The roof is up, and besides the paint and some exterior light fixtures, the outside of our house pretty much finished!    The dark bronze metal roof has a sleek look to it that has a sheen finish in bright light, and a charcoal look in more subdued light.     This roof will be great on snowy Central Oregon days, as snow will slide off of the slick surface quite easily.   From this angle, the roof has more of a charcoal look to it Our utility closet door is installed with the bevelled Cedar matching the siding on the ends The light reflecting on the roof here makes the roof color look much lighter As we walked through our glass front door, the changes in the interior were not obvious, but were very significant.  Just about all the electrical wiring, light fixture installation, and plumbing is complete.  The mini-split HVAC unit is also installed, easing my fears of the scorching summer day in Bend.  The heating ...

If you follow my photography, then you probably know how important the outdoors are to me.   Not only do protected wild spaces allow me to have the job I have, but they also have been the root of so many things that I deeply love in my life.   The outdoors has taught me more about myself than just about any other single element in my life, bar family.   For that reason, I am an impassioned conservationist and environmentalist.   If you dare call me a tree-hugger, I would smile with pride.   Lauren is definitely on the same team as I am, but I am definitely the crusader on environmental issues between us.   Together, we try to recycle as much as possible, pick up trash whenever we are out hiking, reduce our water usage, and buy sustainable products from companies with sustainable practices.   Overall, we just try to do our small part in helping create a world that we would be happy to pass along to future generations.   If along the way we can...

Although not a ton has changed since our last building update, it does not feel that way.  The siding is finished, so our home officially has an exterior.  This has been monumental in the steps towards visualizing what the house will look like when it is complete.   As with all of the progress thus far, one of the things that has surprised us the most is how quickly  Mustard Seed Tiny Homes  gets things done.  We prioritize quality over speed any day of the week, but when a builder works with the best people to provide you both, then you know you have it good.   For the siding, we decided to go with Vinyl Lap Siding on the bottom of the sides, Board & Batten on the top of the sides, and Beveled Cedar on the ends.   We chose these materials because we really liked the idea of having a couple different textures on the house.   We felt like we were walking a very fine line between choosing something unique and a...

Our Adventure Abode is making a lot of progress!  Although we are already a couple of weeks into the construction, I stopped to take my first look at our home a couple of days ago.  After months of imagining and visualizing what the space will look and feel like based on floor plan drawings, taking my first steps into the home brought so much more clarity to my eyes.  My thoughts rolled along. "This is where the sink will be. This shower is actually pretty big.  Man that is a small bedroom." As I wandered around the 31-foot trailer, I could not help but feel proud.  I am proud to have this opportunity and generally just very proud that we made this decision in the first place.  The rawness of the exposed wooden frame and the Jeld Wen brand stickers adhered to the windows was a gripping reminder that this is a work in progress, and this is only the beginning.  Anyway, all of the framing and the house-wrap is done.  The door and the windows are ...

We decided to go Tiny, and we are so excited for what the future has in store for us.  However, living in a pint-sized home was not always how we thought our lives would unfold.  Having a diminutive living space has its lifestyle perks such as forcing you to shed the dead weight of superfluous material possessions in your life. Yet, if we had a bank account that was a bottomless pit, it would be very difficult to say that we would still prefer to live in a Tiny House rather than a conventionally sized home.  Having less space just for the sake of having less space was not enough to convince us to make the plunge into Tiny living.  It was not until we started crunching the numbers that the abstract idea of living in a Tiny Home seemed like a more approachable reality.  As soon as we knew we wanted to leave Atlanta and move to a much smaller city, we began researching what part of the country would be a good fit for our lifestyle.  We s...