Tiny House, Big Freedom

“I was almost a hoarder, I’m obsessed with clothes,” admits Jenkins, 24, California-based Celtic harpist who says that moving into the small space has forced her to pare down her belongings and become tidy and organized. 

 

But the shedding of things has been a welcome change. “Moving into the house was actually a relief because I could only take what I could fit,” she explains. “It feels freeing to have only what I really need around me.”

 

Jenkins says she grew up in a small house with her family and shared a room with her sister, then went off to college, where she mainly lived in a dorm. Shortly after graduating, while living in a carriage house with her sister, she yearned for a place of her own. That’s when she came upon an online article about tiny houses. She was sold instantly. “It was just so practical for me, and it’s a nice byproduct that it’s environmental,” she says. “But the best thing about it is it’s totally mine.”

“I’d never built anything, ever. I didn’t know how to use a saw. So it was intimidating,” she admits. But it also allowed her the freedom to have final control over the interior design, altering room and storage placements to precisely fit her own needs.

 

The musician used savings to purchase a building kit from Tumbleweed Tiny House Company in 2011, figured out how to build it with some help from her stepfather in his Frazier Park driveway and drove it to a piece of open grassland in Half Moon Bay that she rents from a family ranch. Jenkins spent a total of $16,000 on the house itself, a figure that was kept low due to assistance from electrician, plumber and contractor friends. She’s nicknamed it Little Yellow, and has documented her construction adventure and her time there on a blog called “Littleyellowdoor.” 

 

“The biggest thing in my life is cooking,” Jenkins explains, “so I designed my kitchen to make it more open.” She cooks on a boat stove, which runs on clean burning denatured alcohol. “I have to start the stove up, and it smells a little bit,” she says. But it’s light and portable, and can be moved up into a storage nook if necessary. Pots hang above the stove.

 

Before moving into Little Yellow, Jenkins admits she was a bit of a slob. But here, she realized, organization would be key. “I clean my house like nobody’s business,” she says. “If you leave something on the floor, half your house is a mess already.” She has no closets or bureau—“I don’t hang things very well, and I hate drawers,” she explains—so she’s limited her clothing storage to a neat, six-foot high shelving unit. 

The miniscule bathroom is outfitted with a curtained, galvanized steel tub that she uses as both a shower and a sink.

 

There is a growing industry of small-scale, multiple-use furniture for tiny houses; in fact Tumbleweed Tiny House Company founder Jay Shafer (who has recently moved on to form the separate Four Lights Houses company) will introduce a line of “transformer furniture,” including an “exploding table” that’s a chair-desk-table, and a loft-bed ladder that doubles as storage space, in January. But, says Jenkins, “I didn’t want to feel like I was camping.” So, in addition to her shower-sink combo, her only other multiple-use pieces are a wooden 1800s school desk that she uses for a desk-table, and some under-the-couch storage boxes that slide out to be used for guest seats. 

 

Jenkins ran out of money before purchasing a propane heater, so there’s no source of heat inside Little Yellow. “I went to college in Scotland, so I’m kind of chill with cold weather,” she says. “I even go in the ocean here.” Cooking dinner heats the house up fast, she adds, and her loft bed—a queen-size futon tucked under the A-line roof—is extremely cozy. “It’s awesome. You can sit up in it.”

 

Aware that people who read about tiny houses are often shocked and even put off by such Lilliputian living, Jenkins stresses the importance of individual design. “You don’t need to live without anything—I know one guy who has a flat-screen TV and Wii in his [tiny] house. Whatever’s important to you, you can have.”
See Jenkins give a video tour of her house here....