Just over 200 square feet of space, a tiny kitchen, bedroom/ living room/ & tiny bathroom :) All electric & it even has an AC unit mounted in the long wall of the bedroom near the only window :) We get a garden space & live on a 5-acre homestead farm with our new best friend & landlady Kathy :) It will be an exciting adventure!
12 two by four's & 2.5 in coated T25 deck screws + 19 two by ones then lots of sanding made a slightly oversized bunk bed that can contain two twin size mattresses. Meg's employer Dr. O gave us one 14-inch-thick comfy twin mattress for the bottom while Meg spent $140 to get me a Lucid Memory Foam & Get low profile 6-inch-thick mattress for the top so I would have more headroom to reduce the odds of hitting my head on the ceiling when waking up to tinkle in the middle of the night.
We brought a number of rapid assembly metal racks to improve storage for our clothes, electronics, tools and other assorted goods. Rosie the Neato Robotics D75 vacuum cleaner been cleaning up the floor regularly since we have been doing & continue to do construction to improve the inside for usability. I have to frame out the kitchen with open shelving for our pots & pans and foods, move the fridge the landlady giving us, take my compact microwave out of storage and mount and wire it up :)
I got my old Troy Built 4-stroke weed whacker running & cleared out some overgrown grass and weeds near our unit. There are lots of projects to work on that will keep me busy, including & especially moving everything out of our apartment.
Given that we had a 20v lithium battery DeWalt drill & impact driver, and electric string trimmer, we added a 5in brushless DeWalt orbital sander & used it with our fleet of dual 2 amp batteries & single 5 amp battery to cut down weeks, sand our bed frame & we are actively using it to take the dark stain of a pair of matching tables at our apartment that we are bringing with us. Even using 80 grit sandpaper its taking many hours so far. This is much better than hand sanding though.
I just threw away the 2002 model year mattress & box spring that my mother wanted to replace because they were long ago worn out, but she died before doing so, and since we are moving out, I had to trash it, as it is so badly warped & damaged internally that it is trash. It was very physically demanding, moving that queen mattress by myself & caused me to work up a full body sweat.
We are moving car full at a time so far, taking stuff to the farm or storage or donating things to minimize our inventory to embrace a less cluttered life. I even watched a documentary film online about minimalism.
Super excited to garden edible foods, something my mother's mother or grandmother taught me about growing up. Its magical seeing seeds turn into edible plants via water, soil & sunlight. This is the best part about moving to the farm.
We inherited a solid wood coffee table, and side table that match that were stained ebony & spent perhaps 10 hours combined labor sanding them down with 80 grit, then 150 grit sanding, then 220 grit sanding. We then used Butcher Block Conditioning made of mineral oil & beeswax & applied 2 coats to each. I love the look of the natural wood with the non-toxic food safe conditioner giving a light warm yellow hue that reflects light far better than the ebony finish we removed. I imagine the mass of each piece of furniture decreased a few grams given the amount of sawdust our little brushless DeWalt 5inch 127mm orbital sander made with those diablo disks, collected in the little black tube sawdust bag & then dumped out onto the soil at the edge of our concrete patio so it can break down back into soil. These are going to our tiny home today. I have to meet the Comcast tech today in order to get high speed internet setup in the barn so that our computers and TV and smartphones & other connected devices can work at home :)
Many stages remain to be completed for the move to be finished. Just sanding down the cedar 5/8" thick boards with 80 grit sandpaper took us more than 5 hours. We actually cleaned up and called it a day after just that stage & left the boards to dry as they had more moisture in them.
I am driving my sister and her boyfriend Philip to Sea-Tac airport today so they can go on a vacation to Vegas. Then it is back to the farm. If its not obvious, I worked on this post over many days, adding information as we made progress.
Its' been many car loads to donate, store, and move things to the farm. I am overwhelmingly glad to be moving to a farm. While I was sanding the cedar kitchen shelf boards, Meg used one of our smaller 20-inch Chinese made Gerber machetes to slash morning glory vine out of the area that will become our garden. Sanding the 5.5-inch-wide cedar boards of 5- or 6-feet length produce several hundred grams of cedar wood dust that I saved in a polymer plant bucket for use as an insect repellent after being mixed with cedar essential oils & mineral oil. I have to think about that more :)
I know that using a tiny 5inch sander for that much sanding sounds crazy, but our larger belt sander MIA because of moving so many times and some disorganization and disuse. The DeWalt 5inch orbital brushless 20v sander was $99 on sale tool only without a charger or battery. I have 3 such chargers & 4 batteries for my other DeWalt tools.
I decided to go with 20v Lithium tools when Meg & I first got married in 2013 and DeWalt had great brushless tools with excellent reviews. So I stuck with this ecosystem, when later adding an impact driver, battery electric weed whacker, and most recently the 127mm orbital sander. I really like those Velcro felt attachment sanding discs by Diablo that have dust extractor holes for 5- and 8-hole setups. The small detachable dust collector bag that twist click locks onto the orbital sander does an ok job of catching dust, and that is how I collected the cedar dust to save it for later use.
As of July 14th good progress made with phase one complete framing up some shelving over the sink and stove in the tiny kitchen to add functionality. I did most of that yesterday and will return today to add more capacity to the system since there are no cabinets, all our vitamins, spices, pantry items, water filter pitcher, spare filters & more have to be stored in the kitchen. We have a metal rack covered with tooling, a bakers rack, and another small metal shelf that I am using as a construction materials buffer. All in all we will have a good amount of shelving capacity. I also need to upgrade the bunk bed with a safety rail so I do not accidentally roll out of bed while sleeping up there.
Stage 5 of the Kitchen shelving additions went well. Several more stages will add additional capacities & functionality. I did some cleaver bracketing with 1X2 to enable a floating edge of cedar wood. I sand down all the wood with 80 grit to make it finger safe so no splinters or cuts if skin rubs an edge of something, it also makes the wood look a softer & lighter in color and really brings out the detail in the knots that are beautiful in the light pine wood & even cool in the cedar wood. Sanding is huge time penalty, as it takes more than 10 min per 1x2 to do all six sides and 12 edges. The 6 foot 5/8' x 5.5in cedar planks take around 25 min to sand.
I have done so much sanding with our 5 inch orbital sander that the resulting sanding dust saved has almost filled a gallon sized planter vase that I have been saving it in. The pine dust a lighter yellow color while the cedar has a warm red huge. I mixed some of the sanding dust with candle wax to make a fire starter that worked well when I tested it on the bottom of a standard aluminum pop can punctured with holes to make a little improvised stove. I ended up buying 60 different 80 grit sanding disks and using 5 different Dewalt 20v batteries, sawhorses, and more to sand lots of lumber used in the kitchen framing shelf mod to add storage capacity to our tiny kitchen that has no counter tops yet other than the 4-burner electric coil stove & tiny oven next to the single bin stainless sink.
After 12 stages of cutting & sanding 1x2 and screwing them together with coasted T25 deck screws into pre-drilled holes in wood clamped together for alignment with a spirit level & other method, we finally moved in. We are now in the middle of internal storage optimization, in essence moving duplicates & other less used items to our storage locations. We have stored stuff elsewhere because we downsized from a 1200 square foot 2-bedroom apartment with attached tandem length garage to a tiny 240 square foot long rectangle tiny home attached to the north side of a barn, originally intended as a storage closet & later optimized as a single person tiny home. Fitting Meg & I & kitty in this tiny space has proved challenging on many levels but gives us something to do & think about other than watching content online like Portrait Artist of the Year a British show on Amazon via Freevee so you watch some commercials, which we mute with the TV remote. We worked hard for 35 days straight & took a rest day all day yesterday.
Today Sunday Aug 6, I woke up and made coffee with 24 grams of pre-ground light roast in Meg's 1L stoneware French Press made in the UK, then let it brew for 12 minutes. I added a Hot Coco packet to my 16 oz ceramic coffee mug & then when the coffee was hot & ready poured it into the coco mix with vigorous stirring with a stainless-steel spoon. Once the hot coffee & hot coco was mixed, I added 2 oz of Half & Half with more staring & enjoy a very tasty, simulated mocha. Then I took the farm's 01 Chevy 2500HD truck to the local gas station and put 7.8 gallons of E10 in for $39. After that I took our 10L or 2.5 gallon gas can and emptied it into other nearby gas tanks, then added 30ml or 1 fl oz of chemical fuel system cleaner, 30 ml or 1 fl oz Fuel Stabilizer and 5 drops of refined mineral oil to the safety sealed gas can with push button dispensation. I then used our 01 Audi A4 to go to the Grange to top off off its fuel tank with $13 of 92 Premium E0 at $6.29 per gallon. I brought the safety fuel can in the Audi's trunk. At $5.49/gal the regular unleaded 89 E0 was $15 for 2.7 gallons. The fuel in this gas can treated with fuel stabilizer, chemical fuel system cleaner & mineral oil is optimized to keep the fuel system gaskets moisturized, lubricate the fuel pump, clean the fuel injectors and prevent fuel gums threads from forming while stored for up to 2 years.
Additional stage of optimization of the kitchen space ongoing to adapt to the RV like conditions! A death of Lois Miller & similar trips to Yakima recently caused major schedule delays. I also officially started working as a bus driver again with the acquisition of Route 42 on BUS 208093 in spot 100 :) I wrote that down as a memory input trigger since its fresh info from August 25th, 2023. Now I have to memorize the employee handbook and my route stops & times by recursively reading both daily multiple times & rehearsing it to encode into into my neural matrix of 86 billion neurons :)
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