Skip to main content

Tiny House, Big Living

I love hearing the stories of people on this show. Tiny House Big Living screens Sundays at 9.30pm on Channel 94 (in Australia). Each week there's two half-hour episodes.


While it's fun seeing (and critiquing) the various designs, I really get inspired when someone is making a big positive life change. Recently we got two good stories in one night.

Paul and Bekah Dreisbach

Paul and Bekah each grew up overseas. Their families were in the Philippines and Africa. Paul shares how this changed them.

"Our backgrounds of growing up in a third-world culture and country have affected why we're going to go tiny. People living in shacks or the smallest little places are just as happy and we've realised that it's not necessarily the place you live in or how many things you have but it's the people you're around."


Bekah reflects on the moving back to the USA:

"Here it's just a struggle to have more and buy more things and you surround yourself with so much stuff and yet you miss out on a lot of great experiences because of that."

Their destination of Oregon is more expensive than their home state, so "going tiny was a great financial choice for us. We'll be able to live tiny, save some money and do all the things we want to do."

Rich and Sonda Moriarty

Showing that it's not just for young couples, Rich and Sonya also talk about their reasons for downsizing and simplifying their life, now their five adult children have all left home.

"We're empty-nesters. We want more time; and the way to have more time is to live more simply. Less things to take care of."


They'd been thinking about this for couple of years before taking the plunge.

"I'm so glad that we took that leap and we decided to go for it, because it's just so liberating I guess - having just a few things now instead of all of this stuff. It's really made us think about what's important to us."

"I didn't think we'd be able to do this but I'm so so happy that we made this move."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

5 Reasons why we hoard - and they're wrong

"Less is More" is one of the catch-cries of downsizing. Often the fewer things we have the more we value them. So it's a great title for a book that's basically a manual for how to de-clutter your home. The introductory chapter of Less is More: How to De-clutter Your Life gives some great insights into why we find it so hard to reduce our stuff. Here are 5 of them - the last one is one of the biggest for me. 1. The cost of holding on. We were raised by our parents and grandparents and in their day items were expensive and space was cheap. It made sense in those days to hold onto stuff just in case you ever needed it. But today housing is expensive and items are cheap. It's hard to change a habit, but now we save much more by downsizing. 2. Keeping it in the family. For some reason we prefer to give things to those close to us. Again this was viable in the days of big families and lots of children to receive hand-me-downs. But these days we have smaller fa...

20 unplugged ideas

May 1-7 is Screen-Free Week . It's about spending time away from the screen and more time with each other - or doing things we love. It's a great chance to break the work-tired-watchTV-ads-shop-work cycle. This list of twenty alternative ideas is great for screen-free week. It's also a great reminder of things we could enjoy if we're shopping and spending less - and maybe working less and enjoying life more.

Will robots take your job?

The future could be very different. It's one reason I started this blog. What will technology mean for jobs? For incomes? For society? So I was excited to find Will Robots Take Your Job? at my local library. What does the book say? There's always been technological change and we've always found jobs. As the more laborious jobs were taken by machines, we took on higher skilled jobs, moving further up the "skill ladder". The main question is whether this time is different. Will the "skill ladder" continue to have higher rungs for humans to move on to? Will these rungs appear as quickly as the current rungs disappear? Either way we're headed for significant disruption. Either large-scale re-training of our workforce or massive unemployment. The author despairs that our leaders seem not to talk about this - and worse still, not have a plan for it. Farmers or horses? In 1870 about 75% of Americans worked in agriculture and used 25 million hors...