Rosie & Land!

Over the past three years I’ve been traveling in my tiny house/stage while continuing to build on the road between odd jobs. As amazing as this process has been I am finally ready to have a home-base to work from. My partner, Marisa, and I were contemplating buying a house. We were even approved for a loan, but the houses we saw that we could actually afford weren’t well built and/or there were too many problems to fix. And even if we could have been approved for more, we weren’t interested. The last thing either of us wants is to spend the rest of our lives working our asses off to pay for a mortgage. We don’t want to be trapped under high utility bills. The realty experience in and of itself was reason alone to NOT go through with the loan. And who wants to give banks money these days? They have far too much as it is… We thought buying a house would be easy. We planned on fixing one up and then selling it in five years to begin our dream place. But the reality is that buying land and building our dream place is just more practical…

So we are in the process of buying land. I found an intentional community in Ash Fork, Arizona and called to find out if the owner would be interested in selling us some of her land. I called a few places in Arizona. She was the one person who seemed genuinely interested and actually kind of excited about having two more crazy off-grid types out this way. Her intentional community hasn’t panned out well, most likely due to the remote location. We are an hour west of Flagstaff Arizona, but it takes an hour and a half to drive there because the roads into our place, which I affectionately call our driveway, are so rocky and rough that it takes thirty minutes to get to the house.

We arrived August 2. We’ve been getting Rosie semi-set up (I will later pour some concrete for a more level and secure foundation), by stabilizing her with jacks, putting our plants out in the front, setting up an outdoor kitchen space and solar shower, and building a compost bin so we can use our compost toilet. As much as I have loved the traveling process, pulling Rosie was not easy. She is heavy and big – built like a house… but on a trailer; she’s kind of a monster back there, one you love and are scared of. She sways in windy weather even with the distributors; you have to be extra careful going down these mountainous roads, and going up means downshifting and going slow in hot weather so the truck doesn’t overheat. I’m so glad to finally have her in one place… for good! No more moving, unless it’s just a few feet or so. I am HOME! Exciting for me, since I feel in some ways that I’ve always been searching for home, hence a home on wheels.

At some point I plan on opening up the stages and stabilizing them permanently. Then I would like to put in some glass to separate inside from outside, with a door that leads to my little stage/porch area. I’ll put some sort of canopy over the top to protect the stages/porch and then I’ll add more footage area – possibly extending it to the other side as well – a wrap around stage/porch if you will. I’m also thinking about building up, creating a pitched roof so rainwater is easier to catch and creating a loft area. I think about all the hard work I put into making a pulley system for the stages and I start to re-think all of this, but the truth is, even if I change my plans so that the pulley system isn’t needed, it was an amazing learning experience.

But for now, we are homesteading, which means focusing on building more tiny structures (not structures with stages) to live in, play in, dream in. We have no electricity or water. We are hauling water for now and plan on building a rainwater catchment system. We need to focus on solar panels as well… There’s a lot to do! So it may be a while before I work on Rosie again. But when I do – I’ll make sure to document!!

Till then – S.



All photos by Marisa Muro