Back from overseas, and back to work

I write this sitting in our shipping container with the big metal doors flung open. I’m at the desk Isaac built for me out of a sheet of pine when I needed a place to work at home in 2020, sitting in the office chair I bought back then too. Both are smeared in mud now and coated in sawdust. The back of the container is piled with boxes we haven’t opened for over a year now, and mattresses that have been wrapped in clear plastic for as long. Around the desk are boxes of nails, tools, building drawings, and a big basket of snacks. The babbling sound of yesterday’s rain storm is trickling down the drain we dug behind our work site like a creek. I’ve sat here many times to write, though it’s been a long time, and today when I look out I can see the house we’ve built, painted dark green and nearly finished. It makes me so happy.

Much has happened since I last got a chance to write. Our six-week trip to the US ended up being more stressful than we could have imagined. Our youngest sliced his arm open in a fall that required stitches, then our oldest was bitten in the cheek by a dog, requiring more stitches. A shelf fell on his head shortly after that, requiring yet more stitches. The universe seemed to be telling us to get back to the island. We also did SO much – saw all our friends and relatives, visited two national parks and countless campgrounds, went to zoos and aquariums and a gazillion new playgrounds, ate heartily and shopped like true Americans. It was exhausting.

Revisiting Golden Gate Park in San Francisco

Both those green bags are filled with stuff we purchased in the US.

After a 12-hour flight followed by a rough 30 minutes in a 10-seater plane through inclement weather, we finally made it onto the island’s grassy runway. We rejoiced. Isaac and I unpacked our bags (we had bought two duffel bags worth of stuff in the US, amazed at how cheap everything seemed, and of course we stocked up on Trader Joe's delicacies). Then, we dove straight into working nonstop to get our house project moving along. We want to be moved in by December, and the clock is ticking.

With siding/cladding and windows done on three sides of the house, we just had to complete the rear, which includes two doors and a store room. I put one of the doors in myself and cannot believe how tricky it was to get the thing plumb and straight. My shims kept slipping out or moving, and once I got it level in one direction, it would fall out of level in the other. The siding and fascia boards are equally tricky, being so visible. Framing, it turns out, is a forgiving part of the building process compared to these last bits.

Putting up siding/cladding

Last week we had all the plywood siding up and were ready for my favourite part of the job – painting! We picked a dark green colour called “scrub”, which is what the manuka trees all over the island are referred to colloquially. True to its name, the paint makes our house blend in nicely with the trees all around. Two days of painting and I’d covered the whole thing with two coats. As my mother-in-law put it, “It’s perfect.”

Our plan is to get to “minimum viable house” by December, which basically means making the house liveable so we can move in, even if trim and bits of work have yet to be done. We’re still working solo, with one of us looking after the kids while the other heads up to the site. It’s a joy to work alone, but we do have help coming to finalise the electrical and plumbing. We also hope to get some help putting the gib/drywall up, given how heavy the sheets are. Then we’ve got to lay the flooring, after which point we plan to set up the kitchen and move in. We won’t have a bathroom, but can shower and bathe down at the big old house we’re living in now; our outhouse and composting toilet will only take a few days to build once we’re moved in. It seems insane that we thought this project would take us six months when we first moved here. It’ll have been about 18 months when we finally get it all finished.

What we do on a rainy day when there is nowhere else to go but our yard.

In between pounding nails and sloshing on paint, we’ve been gratefully enjoying the quietude of winter here on the island. After such a busy and stressful trip overseas, I have a newfound appreciation for how safe and uneventful life is here. Last year at this time, I was awestruck by mundane things like cows meandering in the road, or rains that flooded our little valley and trapped us at home. Now they’re commonplace – the other night I drove the boys home from dinner at a friend’s house only to slam on my brakes a quarter mile from our driveway when I hit a flood. I had to backtrack a few miles on the road to get cell service and call my father-in-law so he could come get us. Just another day on the island. Now that we have wetsuits for the boys, rainy days mean swimming in mud puddles that crop up around our yard and driveway. Oh, the joy.

We’ve also gotten quite good at trapping mice. We discovered when we got back to New Zealand that they had infested our store room and chewed tiny holes in every bag of food we had in there. After cleaning out and patching up that space, the mice doubled down on our house, finding their way up through rotten floorboards into storage spaces throughout the house. A week of strategic trapping and clearing things out, and we’ve patched up their holes and are mouse-free again, thank goodness. Our son can’t stop talking about wanting to get a cat, which he says he’ll train to chase mice. That would be nice.

I also managed to find a few afternoons when the waves were small and the wind was offshore (blowing out to sea rather than toward the beach) to pick up my huge pink foam surfboard and head out for a surf. I hadn’t been out at all since we moved here, even though Isaac bought me a surfboard before we moved. One of my US purchases on our recent trip was a wetsuit for myself, which makes winter swimming and surfing a joy. I can see how people get hooked on surfing – I smile nonstop when I’m out there, despite how bad I am at it, and then can’t wait to go again.

There’s a turn in the road not too far from our house where it edges out over a cliff and you can look down on the whole of our little beach. Isaac has always pulled over there whenever we’re driving to or from our house, sometimes to my annoyance, to watch the swell for a little while. After just a few days surfing this beach on my own, I find myself doing the same. I stop the car and look over the edge to see how big the waves are, whether the water looks glassy (good) or choppy (bad), and imagine where the sand banks are underwater so I can picture where I might go out. This newfound love is just one more incentive to get our house done by summer. So now, back to work!

The surf lookout

Getting closed in for winter, and heading to the USA

I have been meaning to put an update on this blog for a long time now but haven’t had a chance. Since my last post, we had a burst of activity working on the house, getting the rafters and all the other details ready to install our steel roofing. Our wet winter weather set in, turning the work site into a muddy slip n slide, as well as making life in general harder. Simply put, living off the grid in winter is hard.

A freezing cold day working on the roof.

Our electricity and primary hot water system relies on the sun, and without sunshine we are constantly on the edge of running out of power and hot water. We can do without power pretty well and are used to managing most nights with headlamps and rechargeable LED lanterns. Our laundry piles up while we are waiting for a sunny dry spell (in order for the washing machine to have power and for our clothes to be able to dry on the line afterwards). A few weeks ago we had our first dry sunny day in a while and whipped through five loads, then filled up the washing lines and had laundry strung up all over the house drying for two days.

Our wood stove is a “wet back”, which means the water pipes are heated when we have a fire going, so in the winter we crank it every afternoon in order to both heat the house and get us enough hot water for dishes and baths. We burned through the existing pile of wood, so many afternoons in July were spent hauling pieces of timber from the piles we cleared around our house site, chain-sawing it into manageable pieces, trucking them down to the chopping block, then wheelbarrowing the firewood and kindling around to our wood box. I learned a good lesson about chopping wood when I was smacked in the face by a a stick as I attempted to cut it in half lengthwise with the axe. The chores never seem to end this time of year.

A break from chores to explore.

By the middle of July, we were on track to get the roof on, get the windows and doors put in, and get the house wrapped in time for our departure to the USA for a trip at the end of the month. Then, we all got Covid.

Needless to say, things slowed to a crawl as we nursed the kids and tried to recover in time to jump on our trans-Pacific flight. With help from builders we hired on the island, we got the final tasks done on the house just in time. When we boarded our flight to San Francisco at the end of July, we were thoroughly exhausted, but breathed easy knowing our house was “closed in” and would be protected from the winter weather while we were away.

Due to having Covid, I didn’t get to be involved nearly as much as I would have liked to in the process of closing the house in. After knowing how each piece of the project has been done up to now, it’s strange to look at it and not know how the roof was put in, how the windows fit into the frame, or how the cladding (siding) is attached. By the time we headed to the airport, I was still so wiped out from Covid that I had only walked up to the work site once to see the progress. I can’t wait to get back and dive back into the project. (Below: the process of getting closed in, first the roof, then wrapping the building and putting the windows and doors in, then adding plywood cladding/siding to the outside)

For the next month, we’re traveling around the western USA, visiting friends and relatives, and feeling both at home and far from it. I had forgotten how friendly Americans are, and we were shocked by the portion sizes when we stopped to get lunch in the airport on a layover in San Francisco. My salad looked like it could have served a family of four, and the hot dog we ordered for the kids came with a mountain of fries and a pickle the size of my toddler’s forearm. “Welcome to America!” Isaac said as we dug in.

The gas here seems so cheap to me, at $4.60 a gallon. Back on the island we regularly pay as much as $11 USD for a gallon of gas. And when I loaded up a cart at Trader Joe’s and saw that the total was only $280, I couldn’t believe it. Everything here is so cheap compared to what we pay living back on the island.

Right now we are near the end of a two-week adventure through the Pacific Northwest in a 22-foot RV. Sleeping together in the same small space has been challenging and joyful. I often wake up to a toddler crawling across me in the semi-dark, and it’s light until 9pm so our bedtime routine involves taping black plastic garbage bags over the windows to make the kids think it’s time to sleep. But that’s a small price to pay for getting a delicious taste of summer in the middle of our wet New Zealand winter. We’ve eaten as many melons, berries, and nectarines as we can get our hands on, and even got to pick our own raspberries at a farm in Washington (not many made it into the basket).

Despite enjoying our trip immensely, Isaac and I talk often about the house back home in New Zealand. We’re on a tight timeline to finish it before Christmas, and part of me will be thrilled to pick up the drill again and get to work after this nice little break. Until then!

Exploring North Cascades National Park

Last piece of the puzzle

Isaac standing in the loft before we added the frames to it

Well, it’s really winter now. We crank up the wood stove almost every day, so we’ve burned the woodpile outside down to nearly nothing and are chopping up the trees we cleared for our building site. The ground is saturated, and our driveway floods with each heavy downpour much like it did when we first arrived last winter. I sleep in socks and dream about when we’ll get the roof on our tiny house.

The past few weeks have been a flurry of framing work on my part as we finished the last few little pieces of the lofts. These frames were small, being only a meter or so high, and I was able to build and raise most of them on my own. Isaac came up for the final piece of the puzzle (video below). It was a small piece of the loft above the boys’ room, which we’ll use as a play space. When we’d raised and secured the frame, we sat looking out the imaginary windows at the valley below and the wilderness beyond. “I think we are going to love this house so much,” I said.

Later we unrolled our 30 meter tape measure and climbed to opposing corners of the structure for a moment of truth: we wanted to know if the frame of our building was square. If our diagonals didn’t match, we’d have a serious task ahead of ourselves to detach some frames and wrench the thing into as close to a rectangle as we could get it. I read off the measurement from one side and we climbed to the other corners. The two diagonals of our rectangular house were exactly the same. Somehow, with no building experience and YouTube as our primary teacher, we had managed to build a structure that was square to the millimetre. I couldn’t believe it. I whooped and jumped in the air like an excited kid.

We had plenty of timber and a little time, so I got excited about turning the wall going up to the play loft into a climbing wall. The kids can either choose to climb the ladder up to the loft, or climb the wall itself. How fun, right?! I cut a ton more studs and put them up and down the wall. We'll do plywood on this section of the wall instead of drywall, and can screw T-nuts into it for climbing holds.

Enough studs to turn this into a climbing wall!

All framed up

The initial design, which we have tweaked a lot as we go

The next day it rained buckets. Since we hadn’t cut the bottoms of the doors out of any of our frames, the whole thing filled up like a shallow swimming pool. I carefully sawed through the bottom plate of each door to let water flow out, and them squeegeed the rest off. The plywood floor hasn’t dried out for a week now nonetheless. We gotta get that roof on. Unfortunately we need some dry weather to do that, and this time of year that’s tricky to come upon. It’s a good reminder that we’re at the mercy of the elements out here.

This past weekend was the Queen’s birthday, which is a national holiday in all the commonwealth countries. There was a market day at the local community club, with stalls selling baked goods and artwork, kids selling their old toys, and adults selling secondhand clothes and housewares. The sun stayed out long enough for us to have a birthday party later in the day for our youngest, who’s now two years old. I officially have a two-year-old and a three-year-old right now – we’re really in the thick of it as parents.

Barefoot biking

Driveway floods are perfect for boogie boarding

I’m not sure at this point if the decision to come here and live this way was one made for myself or for my kids. I often tell people we moved here to give our boys a taste of “Barrier life” – a barefoot, free spirited existence at the beach and in the woods. But sometimes I think it was more of my own dream – to move off-grid and build a house. The longer we live here, the more I fall in love with it for myself. And, sadly, the less I love it for our kids. Living rurally is lonely, especially in winter when people tend to stick to home. There are very few kids on the island – we are almost always the only ones at the beach or the playground, which I’m not used to. The three primary schools on the island each have 30 or so students, split into a lower and an upper class. Seven-year-olds sometimes learn alongside 10-year-olds, and the 12-year-olds are faced with a decision to homeschool or move off-island. This works for a lot of families, but it won’t for ours.

All this is to say that I already know deep down that this island can’t be our forever home. It weighs on me as I continue to build our little house, which we designed as a tiny vacation home but which has become something of a real home for me in these 10 months we have lived here building it. We’ve gotten this land’s dirt under our fingernails, befriended the bugs and birds, memorised the twists in the roads. I don’t want to leave.

Thankfully we won’t for a while. A few years perhaps. We can’t go anywhere until we know where that next place is, after all, and right now we don’t. But we do know we need to put rafters on, then attach sheets of roofing, wrap the building, put in our doors and windows, and cover it with siding. One step at a time, each phase of our project reveals itself, and I learn what I need to in order to get it done. That’s how we’ve gotten this far building our first house, and I guess that’s how we’re living life too, making decisions as the answer is clear. If I’ve learned anything so far it’s that everything seems difficult until you learn how to do it, then it’s easy.