“Ryan Mitchell lives and breathes tiny houses. He has been running the popular website The Tiny Life for the past five years; is currently planning a tiny house conference for approximately 120 people in Charlotte, N.C., where he lives; and has written a book on tiny living that’s due to be published in July. To top it off, he recently finished construction on a tiny house of his very own…”
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The Owner-Built Log House * Log Construction Manual: https://kk.org/cooltools/archives/14097
Wiring Complete: https://kk.org/cooltools/archives/14159
“I spend perhaps an inordinate amount of time looking at images of axes. There’s just something about them. I think that axes will never go out of fashion, nor will they cease to be useful in their multitude of functions. Over the hundreds of thousands of years they have been in use by humankind, any number of styles, shapes, and sizes have been made to perform a variety of splitting, chopping, and shaping work. It’s the sheer variety, and the craftsmanship that I am most attracted to, I think. Of course I love using them, too, probably more than any other hand tool.
To celebrate the axe and the people who continue to make them, here is a selection of 26 modern day (steel) axes made by a variety of craftspeople that are beautiful, functional, and swoon-worthy.…”
-Ziggy
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From Cheryl Long, Editor, The Mother Earth News
See also “Ziggy’s Cob Cottage,” pp.110-113, Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter
“Just ran across this video. Some pretty amazing joinery here. No idea where this is…”
Mackey Smith, Pure Salvage
I turn off the music on a lot of YouTube videos; often it’s just distracting.
-LK
This unique building is weathering the years beautifully. It’s a masterpiece of building with natural materials. It’s documented on pages 66-69 of Builders of the Pacific Coast.
I did an an interview last night with Kevin Kelly on the Google+ “hang out” feature. I used my MacAir laptop with the camera and was a little nervous, but it went OK. Kevin, whose latest book is the sensational Cool Tools, guided the conversation. We talked about tiny homes, owner building, gardening, chickens, the myth of self-sufficiency, what you can do in cities, the Whole Earth Catalog, what I would do if I were building a new house now, the fact that I don’t like shipping containers or Earth Ships or domes or A-frames as homes, and the virtues of self-publishing. The video of it is here…Next week I’m flying to Charlotte, NC, to talk about tiny homes at the Southern Spring Home & Garden Show. Deek Diedrickson from Relaxshacks will be there as well, and we’ll talk to people about the subject out in front of a tiny home he designed; if you’re in the neighborhood, stop by and say hello. I’ll be handing out mini Tiny Homes books (2″ by 2″, 64 pages) and have proofs of our latest book, Tiny Homes on the Move…In praise of real books and bookstores: I’ve read a few books on my IPad, and it’s fine for reading on airplanes or trips, but in my reading for an hour or so every night before going to sleep, I don’t want the electrons; I spend enough time at a computer screen as it is. The publishing business is obviously in turmoil, but books like our building books, although we’ve done digital editions, work best as hold-in-your-hands physical objects. And there’s nothing like a physical bookstore. Sure, Amazon is cheaper, but money ain’t everything. One of my very favorites is Bookshop Santa Cruz; it makes me happy to be there…Tiny Homes On The Move: Just about there. Yesterday Rick, Lew and I sewed up a lot of loose ends. About 3 knotty problems in design worked out. Often we’ll start working on something with no idea how to fix it, and as we go along, things fall into place. Like I told this guy in the interview yesterday about building house: just START. You’ll never get anywhere if you wait for everything to be perfect. Get going, and things will work out as momentum carries you along. When I was about to start building my first house in 1961, I asked my friend Bob what to do, and he said “This,” and picked up a shovel and started digging the foundation trench…Spectacular sunsets of late, this shot with iPhone last night; tonight’s the full moon, ow-wooo!
https://kk.org/cooltools/archives/14230
5 PM western, 8 PM eastern
“Interesting article:
‘I wanted to physically make the world a better place,’ Janes said. With his family’s help, he bought 40 acres of forested land on Denman Island. It came with two trailers. Janes and a girlfriend he’s no longer with moved into one, and promptly sold the other — ‘a big, ugly, white vinyl doublewide,’ he said. They planted a vegetable garden and got some chickens. Self-sufficiency ‘was definitely an ideal,’ Janes explained, ‘but we were doing everything we could’ to achieve it.
-Mike W”
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I realized in the ”60s and 70s that self-sufficiency is a DIRECTION. You never will get there, even remotely. In those years we were raising a lot of our own food, and when I planted some wheat and went through all the steps to get it from the field to flour for bread (unlike potatoes or corn, which you eat just the way it comes out of the ground), I saw that self sufficiency is a myth. BUT that’s no reason to give up. The idea is to become as self-sufficient as possible. AND, we weren’t really doing it to make the world a better place. We did it because whatever we could produce was better and cheaper and more tuned in than what we could buy. Like building one’s own house. AND in doing that, it turns out that it IS better for the world.
-LK
Greetings Lloyd-follow your blog every day.…One of the other sites I follow is Cape Falcon Kayak, a gentleman who runs an off the grid organic farm as well as teaching skin on frame kayak construction. He just posted a seasaonal update for Winter 2014 that includes 2 videos, one showing the construction of his small japanese style house, the second showing the farm, off the grid construction and how they operate. Worth checking out and sharing on your site. The foraging sections and photography are also very good if you have the time to peruse. Thanks again for taking the time to run the blog, and looking forward to the new book. -David Stoll
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