December 12, 2018
Rich here. I’ve been giving some thought to the “what’s next?” question and I think it might be a tiny house – maybe not the one above, but something small. After all, we’ve really lived in a tiny house for the past seven years and been just fine, but I do feel like I need a little more space than Legacy has.
It’s got me thinking a lot about issues with living in small spaces. I read r/TinyHouses on Reddit (if you don’t know Reddit, you should!) and there are lots of discussions about floor plans and building techniques but very little about storage issues. We have all the storage space we need on Legacy (certainly not all we’d want!), but when the storage space gets small, it seems to also get inconvenient. Take the locker below for example:
This was designed as a hanging locker but not only do we not have anything much to hang, we don’t have the luxury of using all this space to hang what we do have. Instead, it’s filled top to bottom with stuff. Important stuff.
This is fine if you want the mask and snorkel on the left side, but the storage goes all the way down to floor level. If we want the bag of extra alternator parts at the bottom, everything else has to come out first. Aaargh! (I’m prompted to write this post because I just went digging for our extra cell phone holder – at the very bottom!)
We’ve all seen pictures of the ideal mechanics tool drawer like the one below – shallow drawers where everything has its place and is very easily accessed. As space gets smaller, this kind of thing doesn’t seem possible. Picture the tools below, rearranged into a shoe box, along with the tools from six other drawers. Get my point?
On an actively cruising boat, versus a tiny house, there’s the additional problem in that the amount of spares required pretty much equals a whole additional boat. (Sometimes I think we should just tow a spare yacht behind us!) I know you need spares and supplies to maintain a house, but it’s a different issue when the hardware store is a short drive away and a dripping faucet won’t sink your house. And then there are sheds: magical land based creations that really have no equal on a cruising boat. Here’s the closest we’ve come to a shed…
Our v-berth pretty much has the same issue we have with our deep, hanging locker. I often need stuff from the bottom, back bins. That means lifting the top bins off while bent over into the v-berth as far as I can stretch. And then I dig all through a bottom back bin just to find that the pipe cutter I desperately needed isn’t there. Really infuriating. To mitigate that, we’ve started keeping a photo inventory. I’ve tried but I’ve never been able to keep a written inventory current. With a photo inventory, we just snap pictures of everything in a bin or locker and dump them into a folder on the computer with names like “Bow Bin 1.” Now I dig through the photos before I dig through the bins. Much easier.
We have a pretty small boat and while smaller makes some things easier and less expensive: lighter lines, smaller less expensive winches, smaller dock lines and so forth, smaller hasn’t made the storage issue any easier. No matter the size of the cruising boat, you pretty much need to carry the same spares and the same living necessities (assuming the same number of occupants). My pants aren’t any smaller living on a 38 foot boat than they would be living on a 46 foot boat. (Yea, yea, I know, less pizza! 😉 ) Except for the shed option, I’m sure this is the same with a small house.
Oh well, semi-rant over. Legacy has actually worked out very well for us and mining the bottom of a locker for our extra bag of coffee is a small price to pay compared to how she allows us to live. (Again, maybe this would be the same with a tiny house?) -Rich
