A Tiny House

As often happens during this time of year, the office that I work in is turned completely on its head for approximately 4 weeks while colleges and universities across the country welcome their students back onto campus.  Although being away from home for three of those weeks is NO excuse for not posting, I'd like to think it gives a pretty good explanation of where I've been hiding out :)  In a complete turn of miraculous events with all the stars and planets aligning at just the right moment, the schedule opened up in such a way that the J man and I were able to get a full Saturday/Sunday combo of days off--perfect timing for his cousin's wedding and the discovery of a Tiny House open house in NH!  So early on Saturday afternoon, we loaded up the truck and headed to Andover for a night of wedding fun that more than raised the bar for all weddings to come.  Bride and groom were impeccable and the pinkcentric (that means very pink for those of you unfamiliar with that word) color scheme spoke straight to my Barbie girl heart.  The paper accents were absolutely exquisite, and all designed and created BY HAND by J's sister.  If you're a member of that old website known as Facebook, you should totally check out her page for All On Paper because this lady is a master of paper!  The wedding took up all of Saturday plus some of Sunday because we had to get a delicious breakfast at the hotel before heading to Jackson on our Tiny House adventure.  Oh what an adventure it was!  Two and a half hours of driving might not seem like a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon, but for professional drivers such as we are, a scenic drive on a beautiful day with no arrival time looming is heavenly.  Eventually we made it to Jackson, NH, but the Garmin was not being super friendly and we struggled to find the site of the open house.  As we're driving in circles looking for The Lodge at Jackson Village, J suddenly blurts out, "wow...look at THAT tiny house..."  Talk about an AHA moment.  I took my attention away from the road for a few short seconds only to glimpse in person the Tiny House that I'd been admiring online for the past few days!  It was marvelous!  Tiny is certainly the right word for it; I think my current height might slow any plans that were forming in my head to build such a small abode, but it sure was fun to finally get to see what tiny really means.  As we were walking across the parking lot, we bumped into a few folks who were also checking the place out.  They told us they were from Boston (like us) and that they had seen the open house advertised online (also like us) and were really interested in checking it out (again like us).  They were super excited to find out that they weren't the only "crazy" folks who had made the drive up there, and I can assure you that the feeling was mutual.  Crazy as it might have been, the ends most certainly justified the means.  When we went inside the house, we met the owner of The Lodge who explained how she had started following Jay Shafer and his Tumbleweed Tiny Houses, and eventually was lucky enough to have a house built by Jay delivered to her parking lot to live for the next few months.  It's even available to rent for a night so that visitors can get the full Tiny experience.  What a great story, and what a great Tiny house:

Tiny House courtesy of The Lodge at Jackson Village and Jay Shafer