Getting rid of their stuff.

They had to literally touch every single thing they own and decide whether or not to keep it.

And here's where I part ways with the tiny house movement:

If your life fits in a fuckin' trailer, you have no life.

Back in college a girlfriend and I added it up - between the two of us we'd had 13 addresses in 12 months. You can absolutely pack light when you do shit like that. The stuff you don't need does not get dragged around. Accumulation is something your debts do, not your possessions.

When I moved my wife down to Los Angeles we had to crack her out of 9 years of stability. That meant getting rid of "stuff" - stuff like the dining room table, the couch in the study, the mother-in-law tongue grown from her great grandmother's (actually, we kept that). But I mean, even scanning her five years of medical school notes down to PDF (all 11 linear feet of them) we still had a fucking moving van worth of stuff.

Set aside the fact that she's got a medical degree's worth of books. Set aside the fact that all her winemaking supplies take up a couple closets ('cuz we got rid of all that). Set aside the fact that even if you do a tiny amount of knitting you've probably got a garbage bag worth of yarn. Never mind me - the fucking mouse I use to talk to Pro Tools is bigger than a twin bed. For some reason, "furniture" is "stuff" to the Tiny House Movement as if you should feel guilty for having a place for your friends to sit. As if it's bourgeois to have enough pots and pans to cook spaghetti for four people. As if owning more than four glasses is somehow materialist.

THAT is what I hate about the tiny house movement - you aren't getting rid of the stuff that's essential to you, you're getting rid of the stuff that's essential to other people interfacing with your life. You aren't purging your wants and needs, you're externalizing them:

Now, when they come to visit and Susanne needs a lap blanket, we hand her the one we got from her. So she smiles, tells us a memory of the blanket, and gets warm underneath it. But she no longer needs it in her house. She can "visit it" when she comes to our house!

How 'bout when you come to visit them? Oh, right. The awkward conversation about sleeping on the "porch." Been there, done that, got the bug bites.

'cuz that's the thing. Nobody builds a "tiny house" in the city. They all fuck off to the Back of Beyond where you couldn't find a fuckin' bed'n'breakfast if you tried and then post about how they sure wish you all could get together more often. That's the subtext of the tiny house movement - "don't visit me, I'll visit you." 'cuz the thing is, if you're moving out to the sticks, you're spending less money anyway. And it's not like you can't throw up a 1000sqft structure for a titch more than a 500sqft structure. And hey - maybe you legitimately have no need for anything hobby- or entertaining-related in your entire goddamn life and you're cool with nobody ever coming out to hang out with you. More power to ya.

But you live in a van by the river.