Amish House

Hopefully I won’t offend my Amish fan base too much when I say that the idea of a barn-raising has always appealed to me. I’m not sure if the image is just a stereotype, but I love the idea of a community working together to accomplish an otherwise daunting task. In our home improvement adventure, we’ve been lucky enough to rely on more than a few helping hands. We joked that each “wing” of our tiny house could be named after a friend or family member who either helped to take it apart or put it back together again. At every stage, our community backed us up with support of every kind (hard labor, financial help, free supplies, cold beers, mental health services, interim housing, etc.). There are simply too many kind people to thank. Here, for example, are our friends Alice and Erik supplying the ditch-digging skills necessary to create sufficient crawl space under our house. (These two were suspiciously good at digging ditches, by the way, but I felt it was indelicate to ask where they’d acquired this ability.)