Thursday, November 1, 2012

A closer look at my Tiny House series

Tiny HouseIMG_6878
Tiny House

I have three houses in the series completed so far. They are all  for sale in our Etsy shop. Click on the houses to go to their listing.

Part of the reason I'm interested in tiny houses in craft is their cuteness and part of is the fact that I live in one. Actually our tiny house is smaller than the first two of these. Two years ago we ended up moving to a four room house in the middle of nowhere.

Trying to go from a two bedroom, reasonably small house with a garage to four tiny rooms was not easy. We still have boxes up against the walls because there is just nowhere to unpack to.

PICT9011done

The bedroom and lounge room in the cottage are much older than the other two rooms. They date back to before the 1870s gold rush. In 1872 - 1874 it was used as the first police station in the village and at some point in 1874 to the mid 1880's it was a telegraph office.

IMG_6828

In the 1930's it was bought, along with Hosie's Store (now Hosie's B&B) by Ruth's Great Grandfather and  they built a kitchen on. In the 1970's the house was taken by National Parks and Wildlife and they added an indoor bathroom/laundry.

We're on tank water rather than town but at some point we'll have to get reconnected to town water again because the tanks just aren't big enough for people living here full time. We don't have a phone line and we had to get satellite internet installed when we moved in.
We don't have a postal delivery, we walk to the Post Office to pick it up and we have to take our own rubbish to the tip. The nearest shopping, doctors, hospital, chemist etc are an hour and a half drive away.

IMG_4268small

It's something we've managed to get used to but coming from Newcastle where everything was less than 20mins drive away it was a bit of a lifestyle change.

There are some fantastic benefits to living out here. The main one for us is the fact that it's cooler here than on the coast. We are over 800m above sea level and we are often 10c less than where we used to live.
Neither Ruth or I do well in the heat at all so it's lovely to not get above 30c often in summer and most nights have it actually cool down to about 12c.
We do get much colder winters but we have an open fire place, a small lounge room that we can shut off, walls that are about a foot thick in the front two rooms and an electric blanket so we keep pretty toasty.
Not to mention the fact that we both knit and have a lovely collection of wool hats, gloves, jumpers and socks to keep us warm.
So far though we've only seen it snow one day each year and not for very long. As much as I love the look of snow and it's a real novelty here in our part of Australia I really don't want to be driving on it.

snow in Hill End

snow in Hill End
(used one of the Pioneer Woman Actions on this)

Another benefit to living here is the amount of fruit trees in the village. Because the village used to be so much larger and it was at a time when people had to be as self sufficient as possible because the journey to Bathurst was incredibly slow and dangerous there are fruit trees all over the place.

IMG_4566small

IMG_4570small

PICT3017small

We also have lots of Kangaroos that hang around the village

PICT3352small 
 
PICT3366small

There's also silence. I've never lived somewhere so quiet most of the time and the stars are amazing  but I don't have photos of those.

Tiny House
I think this one is my favourite. It is partly based on a Hobbit hole but also partly on the Nissan Hut we used to live in. 

Tiny House
Tiny House
These two are based more on traditional simple drawings of houses.

Coming soon will be some more traditional cottage shapes along with some mushroom and toadstool houses and some more fairy tale based ones, even some tiny castles. I have some sketches for now. Just need to sit down and stitch some more and then wait until I can afford more hoops.


2 comments:

  1. That little house has an exciting history! I hope you don’t intend to sell it. Anyway, don’t you think that you should remodel your old tiny house? That rusty roof might have holes in it. I would suggest that you to have it maintained in order to prevent leaks.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Umm we don't own the tiny house any more. National Parks and Wildlife Service took it off Ruth's family in the 1960s.
      The roof is fine and doesn't have any leaks in it. Can't remodel as it's Heritage Listed so we can't actually make any changes of it.

      National Parks keeps the place maintained.

      Delete