A (Tiny) Room of One's Own

Three hundred and twenty square feet of freedom.

I built a tiny house for myself.

On March 2nd I slept in the tiny house I built for myself for the first time. After nearly four years of scraping together enough cash for windows and doors and plumbing and floors, I crawled up onto the lofted bed situated at the back-end of a forty foot shipping container and lied awake, listening to the bugs and the wind and the delicious silence of solitude.

During the pandemic it became obvious that I needed to find a creative way to house myself. I’d just returned to Tennessee after an unsuccessful two year run in LA (and then an even more unsuccessful two week run in Italy) had left me broken, defeated, and drunk. I dealt with the “drunk” part, at least I was beginning to, but when the world shut down and my work dried up I realized that I had no where to go.

I had been working for the better part of a decade as a model and actor, taking random side gigs as buffers during the slow years. I had never been afraid to work hard. Getting money by any means necessary came naturally to me and when push came to shove I had always just figured out how to survive. I had serving jobs and bartending jobs. I worked a handful of times as a cater waiter for a company that specialized in providing agency-signed models as staff for big events (barf). I spent a holiday season in a woman’s garage who sold decorative wreaths on Etsy and needed an assistant to make Hobby Lobby runs and fluff fake evergreen branches until they looked real. I answered phones as a hair salon receptionist and washed loads of ass-sweat-soaked towels for an infrared sauna studio. I was a pet sitter for a batshit crazy fashion designer who had more money and more animals than she knew what to do with. I was not afraid to work. Covid was different, though.

Everything stopped and I had no way of making money. Luckily, I had my family which put me in a much safer and less stressful situation than a lot of people found themselves faced with. Still, at thirty-four years old it did not feel great to be sleeping in my dad’s spare bedroom and I knew that the life I’d been living up until that point just wasn’t sustainable. If I wanted to live this creative life, if I wanted to keep pursuing these impossible dreams, if I wanted to commit to life as an artist-I had to find a way to get a home of my own. I needed a place that didn’t require rent or a mortgage, a place that no matter how shit-outta-luck I found myself, couldn’t be taken away.

I didn’t need much. It was just me, my books, some boxes of clothes, and a few sentimental trinkets I’d collected from around the way. I’d need a bathroom, a kitchen countertop, a stove, refrigerator, room for a bed, maybe a couch and a small TV. How hard could it be?

*searches tiny houses you can build cheap

There were log cabins, sheds converted to guest quarters, school buses, barndominiums, prefab homes on wheels, A-frame stick houses, and tree houses. I watched a video of a man in Cambodia build a house into the literal side of a mountain using only his bare hands and some river rocks. I spent hours and hours scouring Youtube channels dedicated to tiny houses and blogs written by tiny house dwellers and ultimately settled on the shipping container as my vessel to freedom. Something about the industrial minimalism and the cuboid shape of the steel box felt like safety. I went to pick out my container at a lot in town that sold dozens of used ones to folks mostly utilizing them for storage or construction site offices.

“What are ya gonna do with it?” The lady behind the front desk inquired about my intentions, confused by the young woman in front of her with a wad of cash and bright red lips. “I’m gonna live in it…eventually,” I answered only about half-sure of myself. She seemed a bit skeptical, too, “Huh. Well, that’ll be nice, I’m sure.”

They delivered the rust-colored metal box that would become my home on a warm May evening in 2021. We would start building it out at my dad’s house where he had plenty of extra land and would have his tools nearby. I’d have to find some vacant land to move it to when I saved enough money. My dad happily agreed to help me with the design and logistical part of the project, being an engineer he actually relished the opportunity to help me solve this complex problem. We drew up plans on his computer and made numerous trips to Home Depot and Lowe’s for a hundred different types of nails and caulk and brackets and do-dads and thing-a-ma-bobs. I learned more than I ever wanted to about electrical wiring and insulation and septic tanks.

The full account of this mission to build the place I would be is the basis and structure of the memoir I’m currently writing, analyzing all the ways I looked for home elsewhere for so long and exploring sobriety as both the method and metaphor for it all. We all know Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and what she declares is required for a woman to write and write well. I don’t disagree. I’m working out the money part but I finally have the room. Three hundred and twenty square feet of freedom. It took four years of construction but nearly forty years of building.

I’ll never forget what it felt like to walk in, close the door, drop my bag, knowing I would live there. To know that this little place was mine, that my name was on the deed to the land, that every dish towel and throw pillow and flower-filled vase belonged to me, that the tall oak rooted just outside of my sliding glass doors couldn’t be chopped down without my permission…was a living miracle. I pulled the blankets up to my eyeballs, listening to all of the night welcome me. I heard bugs crashing into the windows, loud as bullets, gunning for my light. Try as they may, they can’t reach it. I built this thing air-tight and nobody gets inside without an invitation.