Writing from my 8x8 loft

One of the first questions I always get when I mention my tiny home in social settings is “how many square feet”. I guess square feet is a metric we all understand on many practical and status-signaling levels. Square feet can infer a lot about a person: their wealth, the size of their family, their neighborhood. These inferences can be accurate or not, but we use them to shortcut an understanding of who we are talking to.?

So when I answer, "308 square feet", it likely confuses the calculus. Who lives in 308 square feet?

??Is it someone with no ability to buy a normal house? Probably not. Actually buying a tiny house often (but not always) requires liquid net worth, as there are not yet tiny home mortgages.

??Is it someone who doesn’t care about any material things? Probably not. Tiny homes are often decked-out with fewer but higher-quality things.?

??Is it someone who chose to live differently and had to navigate a bunch of complex and disparate regulations to do so? Absolutely Yes.?

??Tiny dwellers are also people who enjoy doing more with less.

This month I moved my “office” into my 64 square foot loft in order to de-clutter the living room space and remove my podcasting equipment from the range of my chewing rescue puppy. I now sit on a pillow on the padded floor which is good for my middle-aged hamstring flexibility. ??

It’s good working in the tiny loft. Private. Creative. It is a space dedicated to work. Even that little bit of separation helps my focus. I don’t miss my L-Shaped cherry executive desk or the prestige of having my name on the door at all. I open the loft window to the juniper mountain air I love to breathe.? Choice is better than square feet. Tiny homes enable choice.

If you are short on choice and yearning for an unconventional path, take my Unconventional Values Quiz and follow along on your journey to something unique.