tiny house or airstream, or skoolie, or, or, or
We've been planning to renovate this house pretty much since the day we closed (it went into foreclosure while we were living here and the bank gave us a deal). That was ... um ... eight years ago? A really long time. Unfortunately, our bank account doesn't always align with my visions and I'm forced into patience. Which is fine, because I can't even count how many times we've changed our plans for this house.
But what to do while we renovated? We've been dealing with this question for about three years now. At first we thought we'd buy another small house, live there while we fixed this one up, then rent one and live in the other. Well, the market here is super hot and houses are being placed under contract before they are even listed. Plus, I was a little (*cough* a lot *cough*) picky. I mean, not very, but I did want a place where we could keep chickens, which ruled out many of the subdivisions. I didn't want a smaller yard than we have now (which isn't asking much, since we have less than half an acre here). And I didn't want a fixer-upper because I wanted to move right in so we could get to work on this house ... anyway, we looked for two years.
Our next thought - a skoolie! (A renovated school bus that we could live/travel in.) Well, now we had the travel bug. We knew what kind of bus we wanted, the renovations we wanted to make ... well, not we. If it's one thing I've learned, we may have the knowledge and the know-how to do something, but we don't always have the time. And this was the killer - the company we wanted to use wasn't the best at communicating with us and so we slowly let this idea die.
Plan three: AN AIRSTREAM! (This was by far our most favorite idea and is still up there.) I still can't believe we managed to hold off on this. We even found several we liked - already renovated! - and didn't pull the trigger. We live in the city limits and one of codes states that you can't store an RV/trailer on your property. You can use one as guest housing, but not for more than fourteen days straight. "Fine," we thought, "no big deal. We'll just take it off the property for a weekend every two weeks - go to a state park! - and then come back." This was when we almost bought one. But we missed out on one and then we started thinking (because it does occasionally happen, even here), "What will we do with it after the renovations are finished?" Well, the answer to that is, of course, pay to store it somewhere. We even have a storage facility not far away that has RV storage. But we didn't want to add a monthly bill, because our ultimate goal is to get rid of bills.
Where does that leave us? Well, in scouring our city codes, I discovered that we don't need approval to build a shed that is less than one-third the size of our lot. We'll just need permits to run water and electricity. Stay tuned.