That time I was a gypsy
Spending a winter moving house eight times helped Nick Barnett prepare for his new life in a tiny house.
Moving from a regular house into a wheeled tiny home is like completing a boot camp in resilience. Then doing it again. And again, and again, with triple ab crunches.
In my case it started two-and-a-half years ago with the sale of our old house, which by the usual standards was averagely stressful. That is, only a few of my internal organs felt crushed by the process.
Soon there was the downsizing, a backbreaking, brain-hacking ordeal that is a whole different story.
Then came the learning, the hunting, the setup, and the miniaturisation of my motor skills to fit life into 23 square metres. Each was a test of how well I handled change and uncertainty.
But in the middle of the process something happened that trained me to cope. This event I refer to as my gypsy phase.
The time involved was nine weeks, from the day my husband Tom and I moved out of a fourbedroom, two-lounge rental house till the day we made a home in an 8.6-metre-long yellow cottage built on a trailer.
During those nine weeks we lived in a succession of short-term ‘‘gypsy’’ accommodations: a motel, Tom’s parents’ place, the borrowed holiday home of a good friend, and a succession of rentals from websites.
Eight moves in nine weeks. In winter.
Our gypsy carriage was a Subaru station wagon that is now scrap but in those days earned the adjective ‘‘trusty’’.
Eight times we packed and loaded up the Subaru with gypsy necessities like clothes and groceries, and eight times we unpacked and unloaded.
As time went on, the car became less crowded, which I attribute to how savvy we grew about packing. We figured out, for example, that it worked best to put the dogs’ crates on to the back seats first, and then fit the other stuff on and around them Tetris-style.
Yes, I said dogs. Our two dachshunds travelled with us. I had worried about them getting stressed by all the change but so long as their blankets and familiar items were around, they were chirpy. A lesson for humans?
The packing and moving became second nature. With each new move I relaxed and smiled more. It was the smile of someone who has become domestically adaptable.
I adapted to each new kitchen – its joys as well as its oddities. Each new oven with its different pace of heating, and each new inoperable hob (every stove-top has one).
I learned to cook with handle-less pans and
serve good meals on chipped Silver Jubilee crockery. Unfazed and non-judgmental, I was.
I did laundry in seven inscrutable washing machines and hung the clothes out with pegs of the useless kind that I never buy. Such is adaptability!
Seven beds, seven toilets, seven shower cubicles. Seven driveways to learn how to reverse up. All these changes, trivial or troublesome, made me cope better with new daily surroundings. I became a veritable Subaru-driving domestic god.
Our gypsy carriage was a Subaru station wagon that is now scrap but in those days earned the adjective ‘‘trusty’’.
This all might strike you as, well, unimportant. But let me explain how crucial this phase has been in the arc of my life.
My gypsy phase taught me a lot about coping quickly with new practicalities, leaving me ideally trained for the ‘‘tiny’’ life that was to come.
Through a nine-week full-immersion course of adaptation, I got used to taking on new circumstances without getting stressed. Or to use a metaphor that I like, I developed adaptation muscles that were taut, strong, and fit for purpose.
Those gypsy weeks were my transition from big-house life to tiny-house life. Other people will have different transitions, perhaps spread over more time, perhaps cold turkey.
I can only say to anyone considering the tiny life to do something to build your resilience in advance, if you can. Know what you’re doing and why; commit yourself to it. Build up your adaptability muscles.
Not because tiny life is awful – it’s not, it’s brilliant. But because it takes you on a journey that, if you’re not prepared for it, can feel like it’s made up of losses.
Loss of space, loss of ‘‘things’’, loss of certain luxuries, and the kind of loss you might feel if you’re scrolling through your feed one day and find yourself envying your friends with their big houses and their mountain of ‘‘things’’.
I can say, honestly, that I’ve never felt a serious sense of loss since moving into a tiny house nearly two years ago. I genuinely miss nothing.
In our tiny house, with its unique challenges and potential annoyances, I have never felt cramped. Never frustrated about having to shower, wash up, go to the toilet, work and cook in new ways.
A big reason for this is that I went through that gypsy phase. I broke up, bit by bit, the rigid old habits of big-house living.