The House That Friends Built

After three years, our 650-sf straw panel cabin is almost finished—sharing 25+ images from the (official) Home Stretch.

When I recently started compiling all the latest snapshots of the tiny house we’ve been building for today’s story, I got a little choked up. I wasn’t expecting it. Swiping through millions of progress images—most of them crummy construction shots or teetering piles of building materials awaiting installation (also ME in a stress ball in the corner out of frame)—something interesting emerged. Amid the flotsam/jetsam of an ongoing building site, every 20th image or so would spark a tiny primal gasp—a slice of sunlight splitting the floor or the sharp angles of a wall and the stairs visually intersecting like a poem. In one shot, there’s a beam of morning light on a bare plywood wall. An image that immediately made me imagine what it would eventually feel like to curl up in the corner, looking out the window under the stairs, finally living inside the cabin as opposed to around it, from a distance.

You know that saying that seems to come up a lot when someone sees how tall my daughter has grown. ”The days are long, but the years go fast.” That’s how this house feels. Building it for three years now (we thought it would be 18 months). Many things costing (way) more than we anticipated, pushing us to pause or find alternative solves. And with so many delays, compromises, and alterations along the way, a different house began to take shape. Maybe the house it was meant to be all along.

That’s one of the things that I’ve learned in this process…that mistakes and changes and additions and things abandoned become The Story. The Story you didn’t know was there, but that can only be revealed once you start to tell it. Reading the signs, feeling the cues, tracking the natural rhythm a house takes on as it gradually becomes someone’s home. And something else I’ve learned, that in many ways, being flexible and patient has made this house more beautiful and exciting than I could have ever imagined…because it’s been worth waiting for.

(I promise, the landscaping and front bits here will be better soon!)