D
rive to Nicholette Codding’s childhood home, and you’ll weave through an especially tony part of Caughlin Ranch. Houses here are impeccable without being
cookie-cutter, and every spongy green lawn is just asking to coddle some bare feet. The trees are stately, the ponds look real, and there’s nary a clunker in any driveway.
Building a ‘tiny house’ is no small feat BY GEORGIA FISHER • PHOTOS BY ERIC MARKS
Close quarters is a dream that can be had.
A black Mercedes is parked outside Codding’s place. It’s not hers. Neither is the big house, actually. But the tiny house—the one right in front, on top of a flatbed trailer —is very much her own. You can’t miss it. Not here. The 160-square-foot abode is a work in progress the fine-arts photographer shares with her long-term boyfriend, Mitchell Mast, and it’s only parked at the parental-units’ place because it’s under construction. Soon the couple will haul it to the right patch of farmland, a to-be-determined spot where they can earn their keep by working outside. There they hope to grow food, install solar panels, find a supportive community, and send the material world packing. This is no flight of fancy. “This is our life savings,” Codding, 30, explained. And it was hard-earned. She and Mast, 31, whose master’s degree and background are in behavioral science, spent years working in the service industry. Before leaving Portland, where they lived most recently, the pair also found landscaping odd jobs, occasionally with creative parameters and handsome compensation. Other times, “we drove around with a lawn mower” looking for work, Codding said with a chuckle. They believe a house that’s microscopic by most standards is the ticket to a clean, untethered life—one with no mortgage, fewer work hours, and scant room for waste or overconsumption. Permitting is murky. As far as the county knows, the couple has a 20-foot-utlity trailer, carrying a haul that happens to look exactly like a wee house. Thankfully, it’s materializing in the small area between Caughlin and Juniper Hills—a sliver that lacks the covenants, conditions and restrictions of those neighborhoods. “We’re in the freedom zone,” Mast said. “It’s absolutely a legal gray area, but for us it’s an important one, because the permits are absolutely crippling.” A tiny tour
First is their “great room with a little ‘g’,” as Codding called it, which abuts an ingenious bookshelf/pantry/sliding 18 | RN&R |
AUGUST 28, 2014
wall that’s also part of the kitchen. Next is a bathroom with charming tin wall panels and a perfect little sea of retro tile. Hardwood and natural light abound, and a sleeping loft top off most of the space. Every last building material is natural and nontoxic, and any DIY feel is absent, despite the builders being newbies to construction work. The fruit of their labor seems solid and sound, with no creaks, odd gaps or cheap fixes. It’s just enough space for the couple and their dogs, Bailey Roo and Cooper Dean. Codding’s art will stay, as will a few essentials, but not much more. “We have so many experiential ties to things,” she said, “but one thing we realized is that you don’t have to have the thing to have the memory. Instead of identifying those memories through things and through commercial objects, you can know they live inside of you, and they are a part of who you are.” But back to the bathroom, namely the composting toilet. It’s not half as bad as it sounds, Mast said, and “there’s absolutely no smell.” Brave souls. A movAble movement
Micro homes aren’t surprising anyone in cities like Portland, where the “tiny” community is, funny enough, growing quite large. Press, TV shows and films are catching on, too. (An Australian filmmaker’s forthcoming documentary, Small is Beautiful, will include Codding and Mast.) “More people are becoming disillusioned with having a big house, and having to figure all that out,” Mast said. “Millennials coming out of university and being saddled with a large amount of debt, and not having that same dream of working all week long just to be able to afford the house that they don’t really get to spend a lot of time in.” In turn, “tiny house” has come to mean more than a given person’s opinion of relative size. Blueprints are online, and you can even buy a pre-made model from the popular Tumbleweed company for around $60,000 (which amounts
