New Tiny Home Village Site!

Welcome to our new Tiny Home Village! After months of debate, we have settled on a new site. This one has a more country feel, but we are blessed to have 3 lovely ponds, and great swimming. The site is a 100 acre working farm with Highland Cattle, chickens that lay eggs, and a market garden. We use a corner of the property. The farmer practices Holistic Management and moves the cattle around to various hay fields using electric fences. The farm is located just 1.5 hours from Toronto and is just south of Lindsay, a few minutes off Highway 35.

We have a vision of many Tiny Homes, as well as many canvas "Glamping Tents", with shared communal areas. We have mobilized quickly, and already have a shared kitchen tent, a dining room tent, and a fire pit. There is even a hot propane shower! We are using a porta potty for this summer, and anticipate switching to an outhouse using a "Humanure" system by the end of the summer. There is fabulous shade in the nearby cedar trees, and plenty of places to sit and watch the gorgeous sunrises and sunsets.

We're looking for the right people to join our group, and help us build infrastructure like a dock for the pond, a sturdier kitchen tent, and electricity for all the sleeping sites. There is an open house over the August long weekend (July 31-August 3), and if you'd like to visit, or even stay the night, please bring your own sleeping tent and supplies, as well as food for yourself or to share with the group. Please email to RSVP to lindafhochstetler@gmail.com to get a map and more details. 

Tiny Home Discussion Meeting

Are you REALLY interested in being a part of a Tiny Home Village? How about one that gathers people together on appreciation of art, the environment, and spirituality. If so, come out and let's envision it together. We're meeting again on Friday, January 31 at 7pm. Meeting place is the Sangria Lounge, 145 Roncesvalles Avenue, Toronto. RSVP to lindafhochstetler@gmail.com for reservations. Bring a friend!

The latest collection of vision ideas is:

• 8 individuals/couples
• $50,000 investment each
• purchase a property together for less than $400,000
• find 2+ acres of land on a lake (or possibly a large river)
• less than 2 hours from Toronto, probably around Peterborough or the Kawartha's
• each person also purchases their own Tiny Home on Wheels (up to 28 ft long)
• share the central cottage with 2-3 bedrooms, full kitchen, bathroom with shower, and laundry
• personal space plus shared activities and amenities

If you're ready to sign on, or maybe just want to check out who we are, come out and join the discussion. 

Tiny Home Village Potential

I think I've found a beautiful site for a Tiny Home Village. It has 183 acres, waterfront access to both a river and a private lake, and an open minded municipality that might be open to a Tiny Home Village. There is a house and 4 cottages, with potential for adding 38 more cottages, or Tiny Homes. Just under 200 km from Toronto and located in the Northern Kawarthas, this land appears to have everything I am looking for and costs only $895,000. Imagine if 10 people committed to purchasing this land together, and building a communal Tiny Home Village. Wouldn't it be a great place to retire and get old together? Let me know if you're interested! 

Tiny Home Village Potential

Siding is Completed

Where oh where did the summer go? We finally got the siding completed at the end of spring. Just in time to turn our attention to our big house renovations. I visited this Tiny Home a few times over the summer, and was pleased how cool it was. The circulation blows between the back door and the screen door, make for pleasant summer breezes. Great for sleeping and just hanging out, even during heat waves.

I enjoyed being totally off the grid with no need for hydro at all. My little solar panel and power bank generated enough power to keep the lights on and my tech toys powered. I enjoyed cooking outside on a propane camp stove. I did have one harrowing experience when I lit the stove (outside) and went inside to grab the coffee. Suddenly I heard a poof sound and ran outside to see the propane making a blow torch out of the piping. Seems the old piping had dissolved and caused a leak from the propane. I turned off the stove and decided to use the indoor electrical stove top till I could get home to replace it. Ah, the dangers of propane stoves!

Just relax

It's so damn windy and rainy this spring. We really need to move ahead with finishing the outside of the Tiny Home, to keep the neighbours happy, but it keeps raining. We tried to attach the steel roofing, but the wind kept nearly blowing us off the ladders. So we gave up.

Instead I went back to just sitting and enjoying the space. In fact, that's why I purchased the Tiny Home, so I would spend more time just resting and thinking. And maybe being more creative.

So if you've been wondering if we're making any progress on finishing the home... well, hopefully soon. The beautiful thing is how easy it was to get to this stage. A beautiful work in progress that isn't all work. 

My First Solar Panel!

So I got the 400W Power Bank working as one of the electrical sources. It was time to add a true off-the-grid Solar Panel to this system. Unfortunately, my brain doesn't get electricity. And I just didn't have it in my to try to learn. Every time I looked up solar systems, they had about 85 different pieces to put together. Like inverters and electrical wire and alligator clips and controllers. Really, it's totally incomprehensible to me. I felt like such an environmental loser but it just looked too complicated to learn.

And then I discovered the Goal Zero series at MEC (Mountain Equipment Coop). They make them as easy as plugging in a electrical plus. And so I bought one of the Boulder 100W Solar Panels. (I had to special order it, as they don't keep ones that big in stock, even in Toronto.) There is one cord from the Solar Panel that connects to the power bank. Easy peasy. And then the Power Bank has an LED display that lets you know how fast it's charging. This make it lots of fun. You can move the Solar Panel around and it lets you know how fast it's charging. It's so exciting to see the charging number going up.

So this one panel can charge about 40 watts per hour in the middle of winter on a good sunny day. The numbers mean something when you do the math. 40 watts per hour means the full 400 watts of the power bank could be charged in 10 hours. Obviously, there's not 10 hours of full sun in winter, so it's impossible to get a full charge per day if you use the full charge in one evening. But I also realized that for lights, charging phones and computers, and even my electric blanket, I don't need close to 400W in 24 hours. If I would buy a larger Power Bank that I could also use for cooking or heating, I would definitely have to buy more Solar Panels as well. But for starters, this is the easiest possible way into the Solar Panel world. I also learned that it's hard to keep Solar Panels charged in the winter, because almost as easy as the energy goes in, the cold also drains the battery, so you have to grab the Power Bank as the sun sets or the power simply drains back out. So much to learn, and you gotta just play around and figure it out like me. 

Tiny Flush Camp Toilet

You would not believe how many people ask me about the toilet arrangement in my Tiny Home. Like they're obsessed with thinking about their poo and what to do with it. And they can't believe when I tell them I take care of business in a corner behind a screen.

You see, we built our Tiny Home in November, just before the coldest winter in history. So my first weekend, there was no way I wanted to go outside in 2 foot snow just to use a loo. We considered composting toilets, and will probably purchase one this spring and build some kind of little house around it beside our Tiny Home. But they aren't cheap ($800), and more importantly, they don't work in the cold. We heat the Tiny Home when we visit, but not when we're not there. So in the winter, composting toilets aren't a great solution for us.

Instead, we purchased this little camp toilet. It's a Dometic toilet purchased at Canadian Tire in the camping section for $170. It has 2 reservoirs - one on top with a special RV Plumbing antifreeze liquid for flushing and one on the bottom to gather the pee and poo plus flushing liquid. This bottom container is sealed off, so there's really no smells between uses. We empty it out on the farm with the other animal manure when needed, depending on how often we use it.

We don't have running water, but we keep hand sanitizer handy, and really it feels quite civilized and convenient. It doesn't take much room, but gets the job done for us. (And don't you adore the little floor rug to keep our feet warm that my great grandmother made from rags many years ago?)