The Tiny House

Emily and Raul had a four-bedroom house in Portland, two cars, a garage full of boxes they never opened and very little time to see each other. Emily was an architect who worked late; Raul managed a hardware store and started early. Most weekdays they met in the kitchen for about ten minutes, usually while one of them was looking for keys.

The idea came from Raul, of all people. He had watched a documentary about tiny houses one night when he couldn't sleep, and by breakfast he had a plan. "The bigger the house, the more we have to pay for it," he said. "And the more we pay, the more we have to work. What if we just stopped?" Emily laughed at first. A week later she was drawing floor plans on napkins.

It took them almost a year. They sold the house, gave away most of their furniture and spent every weekend building a home on wheels in a friend's field outside the city. When it was finished, it measured just over twenty square meters. There was a sleeping loft under the roof, a kitchen with two burners, a shower the size of a phone booth and a single large window that looked out at Mount Hood on clear days.

Getting rid of their things was harder than building the house. They had far too many of everything: plates, coats, cables, books. They made a rule that each of them could keep only one box of objects that had no practical use. Emily kept her grandmother's letters and a few drawings. Raul kept a baseball glove, some photos and, to Emily's surprise, every birthday card she had ever given him.

The first few weeks were difficult. In the old house, they had been able to avoid each other without even trying. Now there was nowhere to hide. If Raul was in a bad mood, Emily knew it immediately, because he was standing about a meter away from her. Small things became big things. Who had left the wet towel on the ladder? Why did one person need so many mugs? They argued more in that first month than in the previous five years.

Then, slowly, something changed. Because there was no space for a television, they started talking in the evenings. Because the kitchen was so small, they had to cook together, and they discovered that they were both quite good at it. Because they had fewer bills to pay, Emily cut her hours to four days a week, and Raul stopped working Saturdays. The less they owned, the more time they seemed to have.

They learned things about each other that they should probably have known already. Emily found out that Raul sang when he washed the dishes, very badly but with great feeling. Raul found out that Emily got up at five on Sundays to watch the sunrise, and had done it for years in the old house while he was asleep. Now he got up with her. Neither of them had ever been much of a morning person, but the view from the window was hard to argue with.

Not everything was perfect. In winter, the rain on the metal roof was so loud that they had to shout to hear each other, and there were days when they would have given anything for a second room with a door that closed. Their friends asked them, half joking, how long it would last. "A few more years," Emily would say. "Or until one of us buys another mug."

On the evening of their second anniversary in the tiny house, they sat on the steps outside with two plates of pasta and watched the mountain turn pink. "Do you miss anything?" Raul asked. Emily thought about it for a long time. "The bathtub," she said finally. "A little. But I don't miss the ten minutes in the kitchen." Raul nodded. Neither did he.