I reach my arms into a pile of damp clothes and groan. Yet again, our ventless condensation dryer has failed to do its job. The clothes will have to hang to dry.
The problem is, our laundry room also serves as a shared bedroom for my two daughters, the only closet and storage space for our family and a playroom. It?s snowing outside and there really isn?t anywhere left for a drying rack since our entire home is just 400 square feet. My husband and I don?t even have a bedroom, just a mattress-sized loft space perched above our kitchen and living room space. Our running joke is you can sit on the living room sofa while frying bacon in the kitchen.
This is tiny house living, and it?s not exactly the Instagrammable lifestyle that?s portrayed on TV and in magazines. Trust me, we tried it all, sojourning across Canada for nearly a decade, looking for the perfect home. The journey to tiny
In 2008, discouraged by Vancouver?s skyrocketing real estate prices, my husband and I decided to leave the city, driven by a desire for an affordable single family home.
We bought a 2,000-square-foot, two-car garage home on the west coast of Vancouver Island, and it felt like the perfect ?starter? home. As children of the ?80s, we both grew up in spacious suburban homes and had no reason to doubt this would work for us the way it did for our parents.
Our first home on Vancouver Island. (Photo taken a decade later.) Photo: Courtesy of Gillian Robinson Riddell
That dream home put us on equal foot...