The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir
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Dee Williams’s life changed in an instant, with a near-death experience in the aisle of her local grocery store. Diagnosed with a heart condition at age forty-one, she was all too suddenly reminded that life is short, time is precious, and she wanted to be spending hers with the people and things she truly loved. That included the beautiful sprawling house in the Pacific Northwest she had painstakingly restored—but, increasingly, it did not include the mortgage payments, constant repairs, and general time-suck of home ownership. A new sense of clarity began to take hold: Just what was all this stuff for? Multiple extra rooms, a kitchen stocked with rarely used appliances, were things that couldn’t compare with the financial freedom and the ultimate luxury—time—that would come with downsizing. Deciding to build an eighty-four-square-foot house—on her own, from the ground up—was just the beginning of building a new life. Williams can now list everything she owns on one sheet of paper, her monthly housekeeping bills amount to about eight dollars, and it takes her approximately ten minutes to clean the entire house. It’s left her with more time to spend with family and friends, and given her freedom to head out for adventure at a moment’s notice, or watch the clouds and sunset while drinking a beer on her (yes, tiny) front porch. The lessons Williams learned from her “aha” moment post-trauma apply to all of us, every day, regardless of whether or not we decide to discard all our worldly belongings. Part how-to, part personal memoir, The Big Tiny is an utterly seductive meditation on the benefits of slowing down, scaling back, and appreciating the truly important things in life.
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“Whose idea was it that we should all get jobs, work faster, work better, race from place to place with our brains stewing on tweets, blogs, and sound bites, on must-see movies, must-do experiences, must-have gadgets, when in the end, all any of us will have is our simple beating heart....I hate to put it in such dramatic terms, but it's kinda true.”
Oh so true. Williams thought about this for a long time. One day she discovered she had a heart that wasn't so reliable and she decided to make the jump into a simple life in a small home she would build herself. So she did.
An inspiring story.
Note: I read an advanced copy of this book. The finished product may be different that what I read. I finally finished this. I went into it gung-ho, as I am currently obsessed with the tiny home movement and mindfulness. Where this bogged down for me was in the day to day drama of hanging out with friends, injuries, and ...well, the “memoir” end of it. Dee is perpetually upbeat and the pollyanna-ness kind of wore on me after awhile. I did LOVE the descriptions of the house: building the house, life in the house, parking the house. I just didn't care about anything else. The final chapter is, in my humble opinion, the strongest chapter because it really describes the “why” of Dee's philosophy. Is it wrong that I really wanted to know more about how the composting toilet worked and less about who was having dinner at who's house?
Overall, I think it is an interesting read, but I would have liked smoother storytelling. There are some real inconsistencies. For example, Dee is injured in a book store(?) and helped by a librarian (?) in one of the early chapters. Another chapter talks about the dog's odd behavior, features an injury on the ladder, and then a death. And then another death.
