Some Moving Advice

The last time we checked in on the blog we'd been evicted from our very first tiny house spot and were scrambling to find a new one. Well, we did and we've been happily settling into tiny house living for the past four and a half months.

Thanks to all who wished us well and tried to help us find a new spot. It ended up being a bit of a crash course in the perils of tiny house living but we're no strangers to starting in the deep end! We appreciate your patience while we sorted ourselves out and we would like to reward you with sharing what we've learned so far about moving around.

Eviction: Not as bad as it could be

Weird section title but the truth. When we first moved the house it was a big deal, very momentous. By the time we got to our present spot, we had moved the house about seven times. It now no longer stresses us out and we've gotten rather good at moving.

The beauty of a tiny house is that if you're evicted you just take your house with you and roll on out of there. Of course when you get settled in, if you have a situation that you like and that may be tailored to you, it's stressful and time-consuming (and possibly expensive) to start looking for another space. But ultimately, unlike being evicted from a house or apartment, your house just goes along with you, so it's not so bad.

You can never really know your neighbour

One of the most uncomfortable parts of an eviction is that people are unhappy for one reason or another and you're having to move along. The family that we were renting our space from were lovely and it turned out that their neighbour had a beef with them that they hadn't been aware of. Up until that point, they had been on very good terms. We turned out to be the catalyst that brought this beef to a head. We didn't want to make any more hassle for them, so we just accepted things and did our best to move along smoothly. But we felt bad for them, they felt bad for us, and everyone was mad at the neighbour who was a very angry person in general. All in all, lots of feelings happening there.

And we'd asked all the right questions before choosing the spot: what are your neighbours like and will this be a problem?

One of the reasons we'd gone with the spot was that the property was on agricultural land and the owners only had two neighbours, neither of which had a direct sight-line to our tiny house. It seemed ideal. But the point is that you can never really know who might be threatened or have a bee in their bonnet about whatever; the land owners may never really know and you just have to be prepared for whatever happens no matter the assurances you receive from everyone.

We spent the next 6 weeks in my sister's front driveway (shoutout to the Kaufman family!) for the whole neighbourhood to see and no one gave two flips. Go figure.

There is always a space out there

It took us 6 weeks to find another spot but really, it took us that long to find another spot that suited our needs. We had offers from all over the Fraser Valley and to be fair, we never had a serious offer for a spot in Vancouver proper that had what we needed. Since we both work in the city, we were determined to get a spot that wasn't too far to commute and that determination limited us.

It all comes down to a balance between what you want and what you're willing to compromise to have what you want. How we prioritized our needs changed during this process. It's a learning curve, best to embrace it.

But don't despair! The most common reason we've heard that people don't build their tiny houses is that they have nowhere to put them. If you really want to live tiny, you can and there is always a place to put your house, it just comes down to how much uncertainty you're willing to live with, your needs, and how much you really want to do it.

30% success rate

We found that Craigslist was the most useful tool to find spots. By far, the majority of responses came from our ad that we posted while we also visited a number of spots that had ads posted for RVs. Kijiji yeilded many contacts looking for information on building tiny houses and lots of people asking how successful we were at finding a spot. And we posted flyers around the city in shops, community centres and at community boards and post boxes; these resulted in about 2 contacts.

With all the people that contacted us, about 30% resulted in us going to view a spot and deciding to take the spot. For various reasons things don't always work out, such

as being evicted right away or towing your house to a spot, only to find that you can't get it onto the property because of the way the access is set up. Yup, we did that too.

See the pic to the right of us trying to squeeze our house around a fence post. Tiny House FAIL.

But spaces pop up as long as you're persistent and put yourself out there.

Moral of the story: tiny house living is an adventure and unless you build on your own property, be prepared to fully participate in that adventure!