YES! Magazine

Living Big in a Tiny House

I reviewed Dee Williams’ The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir for Cities Are Now, the Winter 2015 issue of YES! Magazine.

At 41, Dee Williams was a “normal, middle-class, middle-of-the-road woman with a mortgage and a job and friends.” She worked as a state hazardous waste inspector and owned a 1927 Portland, Ore., fixer-upper that she shared with a rotation of roommates. She “went running and climbing and paddling, racing in a thousand different directions at a thousand miles per hour.”

Then one day she woke up in an intensive care unit tethered to a urine bag, IV pole, and heart monitor, and the doctors diagnosed her with a potentially fatal heart condition. “It felt like death, or my mortality, or something bigger still, was leaning into my bed with the moonlight, clattering when I moved hangers in the closet, buzzing behind the sound of the shower running or my car idling in traffic,” she writes in The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir.

Soon after her diagnosis, Williams discovered an article about an Iowa City man who built and moved into a house the size of a shed. The idea of building such a little house—the process itself and the paring down it would require to move in—enticed Williams. “Somehow, it would shrink my life into a manageable mouthful,” she writes. Before long, Williams was drafting blueprints for her own tiny house.

Designing a house, even a very small one, involved some “outright panic” for Williams. She planned to live in the backyard of a house belonging to friends more than a hundred miles away in Olympia, Wash. Thus the house would need to fit on a trailer and be under 13.5 feet tall per Department of Transportation requirements. It would also need to withstand the rough shaking that transporting a house on the highway can present.

Excerpt from the book:

I thought I’d find something in all of this, and I got more than I bargained for. I discovered a new way of looking at the sky, the winter rain, the neighbors, and myself; and a different way of spending my time. Most important, I stumbled into a new sort of “happiness,” one that didn’t hinge on always getting what I want, but rather, on wanting what I have. It’s the kind of happiness that isn’t tied so tightly to being comfortable (or having money and property), but instead is linked to a deeper sense of satisfaction—to a sense of humility and gratitude, and a better understanding of who I am in my heart.

I now this sounds cheesy, and in fact, it sounds fairly similar to the gobbledygook that friends have thrown at me just after having their first baby. But the facts are the facts: I found a certain bigness in my little house—a sense of largeness, freedom, and happiness that comes when you see there’s no place you’d rather be.

As she built, Williams experienced sore muscles, bumps, bruises, smashed fingers—and lost her ponytail after she accidentally glued it to her house. She also had a lot of fun. “Risking life and limb every day” distracted her from her potentially debilitating disease. And she erected an undeniably attractive 84-square-foot cedar-and-knotty-pine house that manages to look open and airy in photos despite its minuscule size.

In a society drowning in commercials, books, and schemes promising to deliver us from hardship, it might have been tempting for Williams to oversell downsizing. She resisted that temptation—The Big Tiny abounds with refreshing honesty, humor, and endearing quirkiness.

Williams admits that getting rid of her three-bedroom house full of stuff was more agonizing than she expected, and living in less than a hundred square feet isn’t always comfortable. She has no refrigerator or plumbing. She cooks on a single burner and sleeps with her propane heater off, because she’s afraid her house will catch fire. She estimates she’s happy about 85 percent of the time, about the same amount of time she was happy in her big house.

When she escaped the “mindless rotisserie of work and projects” that guided her in her old house, Williams discovered a satisfaction that came from getting to know herself. “Letting go of ‘stuff,’” she writes, “allowed the world to collapse behind me as I moved, so I became nothing more or less than who I simply was: Me.”


The house and its large skylight helped her connect with nature in a new way. “I like the excitement of the windstorms and the rain pounding down a thousand different ways, inches from my head,” she writes. She also has more time for drinking tea on her porch and chatting with friends, because she no longer has to juggle bills and worry about constant home repairs.

What Williams celebrates most is that her new lifestyle requires her to depend on others. She lives “in community” with her friends Hugh and Annie, their two sons, and Hugh’s elderly aunt Rita because she’s located in their backyard and needs their running water. Williams happily takes on the role of Rita’s caretaker in exchange for using Rita’s shower and occasionally her oven. “If more people understood how nice it is to have a sense of home that extends past our locked doors, past our neighbors’ padlocks…we’d live in a very different place,” she insists.

Williams’ enthusiasm for small living and her charming hand-built house have already helped launch a tiny house movement. The Big Tiny will encourage many more people to assess whether bigger and more means happier—proof that making something tiny can ignite something very big.

If you liked this post, check out more of my popular posts about living simply:

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The Best Fast Food You’ve Ever Had

By Abby Quillen

Here’s my article about Portland’s food cart revolution, from the current issue of YES! Magazine. We’ve had a week straight of ice-cold fog, and these photos, taken last July, are making me delirious with summer longing (not to mention hungry).

Portland’s Food Truck Heaven: How a New Kind of Fast Food Brings Jobs, Flavor, and Walkability

Immigrants and other restaurant workers get a way to rise in local economies. Communities get the best fast food they’ve ever had.

by Abby Quillen

At noon on a sunny day in Portland, Ore., in what not long ago was a vacant lot, customers roam past brightly painted food carts perusing menus for vegan barbeque, Southern food, Korean-Mexican fusion, and freshly squeezed juice.

The smell of fried food and the tent-covered seating bring to mind a carnival, but a number of Portland’s food carts take a healthy approach to street food. The Big Egg, for instance, serves sandwiches and wraps made with organic farm-fresh eggs, balsamic caramelized onions, and arugula. Their to-go containers are compostable, and next to the order window is a list of local farms where they source their ingredients.

“We don’t have a can opener. We make everything ourselves, so it’s very time-consuming. And that’s the way we want it,” says Gail Buchanan, who runs The Big Egg with her partner, Emily D. Morehead.

The Big Egg usually sells out, says Buchanan as she hands a customer the last sandwich of the day, one made with savory portobello mushrooms. And on weekends, customers form a line down the block, willing to wait up to 45 minutes for their food.

Buchanan and Morehead dreamed of opening a restaurant for years. They had food service experience, saved money, and spent their free time developing menu items. “Then 2008 happened,” says Buchanan. Difficulty getting business loans after the recession convinced them to downsize their dream to a custom-designed food cart. When a developer announced he was opening a new food cart lot, Buchanan and Morehead jumped in.

Portland’s permissive land-use regulations allow vendors to open on private lots—food cart “pods”—like the one that hosts The Big Egg. Local newspaper Willamette Week estimates there are about 440 food carts in the metro area.

The food cart scene has taken off in Portland in a way it hasn’t in other cities—transforming vacant lots into community spaces and making neighborhoods more pedestrian-friendly and livable.

Recent features in Sunset, Bon Appétit, Saveur, and on the Food Network have pointed to Portland’s food cart pods as tourist destinations. There are even food cart walking tours.

Despite their success, Buchanan and Morehead have found that running a food cart isn’t easy money. They both work 70 hours a week, most of it prepping menu items—their fire-roasted poblano salsa alone takes three hours to prepare. But they’re grateful for the experience. They plan on opening a restaurant soon, like a growing number of he city’s most popular vendors.

Many of those vendors are first-generation immigrants who’ve found a way to make a living by sharing food traditions.

A few blocks from The Big Egg, Wolf and Bear’s serves Israeli cuisine from Jeremy Garb’s homeland. But it’s Israeli cuisine with a Portland influence, says his co-owner, Tanna TenHoopen Dolinsky. “It’s inspired by food in Israel, but we sprout our chickpeas and grill everything and don’t use a deep fryer.”

Wolf and Bear’s has grown to two locations and employs 12 people, and Garb and Dolinsky are considering opening a restaurant. “There’s a feeling of opportunity in Portland, and I think the rise of cart culture is representative of that,” says Dolinsky.

Nong Poonsukwattana has made the most of that opportunity with her food cart, Nong’s Khao Man Gai, famous for her signature rice and chicken dish. She describes hers as the best kind of fast food: “Fast service but not fast cooked. It’s fresh. I serve happiness.”

Poonsukwattana arrived from Bangkok, Thailand, in 2003 with $70. She waitressed at five different restaurants, working every day and night of the week, before buying her own downtown food cart in 2009.

Now she has two carts and a brick-and-mortar commercial kitchen and employs 10 people. Recently she started bottling and selling her own sauce.

Poonsukwattana likes the sense of community in the food cart pods, “even though competition is fierce,” but especially the cultural exchange with customers, many of whom she knows by name.

“I think it’s always good to support local business, mom-and-pop shops, or small businesses with different ideas. It’s beautiful to see people fight for a better future for themselves.”

Abby Quillen wrote this article for How To Live Like Our Lives Depend On It, the Winter 2014 issue of YES! Magazine.

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Making Economic Exchange a Loving Human Interaction

By Abby Quillen

Here’s my review of Good Morning, Beautiful Business by Judy Wicks, which appears in the current issue of YES! Magazine.

The Economy of Smallness: Making Economic Exchange a Loving Human Interaction

Philadelphia restauranteur and local economies movement leader Judy Wicks on making good and doing good.

by Abby Quillen

A few years after Judy Wicks opened the White Dog Cafe in West Philadelphia, she hung a sign in her bedroom closet as a daily reminder of what her business could be if she gave it creativity and care. Two decades after its humble beginnings, Wicks’ restaurant had become a model for socially responsible business, and Wicks herself was a national leader of the movement for local, living economies.

The message on that sign, “Good morning, beautiful business,” is also the title of Wicks’ memoir, the story of a woman driven by a love of community, a strong sense of justice, and a taste for adventure.

Wicks worked for VISTA in a remote native village in Alaska, laid down in front of a bulldozer to stop the demolition of a historic building, grew one of the most socially responsible businesses in the nation, and co-founded several sustainable business organizations. She also threw some fabulous parties. The courage, creativity, and sense of fun in her story are contagious.

Growing up in the 1950s, Wicks shunned the stereotypes of how girls should behave and longed to play baseball with the boys. But when, almost by accident, she became a businesswoman and entrepreneur, she recognized that her feminine desire to nurture was an asset in bringing collaboration to business and creating a more caring economy.

In the early days of the White Dog Cafe, located in the downstairs of Wicks’ Victorian brownstone, she couldn’t afford to build a commercial kitchen or hire a chef. She cooked the restaurant’s meals in her own kitchen while she watched her young son and daughter, and customers tromped upstairs to use the family’s bathroom. Eventually the restaurant filled three row houses, a companion retail store filled two more, and her businesses were grossing $5 million annually.

But Wicks wasn’t content to do well; she wanted to do good. Before most Americans had heard of farm-to-table, Wicks bought her ingredients from local farms and breweries. When she read about factory farming, she switched to humane sources for the restaurant’s meat. Then she created Fair Food, a humane farm network and free consulting program to teach her competitors about the importance of using humanely sourced meat.

Wicks also used her business as a platform for social and political activism. She traveled to Nicaragua, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, Mexico, and Cuba to establish sister restaurants and build friendships in parts of the world where she felt U.S. foreign policy was doing harm. She held “Table Talks” and published a newsletter to inform her customers about her trips as well as other peace and justice issues.

“‘Food, fun, and social activism’ became the White Dog motto,” writes Wicks, who attributes many of her socially responsible business decisions to living above her restaurant. “When we live and do business in the same community, reconnecting home life and work life, we are more likely to run businesses in the best interest of the community we care about.”

Wicks paid her employees a living wage, started a mentoring program for the area’s high school students, and made her business the first in Pennsylvania to purchase 100 percent renewable energy. Good Morning, Beautiful Business proves that profit can accompany making the world better. It should be widely read in business schools and entrepreneurial circles, but it offers ample lessons for others as well.

Wicks challenges us to look at how we can make a difference in our daily lives and with our dollars. “You can find a way to make economic exchange one of the most satisfying, meaningful, and loving of human interactions,” she writes. At a time when we hear much about what’s wrong with the economy, Wicks helps us imagine an alternative.

She envisions “a new economy based on smallness” made up of independent businesses and decentralized farms that work cooperatively, invest in each other, and pay attention to a triple bottom line: people, planet, and profit. Through her work at the Social Venture Network, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), and other organizations, she has spent decades working to realize this vision.

“We’re out to create a global system of human-scale, interconnected, local, living economies that provide basic needs to all the world’s people,” she writes. “To put it simply, we believe in happiness.”

Abby Quillen wrote this article for The Human Cost of Stuff, the Fall 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Abby is a freelance writer living in Eugene, Ore. She blogs at abbyquillen.com.

Can Money Buy Happiness?

By Abby Quillen

Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet. – Henry James

Several months ago, I realized that money makes a lot of people miserable. In our household, paying bills was a source of anxiety, and many of my friends were feeling a similar financial squeeze. An older friend came into a sizable sum of money, but it didn’t exactly bring him joy; he vexed over how he should invest it and whether it would be enough for retirement. Then two close friends got into a feud – and I suspected a monetary transaction was at the root of it.

That’s when someone introduced me to the concept of the gift economy, which Charles Eisenstein articulates in his book, Sacred Economics. His contention is that money has “contributed to alienation, competition, and scarcity, destroyed community, and necessitated endless growth.”

“One of the things I talk about,” says Eisenstein in a beautiful film about the book, “is the sense of wrongness that I had as a child. I think most kids have some sense that it’s not supposed to be this way. For example, that you’re not supposed to actually hate Monday and be happy when you don’t have to go to school. School should be something that you love. Life should be something that you love.“

Eisenstein and other gift economy proponents argue it’s time for us to move toward a non-monetary economy. “We didn’t earn any of the things that keep us alive or that make life good. … We didn’t earn being able to breathe. We didn’t earn having a planet that can provide food. We didn’t earn the sun. So I think that on some level people have this in-born gratitude. … In a gift economy, it’s not true the way it is in our money economy that everyone’s in competition with everyone else. In a gift economy when you have more than you need, you give it, and that’s how you receive status.“

Gift economics is compelling, and Sacred Economics, the book and film, are worth exploring. The Creative Commons, wikis, and open source are examples of successful gift economies in action, and I’m sure we’ll see many more in the future. Eisenstein says he tries to bring the ideal of a gift economy into his own life by, for instance, letting people pay whatever they wish for the materials he self publishes.

The chain Panera Bread has famously experimented with pay-what-you-can ideas, and locally, a few institutions are experimenting with gift economics. “We don’t sell anything,” the founder of a non-profit school told me. They do, however, actively fund-raise for monetary donations, which begs the question of how removed these institutions are (or can be) from the money economy.

On a personal level, I fear turning away from money would be as dysfunctional as chasing it. The gift economy seems to reflect something that many of us feel – an inner ambivalence about whether it is “good” to make money, to spend it, and to have material things. But money is here to stay. The question is: can making and spending it be a source of good in the world and in our lives?

Judy Wicks insists it can. I recently reviewed her memoir Good Morning, Beautiful Business for YES! Magazine. She opened Philadelphia’s famous White Dog Cafe, one of the first restaurants in the nation to feature local, organic, and humane food. The business made millions, which Wicks used to create sustainable business networks and build local economies across the country. “You can find a way to make economic exchange one of the most satisfying, meaningful, and loving of human interactions,” she writes.

Wicks inspired me to think about how I can transform earning, saving, and spending money into a more satisfying, joyful, and meaningful part of my life. To that end, I’ve been taking a moment when bills arrive to connect them with what I’m paying for. For instance, as I examine our electricity usage or mortgage bill, I remind myself of our warm, cozy, comfortable home, which brings us ample joy. I’m already noticing a new emotion arising when the postman drops off a stack of bills – gratitude.

I’ve also been exploring how I can use money to make the world better, even if in a micro way. I’m budgeting a little cash every month to give away anonymously. What a powerful exercise! I’m amazed by how hard it is to let go of cash. But it feels fabulous to use money, which is so often a source of discontent, to spread a little joy.

There’s no question that money and the pursuit of it causes a lot of misery and devastation in the world, but I hope I’m on my way to a healthier, more joyful relationship with it in my own life.

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Do you feel conflicted about making and spending money? Have you found ways to make money a satisfying, joyful, and meaningful part of your life? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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The Cost of Things

By Abby Quillen

The past two weekends, my neighbors held a yard sale. Apparently my boys could smell commerce happening nearby, because within moments of awakening, they were at the window. “The neighbor has a tent on his lawn,” Ezra announced. Both boys spent most of the weekends outside asking questions and fondling nicknacks or glued to the window watching people come and go.

“We need a canoe.” “Ball next door!” “Mom, can we go look at the games again?” “My boat.” They managed to tote home a number of odd things from the free box, including a stained white plastic ball that looks like it came from the antenna of a Jeep, a telephone that would have been state-of-the-art when I was Ezra’s age, and a wide-brimmed hat that fits no one in the house.

These finds joined other relics that Ezra’s lugged home over the years, including a couple of other land-line telephones, a broken audio cassette recorder, and a microphone. Apparently our compulsion to collect stuff starts at a young age, and it only seems to escalate from there. On our recent camping trip, I was amazed by all the things people bring to “get away from it all” – super-sized motorhomes, patio furniture, dog beds and crates and yards. Of course, we toted our share of stuff back and forth from our car, although fortunately we were severely constricted by its compact size.

It’s not that I don’t love stuff. Every time I turn on my washing machine, drop into my bed at the end of the day, or turn on my computer, I am thankful for the material things that make our lives better. My goal is not necessarily to have less. I’m not on a mission to pare my belongings to 100 things as many bloggers have amazingly done. I just want to be intentional about what I bring into my life. I want to spend my money, time, and attention on things that bring me happiness and satisfaction. And I want to try to keep in mind a purchase’s entire life cycle: where did it come from and where will it end up?

In this issue of YES! Magazine (all about the “Human Cost of Stuff”) Annie Leonard says it well: “I’m neither for nor against stuff. I like stuff it’s well-made, honestly marketed, used for a long time, and at the end of its life recycled in a way that doesn’t trash the planet, poison people, or exploit workers. Our stuff should not be artifacts of indulgence and disposability, like toys that are forgotten 15 minutes after the wrapping comes off, but things that are both practical and meaningful.” (My review of Judy Wicks’ Good Morning, Beautiful Business is also in this issue. Check it out if you see a copy!)

Visiting second-hand stores helps me be more intentional about new purchases. All those cluttered shelves of hardly used, outdated appliances helps take the sheen off the marketing and shiny newness in box and department stores. Recently Ezra and I wandered through several used stores together. He’s been wanting a Leap Pad learning system, because he loves playing with his friend’s, and I heard used stores tend to have vast quantities of them. When the first three stores didn’t have one, Ezra was desperate to bring home something – anything. He insisted he would be happy with a pair of butterfly wings, a toy cash register, or a toy laptop instead of a Leap Pad. I convinced him to wait until we checked out the last store.

They had exactly what Ezra wanted, and it was just $5. “I’m so glad we waited,” Ezra beamed as he hugged his new Leap Pad. I’m hoping he learned something about being intentional about purchases. And for now, fortunately, the yard sales are over; please don’t let any of our neighbors open an ice cream cart.

Do you try to be intentional about your purchases? Do you have any tips to share? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

The Most Powerful Thing in the World

By Abby Quillen

It’s March, and as I write this, it couldn’t be lovelier here. (March does have a way of surprising us, doesn’t it?) In these parts it came in with sunshine, daffodils, and birdsong.

Last week I received my copy of the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine, which includes my review of Janisse Ray’s The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food. Ray’s book is about seed saving, and it’s part memoir, part poetic manifesto, and part how-to.

Ray presents a bleak scenario about seeds. Ninety-four percent of vintage, open-pollinated seed varieties have been lost forever since the turn of the 20th Century. “Goodbye, cool seeds,” she writes. “Goodbye, history of civilization. Goodbye, food.”

Nonetheless, The Seed Underground is an upbeat read. Ray calls seeds “the most hopeful thing in the world,” and she profiles a handful of “quiet, under-the-radar revolutionaries” who are collecting and exchanging seeds in a quest to preserve our food heritage against enormous odds.

The Seed Underground inspired me to learn more about seed saving and got me excited about experimenting more in my garden this spring. I hope you’ll check out my review if you see a copy of YES! Magazine. I’ll be sure to post it here once it’s available online.

In other news, we survived our long stretch of sniffly, sneezy, fevered February days inside, helped greatly by … a pack of construction paper. Valentines. Glider planes. Homemade kites. Crowns. Cards. Envelopes. Shapes. Handcrafted books. Oh yes, we are making the most of this $5 pack of colored paper. What a fantastic reminder that kids don’t really need expensive toys to have a great time. And often the most basic supplies inspire the most creativity.

I hope you’re also enjoying some good weather, or some creative afternoons inside, or some combination of those, as we are.

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