated in preparation for unfolding, but not folded all the way out in the right-most picture.)
The wood for the shelf came from a cabinet door in a 1949 travel trailer that was being hauled to the dump in Flagstaff, AZ in 1998. (I've been carrying it around since then--what a pack-rat! But, I was happy to have it when the time finally came! Let that be a lesson to me, never to get rid of anything. Ha!) The chair is a beloved heirloom that my grandma gave me a couple of years ago when she was down-sizing. And the cool transformer-like table was a stellar $20 garage sale find last summer. The only thing new in this little ensemble is a rather fancy $7 shelf bracket from Home Despot. Wahoo! In parting, here's a nice shot of Janey patiently awaiting entrance on the other side of the frosted glass door:  Lonnnnnnnng time, no post. Here's the deal: we spent the spring and summer shopping for land (which took a great deal of energy, since we where looking in areas that are about a 9 hour drive from here). Then I spent the fall making the tiny house habitable.
The details are these: I took down the American Clay plaster, lovely though it was, and redid the interior with a cement-based stucco. (White Portland cement, sand, and a little lime--same ingredients as the thinset I used for the tile, but in slightly different proportions. I also used some American Clay pigments that I had leftover, so the color scheme is the same as it was--although the cement stucco does not have the same luminous loveliness that the clay plaster did. However, it's much, much, much more durable and less dusty.) Whether it was the American Clay (or their MudGlue adhesive that had to be added to the first coat) that was bothering me, or whether the cement stucco just did a better job of sealing in something in the wall assembly that was bothering me, I can't say for sure. What I can say, though, is that I can now spend any amount of time in the tiny house without cognitive deficits or headaches! Woohoo! Finally!
The place we ended up buying (it closed in two stages, first on August 15th, and then on December 15th) is on Whidbey Island in Washington. It's three contiguous 10-acre lots which back up to a 600-acre trail system! The 600 acres is owned by a land trust and is in conservation easements...so, no spraying agriculture, houses, wood smoke--no hazards at all from that quarter. Also, it's only about 1500 feet from salt water, which means salt-air breezes, which many believe are very healing.
I did not acquire all this land to keep it to myself. I will be developing it into a residential/retreat center for the environmentally ill, with both buy-in and rental opportunities. Even without a zoning variance, I should be able to offer both long- and short-term stays, as well as the possibility of buying in (either by buying one of the 10-acre lots, or, if I get a zoning variance, there could be a total of six smaller lots with shared open space), for those of you with resources who might be interested in building here in the clean air.
Here are a few pictures of the place:
The view (note snow-capped peaks):
 The orchard (44 trees, about 20 different kinds!):
 The woods (LOTS of 'em):
 The location (it's the red block that's on the right-hand side of the map. The map was made when we were still considering a couple of different places. The big, green area to the south and west labeled "Putney Woods" is the 600 acre trail system.):
South Whidbey (the south "lobe" of the 35-mile long island, encompassing the towns of Langley, Clinton, and Freeland and the rural areas between them) is an amazingly rich community, with a preponderance of writers, artists, organic farmers. It's also considered sort of an EI mecca in the Seattle area, perhaps in part because the whole county has a policy of generally not spraying the roads, and there are lots of fresh sea breezes, relatively low population density, and lots of places to walk on the beach or hike in the woods. I've already met half a dozen EI's on South Whidbey--which is three times more than I know in Bend, even though it's only about 1/3 as populous. That's roughly nine times more EI's per capita, according to my calculations!) It's also a Transition town (click here and here if you're unfamiliar with what that means--it's very cool!) It's about an hour by ferry and highway to Seattle, which has several EI- and Lyme-literate doctors (but is a total traffic-infested zoo).
Well, there's more to say, but not much more time for saying it right now. (I'm still in the throes of moving, which is very complicated when you're moving not just your belongings, but also your actual house.) So, until next time....
26 March 2011
Got a new dog to go with the new place:
 napping--she just can't ever seem to convince Janey to join her!
 23 May 2011
Here's the tiny house in its new location:
  Have started building a deck (and another ramp for Janey, which is being modeled by Tillie, below), and doing a little landscaping. It feels SO good to be able to plant things, after living for so many years in a place where the air quality wouldn't allow me to spend any time in the yard. Now I'm outside for hours each day!
 Okay! Enough blogging! Gotta go plant things and build stuff and wrestle with my dog!
Since this allegedly house-centered website has turned into more of a dog-centered blog of late, I figured I'd post about some changes that have occurred in that arena in the last six weeks or so. There is both happy and sad news to report; there has been a changing of the canine guard.
 About a week before Janey died, I had scheduled appointments to meet several rescue dogs in various foster homes eastern Washington, with the idea of getting a canine playmate for Tillie. (Janey wasn't much into playing, bless her heart.) We interviewed about six dogs for the position, all of them young, like Tillie; most of them smallish, with easy-care coats--because I've so much enjoyed the ease of those features in Tillie. (These were a few of the primary criteria when we set out on the dog-adoption road trip: low food bill, low space requirements, and low-maintenance coat. Ha!) The very last one we met was this guy: 52 pounds, with at least enough hair for six dogs and a yak--some of it literally 10 inches long. But to heck with "criteria:" it was love at first sight.
 In addition to his obvious good looks, he is the most sweet-tempered, calm, eager-to-please, affectionate dog imaginable. Also goofy. That anyone could have dumped this exceptional animal at the pound--apparently after both physically abusing him and failing to exercise or play with him--defies credulity. His fitness and coordination have improved hugely in the four weeks he's been with us, and he's learned to swim and play fetch. He also seems to be getting used to the idea that we are never, ever going to hit him (in fact, I don't even look askance at him, because he takes it too hard)--so he can just stop worrying about it. (Hear that, Buddy? You can just stop worrying about it.) It took three weeks to convince him that it was okay to come up on the bed--he acted as though he had been severely reprimanded for trying that in the past, and didn't want to risk it, despite daily invitations and reassurances from us, and an obvious desire on his part to join the pack for a morning cuddle. But, as you can see from the picture, he did finally overcome his reservations about being on the bed, and rather excels at it now! (He's a natural.)
 Happily, it turns out that Tillie, who is generally very shy around other dogs, is totally nuts about him. (A good thing, since the initial impetus for getting a second dog was as an elaborate dog toy for her. The "impetus" now that we have him is: Good Grief, I love this dog!) We spent the first 24 hours or so after adopting him on tenterhooks, as she refused to interact with him in any way--literally wouldn't acknowledge his presence, despite several polite, friendly advances on his part. Then she abruptly dropped the cold shoulder routine and wrestled with him for about three hours. They've been at it ever since, with just occasional short breaks for eating or sleeping. :-) They never snark at each other, don't have pecking order or jealousy issues...they just couldn't be better a better match. They are both only about 20 months old, so should have many, many years of each others' companionship to enjoy. Here's some footage of them wrestling at the beach. Fear not: the "Blair Witch" style of videography mercifully clears up about 10 seconds in (although, the whole thing was shot with a cell phone, so don't expect too much!). Check out Buddy's patented "butt slam" maneuver at about 0:39. Here's a shot of them sharing a car seat on our recent vacation:
 I love this picture because it so aptly captures their respective personalities. Tillie--in true border collie fashion--is sitting bolt upright, startling with every bump in the road, and looking rather as though she might have her tail plugged into a socket. Buddy, on the other hand--despite his own herding breed heritage--is just chillin'. This photo also highlights the (differing kinds of ) wildness of their eyes. Hers are striking not because of any particular physical characteristic, but because you can see the preternatural focus and intelligence of her mind shining through them with startling wattage. His eyes, on the other hand, are arresting primarily due to their pigmentation--and perhaps also because the zaniness of the pigmentation seems somewhat incongruous with the fundamental groundedness that his eyes otherwise convey.
He came with the name "Buddy," which is threatening to stick because he is just such a...buddy. I've heard at least three people call him that without even knowing that it's his name. However, "Buddy" is a pretty prosaic and over-used dog name (to such an extent that it's almost a non-name), so we're planning to change it once he gets settled in. Front-runners under consideration are Argus (from a cool Greek myth involving faithfulness, eyes, and peacock feathers), Agate (because of swirly coat coloration, and marble-like eye), Tempo (even and measured), and Barnacle (because he's rather clingy; and "Barny," the shortened version, has an apropos hint of goofiness; and finally--like many another barnacle--he's a Whidbey Islander now). It's still up in the air, which may mean we haven't hit upon the right name yet. Suggestions are welcome. His last name, however, (contributed by the perspicacious Mr. Eric Hirst) has already been quite settled upon: McBuddypants. Because, seriously, if you thought his eyes were remarkable, check out these pants (click for a larger image):
01 September 2011
Finally making some progress on the siding, pictured here on a misty, summer-never-made-it-this-year August morning:
 The gable end--the area around the porthole--is stucco, this time with an acrylic additive to increase plasticity.
(The stucco used inside is free of synthetic additives in consideration of air quality. However, this product
with the acrylic will be more reliably crack-free, which is important for exterior use, and it is very, very low
odor.) The shingles are pre-painted Hardie Board; the paint is baked on at the factory, which confers the double advantage of accelerated off-gassing, and greater finish durability. The wooden trim on the gable will be covered in red metal (don't want to deal with the fresh paint on the house, or the ongoing maintenance that comes with painted wood--which is even more of a hassle if, like me, you'd have to vacate the house for weeks every time you painted it!).
The shingles are installed over a rain screen. A bit of extra labor, but it adds a great deal of protection against
trapped moisture, and hence, mold. Stucco was chosen for the gable end because, due to width limitations on the house imposed by the fact that it's on a trailer, the eves didn't overhang there enough to accomodate even the thickness of the overlapping shingles, much less the extra 3/8 " that the rain screen requires. The stucco was applied over a crinkled version of Tyvek that, while not as fool-proof as a rain screen, does help to create an effective drain plane. The other two gable ends--the ones on the ends of the house--have ample eave overhangs, so they will be done in the functionally superior shingles-over-rain-screen (with cream colored shingles that match the stucco). Feels great to have at least the front of the house sided, so that it finally looks more like a home and less like a construction project--from certain angles, anyway! :-)
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