On a sunny, winter afternoon in February, on a wooden plank laid across two pieces of log, overlooking our valley and as we took a lunch break from working on our home, Dave asked me to be his wife. It wasn’t fancy, the ring wasn’t huge, he didn’t get down on one knee. He grabbed my hand and looking at our valley, he asked me if I would be willing to spend the rest of my life with him. It was that simple.
He was going to be mine FOREVER!!!
We had been through so much, and we were still in the battle, but we knew we were meant to be together forever. Even if I wasn’t Dave’s wife and Dave wasn’t my husband, we were so much better together than apart. As we looked over our valley together, I said yes, I would be honored to be his wife.
A Home Complete
We both knew that we wanted a simple ceremony, and we wanted to be married on our property. What better place than on our deck, overlooking the very same valley that started it all? When Dave asked me to be his wife, we were about 8 weeks from being completed with our home, if nothing went wrong. We knew we needed to work even harder than we already were to make sure that we had a final inspection on April 8th, because on April 9th, we were going to unite our futures forever on our deck. No pressure ~ but we accomplished our goal and met our timeline! 🙂
Our County Building Inspector ~ He was our biggest advocate!
After 10 months of construction, a brain hemorrhage, hundreds of hours of therapy, and blessings beyond measure, we were awarded final occupancy on April 8th, 2016. We moved most of our household items in that day, but didn’t move in our bed. We wanted our first night in our new home as husband and wife.
Choosing Forever
Never in a lifetime of dreaming did I imagine that I was going to meet a man as hard working and tenacious as Dave. Never did I imagine that I would not only help build, but live in a shipping container home in a valley that brings peace to my soul. Never did I imagine what my future would hold when I said, yes, let’s build a shipping container home. Never, in this lifetime or the next would I change the past 5 years. We have been so blessed and we have grown in ways that would not have been possible if we were still chasing the ‘Jones.’
April 9, 2016
As we exchanged vows on our deck with our children present as witnesses, little did we know that our story wasn’t over, but really just beginning. That the challenges and trials ahead would be almost as difficult as the ones that we had already overcome in the past 10 months. Dave and I would learn that Joy was our only hope.
Choosing Joy
Joy is not always present. You have to choose joy in the midst of the trial. Joy is a choice. That is the biggest lesson that Dave & I learned over the last 5 years. When you choose joy, life is not nearly the struggle that it could be. Yes, life is still hard. There are still so many hard things that we have to face every single day. But together, choosing joy, we are better.
4 years later, we are together, in our tiny shipping container home of 406sq ft, looking over our valley, feeling more blessed than we ever thought was possible.
I’ve come to the end of our build story, but our story really just began with that Certificate of Occupancy awarded to us on April 8, 2016. It was only after we began our life in our valley together did we discover the real joy of That Tiny Life Love!
As we came down the final stretch of converting 2 cold, ugly, metal boxes into a legal home, I (Jaimie) knew we needed to be on our A game and get organized. To stay on schedule for a move in date of the 2nd weekend in April, I reverted to my old friend, Excel to help keep us on task 😉 .
When I emailed Dave my spreadsheet with everything organized by task and weekend/date to complete said task, he laughed initially, followed immediately with an, ‘Oh My.’ But, he quickly realized how valuable our schedule was so that we could efficiently use our time to finish up the required interior elements of our home of our home by the 8th of April.
Together Forever
In February of 2016, 8 months into our build and 6 months after Dave’s brain hemorrhage, he asked me to be his wife. I will share more on that in the next blog 😉
We knew that if we were going to get married, we wanted it to be on the deck of our home. We decided that we were going to put a date on the calendar and knew that we HAD TO HAVE THE HOUSE finished by then so we could start our forever together.
Transforming a Box into a Home
The foundation was poured, the containers were placed, the welding was done, the walls were framed, plumbing and electrical were in, insulation was sprayed, sheet rock was hung. It was time for the final transformation of 2 metal boxes into our home.
And as I usually do, here is our creation in pictures 😉 Enjoy!
Our dream was becoming a reality ~ and we were on schedule for our together forever date of April 9, 2016.
I remember that I had received a message request through Instagram early in 2019 from Rasa, Bryce’s partner the gorgeous soul behind the camera. She had asked if we were interested in being featured on their YouTube channel. To be honest, I had never even heard of Living Big in a Tiny Home. We don’t really follow the tiny house movement; we just live our best life every day in our own tiny home. 🙂
So when Rasa sent that first message and a couple of clips of what the video would look like, I have to be truthful when I say, I didn’t even open the links. 😦 I read her messages, told her I would let her know and then forgot about it all. Life was so busy in the early part of 2019 as we had just come out of a long hard winter and were dealing with some issues with a couple of our kiddos.
Thank Goodness Bryce & Rasa are Persistent
Fast forward 6 months, and Rasa reached out to me again. She said that they had just returned to the states and would love to film our home. At this point, I had still not ever watched or heard of Living Big, but I did take the time to click on her links and watch the video clips. Watching what they produce, it seemed surreal that they were reaching out to us. We had never expected anyone to think our house was as amazing as we thought it was 😉
I responded that yes, we would be interested and to please let us know what they were thinking and their time-frame. I didn’t hear from her again for a couple of weeks and so didn’t think much more of it. Like I said, it had seemed too good to be true, so it probably wasn’t true 😉 Later we learned that they actually film or travel to their next filming destination EVERY SINGLE DAY. No wonder she didn’t have time to respond back – Bryce and Rasa are so very busy sharing people’s homes and stories.
Late August, I received another message from Rasa asking if they could come and film our home the first Saturday in September – just 2 weeks away. Dave and I talked about it and said, sure, why not. Let’s do this! knew that I needed to do some homework and research what their show was about and what to expect. I clicked on one of their videos and then told Dave, this is a BIG deal. Look at these videos and these gorgeous houses that they film all over the world. Oh, my goodness. What have we signed ourselves up for?!?!?!
We Are Just Ordinary People
We live in 2 shipping containers that we love, but it really isn’t anything special. After watching just a few more of their videos, I knew that we needed to make sure our windows were washed and the dead lawn mowed and get our home as ready as possible! We tend to keep our home very tidy, but we do live in the woods, so bugs and leaves and spiders and all the dirty things tend to get everywhere all the time.
Is This Really Going To Happen?
Again, I didn’t hear anything from Rasa after we settled on the filming date in September. Dave and I worked to get our home ready, but because of the ‘radio silence’ weren’t even sure if this was really going to happen. We figured if it didn’t, at least our house was spick and span to go into the long winter ahead. 🙂
Saturday morning arrived and so did Bryce & Rasa – we couldn’t even believe that this was really happening! They had driven from their previous shoot in Colorado just two days before. As soon as they got out of the car, we asked how they were doing, and Bryce said, ‘tired.’ Oh, my mama’s heart went out to these two lovely people that had chosen to drive from Colorado to our little town in Washington State to film our home.
Immediately Bryce started asking us questions and soon discovered that our home was more than just a couple shipping containers stacked like legos that we lived in. We had a story. An amazing story of perseverance, joy, love, and hope.
Bryce and Rasa spent the better part of 2 days filming our home and listening to our story. They cared. It was genuine and you could feel it. After the first day of filming, we asked them if we could take them to dinner. We also offered our son’s room for the night as he was away at his grandmas. Bryce & Rasa ended up using our home as a base camp for the better part of a week as they traveled North & South of our home to film other tiny homes & stories.
During their stay with us we talked and laughed and learned so much about the tiny house movement and cooked and built a friendship. Bryce is a permaculture encyclopedia and Dave learned so much from him in a short amount of time. Rasa is an amazing cook and made us the most delicious dinner right out of our garden.
Behind the Scenes of Living Big
Have you thought about how Bryce and Rasa live to travel and shoot so many tiny homes? They literally spend the majority of their time living out of a rental car. They shoot or travel every day of the week for months on end. They edit in the evenings and throughout the night to make their weekly episode deadlines. They shoot hours and hours of footage on each home they visit and condense it into 16 minutes. They own what they can carry in suitcases, for the most part. They seldom get the opportunity to cook home grown meals and rest in a real bed that isn’t a hotel bed. They truly are angels sent to tell all of our stories…
Our Shoot in a Nutshell
I’ve read so many of the comments on the YouTube episode. So many questions and because not everything can be included in 16 minutes, here are the highlights of what you didn’t see:
We found our property on Craigslist from a private party for cheap. When we purchased it, it was a goat trail along the side of the mountain. Dave & I have done all of the landscaping ourselves, mostly by hand. We have rented a small excavator a couple of times and we had an old backhoe that didn’t have brakes and almost killed Dave 5 times, but mostly, we do things the old fashioned way – one rock or shovel scoop at a time. 🙂
We pay for things as we go to continue building out our property. We both still work the same jobs we have worked for years. Dave has been at his job for 29 years and I am an accountant and have worked for the same company for 9 years. When we want to add a rock wall or a greenhouse, we can because we don’t have a mortgage. Because of Dave’s health, our home and property is our stay-vacation destination and we spend so much time enjoying the gorgeous valley we live in!
We intentionally built with only 2 containers because we wanted TO BE MORTGAGE FREE when we completed our build. We accomplished that. We love our home, but yes, building a home out of Shipping Containers is definitely more expensive than a traditional stick built home of the same size. Live and learn 😉
Dave has always wanted a shop – doesn’t every guy wants one? In 2018 we built him his shop so that he can work on his projects and stay busy and active. He has an enormous crane in there that is his pride and joy and everything he needs to keep his creative juices flowing and his mind as healthy as possible. 🙂 We have recently turned the living space in the back of the shop into an Airbnb when our kiddos aren’t home and to create passive income 🙂
Our shoot was in September, so our seasonal creek behind our home was dry. The ‘Ferris wheel’ looking thing is actually a water wheel that plays a ‘not so sweet’ melody during the rainy months. 😉 It is essentially a large piece of garden art made from a pipe reel, galvanized buckets and an old bicycle. Dave loves to create!
I didn’t intentionally do the majority of the talking. Dave talked lots, especially in the beginning when Bryce and Rasa first arrived, but after a couple of hours he was tired and his words weren’t working as well. You don’t see this because the video is actually edits that cut out his stuttering and loss of words and replace it with me explaining a lot of things. When Dave watched the episode, he just kept saying over and over – I am not the same man I used to be. He sees how much he has lost. It is heartbreaking to see the strong man you love and admire and who is a hero in your world be so vulnerable and weak. I am glad that Rasa & Bryce protected Dave from the ugly comments that would have been made had they left all of Dave’s stuttering and difficulty talking in the episode. A lesson to be kind always, because we don’t know what other people are battling.
Angels in Disguise
God gifted us with angels. Angels that were wanted to share our story. Dave and I told Bryce & Rasa, that while we were so honored that they wanted to film our home, it was our story of love and perseverance, even when all seems impossible that we wanted to share. Our prayer was that if by sharing, we could touch just one person’s life, then it was all worth it.
Bryce uses the word amazing a lot. Honestly, it is Bryce & Rasa who are amazing and the work they do to bring tiny homes and their stories to life, are a true testament to their selflessness. Dave and I feel so blessed to have been able to spend a week with them. We were also able to learn how to support them in their journeys just a bit. As a Patreon supporter, we sponsored Bryce & Rasa for $1 per video or an average of $4 per month. Being able to spend time with them and seeing the sacrifices they make personally so that they can share tiny home stories – let’s just say it isn’t all glamorous living out of a rental car and suitcase. You can learn more about being a Patreon here https://www.patreon.com/livingbig. For those of us that love what they do, please consider sponsoring their work – Dave and I thank you, personally!
Angels and friends…
Thank you, Bryce & Rasa for your love and friendship. Until we meet again…
We were officially dried in, but still had so many outside projects that we needed to wrap up before we were ready to move inside and start finishing our home.
The Roof
A shipping container doesn’t need a roof, but I wanted a unique roof to create a dry space over both our deck and our front door. We have a 20’r sitting on top of a 40’r, leaving 20’ of deck space off of our master bedroom. We roofed 10 of that space creating one of our favorite places in the entire house – living space right outside our bedroom door – and the view 🙂
Friends are the greatest gift!
Dave’s friends came and helped us complete the roofing. Our roofing is called Rusteel and is unique in that it rusts almost immediately upon exposure to the elements. Yes, I paid extra for metal that will rust – Dave still questions my sanity at times 😉
Turning a Ginormous Gravel Pile Into Access
In order to meet code, we had to have access to the front of the house that didn’t exceed certain tolerances. The only thing we had infront of our containers at this point was a huge pile of gravel that had been used to park the crane when we placed our shipping containers.
But Dave and our son, Bryce, got to work and upcycled some 4×4’s that had been salvaged from a project on the Canadian border. He reused the brackets, the boards and designed the large pile of gravel into our home’s approach 🙂
Bryce – hardest working little man I’ve ever met 🙂
The Deck
As I’d mentioned before, Dave’s OT set up therapy for Dave. The upstairs deck and exterior stairs were a project that Dave meticulously worked through as part of both his cognitive and functional therapy. From laying out the deck boards, screwing them on (a challenge when he couldn’t feel his right hand), cutting and laying the final stair treads, upcycling and designing the outside stairs and access. All of these steps needed to happen to make our shipping container legal and meet building code.
PT 2×2’s to support the deck boardsPT 2x4s anchored in place with brackets that Dave created and welded to the railing baseBrackets that stabilize the deck runners
Cedar Decking
Outdoor living space being created!
Replacing the ‘work’ treads with the final cedar treadsBuilding stairs to code, especially after a brain bleed is quite a task!
The lower landing was off 1.25″ to meet code, so Dave created a platform over the concrete landing ~ it turned out much better than the ugly concrete 😉
The lower landing was where Dave’s creativity started to really shine again ~ Gorgeous!
This was a project that would have taken us a couple of weekends before Dave’s ICH. But even working on it 6 days a week for a couple hours a day in the beginning and then longer as he got stronger, it took him almost 6 weeks to finish.
Outdoor Living Space
When Dave had sealed and laid the last board, he was so proud of the deck and stairs – and he should be. I was so proud of him. I had seen him struggle through the processes in a way that tore at my heart, but he preserved. It turned out amazingly gorgeous. The biggest victory was how much he was able to regain his dexterity and skill level during the project. The project may have taken weeks and weeks, but to this day, it is one of the areas of our home we are most proud of!
you’ll always have a friend in me…Bryce working on the future flower gardens!That is amazing therapy!
The ICU is a busy place in the middle of the night. The nurses in and out of the room every 10 minutes, sometimes more often if Dave’s alarm started to go off. There was a constant sound of paging, alarms, and more than once that long night, the sound of someone coding.
I tried to make myself shut my eyes and rest while Dave was resting, but the minute Dave’s alarm, or an alarm in the hall or a code sounded, my eyes flew open to make sure that Dave’s chest was still moving up and down.
At around 2am, I gave up on rest and just sat watching Dave and prayed and prayed and prayed; I begged; I pleaded; I bargained; I negotiated. I would do anything, God. Just please don’t take him from me yet. We aren’t ready. We have so much we still want to do; adventures to take, a home to build, vacations, growing old together and sitting on the deck rocking together. Please God, I will do anything…
And for hours, I repeated this conversation in my head, waiting for the sun to rise and marking off his second huge milestone – living through the night.
Google IS NOT Your Friend For Prognosis
Between the praying and watching Dave sleep, I did the stupidest thing ever – I Googled Intracerebral Hemorrhage. At this point, the doctors hadn’t given us much information or a path forward, or prognosis, or really anything. They were so skeptical and were not expecting a good outcome, and had pretty much stated that, and not much more to this point.
It took me but a minute to find out a whole lot about what ailed Dave – DUMB. There was so much information, and 95% of it was heartbreaking. According to Google, Dave didn’t stand much of a chance either.
Would he wake up? – probably not.
Would he have lost more ability throughout the night? – most definitely, yes.
Would his brain have endured more damage from the hemorrhage? – what was left of the undamaged gray matter.
Would he be better or worse when he woke up? – most definitely worse.
Was he ever going to walk or talk again? – with aids and assistance devices, or even in a wheelchair.
Would he live? – there was less than a 25% chance.
If he lived, what kind of quality of life would he have? – Less than 3% of returning to 90% pre-ICH status.
Never, I repeat, NEVER visit WebMD while your best friend is lying in a bed in ICU and expect any reassuring information. It took me less than an hour to learn my lesson. I put my phone away, and did not ever look again. Going forward, I would let the experts, Dave’s team of neurology surgeons update me on our path forward. I couldn’t stomach finding the information out on my own, because according to Google, there was almost a 0% chance of our life going forward to resemble our life up until this morning.
He Out-Slept The Sun
Dave actually slept pretty well all things considered. He barely responded for his constant monitoring and 3x per hour neurology assessments that were conducted throughout the night. At around 7am, he finally started to rouse into a more wakeful state. The sun had been awake for hours, and for Dave, 7am might as well have been noon for as often as he sleeps in. But considering what his brain and body had endured in the previous 24 hours, he deserved and needed every single minute of that sleep. I was just so thankful to see him waking up.
The minute his eyes opened, he sought me out, making eye contact with me and the look of, ‘This really happened, didn’t it?’ crossed his face and the panic set in almost immediately. I didn’t even know what to say, except that I wasn’t going to leave his side and we were going to be okay. We would fight this together. I squeezed his hand and kissed his dry, cracked lips. 20 hours with nothing but a few ice chips by mouth, really dries a guy lips out.
My Tongue Was Bleeding
From biting it to keep myself from crying. How could I stay strong for him, when I could barely hold myself together? There was a constant prayer in my mind, ‘Please Jesus, keep me strong for him. Please.’
Oh, my sweet boy – I just didn’t have words for the heartbreak I was feeling, not only for myself, but so much heartbreak for my hardworking hero that was now laying ½ paralyzed in a hospital bed. The fear in his eyes, and the panic in which he held my hand with were almost my undoing. Hang in there, sweet man. Don’t give up. We will do this together.
I couldn’t wait for the doctors to make rounds and give us a plan on what going forward looked like. I had so many questions – my first question was going to be what caused this? And second – how do we stop this from ever happening again? All those hours in the middle of the night watching Dave’s quiet breathing gave me lots of time to think and I needed to know why this happened.
I needed to know why and how this happened so that I could do everything in my power to make sure that it never happened to him again. I needed a purpose, a path, a goal – I needed a plan.
A Day Of No Answers
Finally at around 10am, the doctors arrived for rounds. The plan for the day was to take him for a cerebral angiogram and see what was going on in his brain. If there was something there to repair, they would, but it would give them more of a clue as to what happened. As they prepared him for his small surgery, Dave’s anxiety grew. Anytime you go into the brain, there are so many risks, and he was again fearful that he wouldn’t wake up. The surgery was expected to take about 1.5 hours, and I took this time to take a shower and put on clean clothes that my daughters had brought. I am here to tell you, there is nothing that fresh breath and a clean pair of underwear can’t fix. After my shower, I felt much lighter of heart and ready to take on whatever was in front of us.
Finally, they brought Dave back from surgery, and he had to lay completely flat for 6 hours without moving at all. He was already so exhausted from everything going on, that he slept most of the time. About the time that he started to wake up, the surgeon came in to update us on what they had found.
Sitting up for the first time 🙂
Finding JOY in the pain!
Nothing?
They could see nothing because of the size of the blood clot taking up so much of the inside left quadrant of Dave’s brain, which means that they couldn’t tell us much at all. They couldn’t see if there was a malformation in the brain that had caused the bleed, they didn’t see any weekend vessels that could have caused it. There was no explanation for why my boy was laying flat in an ICU, with no feeling on his right side, unable to speak legibly. After the doctors explained this all to us, they said that we would continue to watch and wait for the next 72 hours and keep Dave in the ICU, because they didn’t think the clot was stable and wanted to be prepared in case he started to re-bleed.
I’d wanted answers – why this had happened and how to prevent it from happening again. And the doctors had no answers. They didn’t know why it had happened in the first place, and they didn’t know how to prevent it from happening again. I can’t lie, in that moment, I was angry with God. No answers – just a spontaneous bleed. This wasn’t fair.
Watch and Wait
And so we did what they said to do – we spent the next 3 days in the ICU, watching Dave and waiting for him to re-bleed. Literally, that was what they were waiting for. During that time, they came in to talk with us about what Dave’s aftercare with discharge was going to look like. Did we have a safe place that would accommodate his new limitations for him to go home to. We were so fortunate that while Dave had no feeling on his right side, he was able to stand, bare weight and walk. He had maintained his strength on his right side, but no feeling. Another thing that they couldn’t explain, but we were so thankful for the small victory.
I clearly remember a comment that the Therapist Coordinator said to me on the second day of Dave’s ICU stay – he said, ‘You are going to advocate for Dave’s life, for his therapy, for his recovery, for his quality. If you don’t advocate, his future is grim at best.’
Wow, powerful words, but words that shot straight to my heart. I might not have a reason why this had happened, but I had a goal and focus that I could work towards to help Dave recover the best quality of life that was possible for him and us.
Finally, after 4 long days in the ICU, they discharged us to the stroke floor for 2 more days of observation. It was while on this floor that Dave got terribly sick and they took him in for another emergency CT scan, hoping that he hadn’t dislodged the clot and started to re-bleed. Thankfully, the clot was stable, and his body was just rebelling from all the trauma that it had been put through.
I’ll Never Leave Your Side
Through this entire time, I never left Dave’s side, sleeping in his bed with him at night, holding him. The nurses brought me food, and except for when he was taken aback for a procedure or scan, I was with him around the clock for his entire hospital stay. His nurses loved me because I took care of him, fed him, bathed him, making sure he was as comfortable as possible.
Finally, after 5 long days in the hospital, his neurologist decided that he would be okay to go home, since the sights and sounds of the stroke floor where causing him severe anxiety and making him physically ill. All of a sudden, the reality of the journey that lay before us overtook me and the fear that I wouldn’t be able to give him the quality of care he deserved and needed caused me to pause. And then this still small voice reminded me – I am Dave’s biggest advocate. If I don’t work hard to get him the therapy and help he needs, he won’t have the life he deserves going forward. That small voice was all the reminder I needed that while I felt completely inadequate and ill prepared to become Dave’s primary caregiver, this was the job that God had given me in this season of our lives. I had a goal and a purpose – that my hero would talk, walk and feel again.
Escape ~ finally, even if it was in disposable scrubs!
We arrived home on a Tuesday afternoon. Dave didn’t even have any clothes to travel in, so one of the nurses found some disposable scrubs for him to escape the joint in 😉 We arrived home and he settled himself into the chair to rest while I started his shower and lay out his clean clothes. Our shower was upstairs, and this was our first attempt at stairs, but thankfully because he still had the strength, we were able to climb the stairs together and get him refreshed and rested. The reality of the monumental task that lay before us became very clear.
Poking fun at himself ~ because sometimes the only option is to laugh, or you will just cry 🙂
Just Call Me General Advocate
Tuesday, while Dave rested, I spent the day on the phone scheduling speech, occupational and physical therapy appointments for Dave. The therapy started on Wednesday, because I believed that if we didn’t get right into therapy, there was a greater chance that Dave’s brain would struggle with regaining what had been lost. And so we started therapy, 3-5 times per week every week for 3 months. I was with him for every single appointment since he couldn’t drive, and pushed him hard during those sessions. I researched home therapy that we could do in addition to the clinic therapies, and Dave spent no less than 8 hours a day working his brain and body.
Therapy games ~ making his brain thinkTherapy comes in all sorts of ways 😉Choosing the right bolts for his dexterity therapy
Getting better was his full time job. Speech was, and still is the most difficult for him. His brain struggles to put words together, to remember words that he has commonly used before his bleed, and still stutters when his is tired or stressed. We read, we played games, we wrote lists, we spent hours and hours working on his speech therapy. We also spent hours and hours stimulating the nerves in the right side of his body with sensation therapy so that he could regain feeling again.
His occupational therapist was amazing and actually used projects at our home as part of Dave’s therapy. When he was strong enough and well enough, laying out our deck, installing with a screw gun the deck boards and stair treads was a huge piece of Dave’s therapy. What once would have taken him for a weekend, took him almost 8 weeks, working 6 days a week at it to complete. Because he couldn’t feel his right hand, he had to watch so carefully everything he was doing. His brain was also struggled with managing and thinking through the next steps of what he needed to do. But he never gave up, even when it was so overwhelming, he persevered, and slowly but surely, he had a huge victory when he completed that project, almost 3 months after his bleed.
No Fear
A side effect of Dave’s bleed was that it affected the portion of his brain that regulates fear. Situations Dave would have never put himself in prior to his bleed, things he would never of done were all of a sudden common everyday occurrences. For months, it felt like it was my full time job to keep him alive, and not just because of his bleed, but because he became a daredevil. I couldn’t keep him down, and he would badger the kids into driving him to the property when I was at work. This pattern started just a week after his bleed. He wouldn’t rest, but was so restless to get on with his life, with our home build that he would get angry if we tried to keep him from the property. This made me so worried and anxious, but I just had to give him to God, and prayed constantly, God, please keep him alive today. 🙂
A couple of weekends after Dave got home from the hospital, my sister and her husband had come over to help me prime our metal deck railing and roof so that we could get it painted before the rain started and it rusted. It was a slow tedious process, because we were doing it by hand, with paint brushes. This was driving Dave crazy as he looked on, but I didn’t know how else I could accomplish this task. It took us all weekend just to get the railing’s primed, and had planned on painting it next weekend.
Well, on Monday, while I was at work and just 2 week’s after Dave’s bleed, my daughter told me that Dave had asked her to drive him to the property, but she had to go to work so couldn’t stay with him. When I got off of work, I went and checked on him. I pulled up and he was STANDING on the top of a 12 foot ladder painting the railing and deck roof, with a paint sprayer. Not only had he drug out his ginormous air compressor, figured out the tubing, located his spray gun, but he had taken it upon himself to complete in 1 day, what would have taken my sister and I another full weekend. He was so proud of himself that he had gotten it all accomplished. I was so angry at him for doing it. Not that I didn’t appreciate that I wasn’t going to have to, but because he could have easily hurt himself, falling as he could not feel the right side of his body at all still and he was standing on the top of a tall ladder. I messaged my sister immediately and said, ‘Well, deck railing and roof metal are painted, and Dave isn’t dead – so good news, all in all!’ We laugh about it now, but I still remember clearly the panic I felt when I pulled into our driveway and there perched my husband, 12 feet in the air, painting away.
The Day the Seizures Started
Almost 3 weeks from the day of Dave’s initial bleed, while at Occupational Therapy, Dave had his first seizure. It was terrifying, to say the least. Another ambulance ride, another CT scan, so many medications. The trauma to his brain, the ongoing injury was just to much for him and his brain was done. The start of the seizures was actually harder for us both than the initial bleed. Managing them, listening to his body, keeping him calm, trying to keep him from overdoing it. That was the hardest part because he had a goal to finish our home and in his word’s, “I don’t have time to die or seize out. I have a home to build.”
In the hospital after his initial seizure. Always trying to find the Joy!
God was and to this day continues to watch over and protect Dave. While his self regulation for dangerous situations has tapered off in the years since his bleed, it is still something that I have to regularly remind him to be watchful of. He is a much better sport about it now, where as before it would make him so angry that I was ‘bossing’ him around. He now knows that I am not and was not trying to boss him around, I was just trying to keep him alive. He depends on me now, more than ever, to gently remind him to be safe, because sometimes, he just forgets.
I am so thankful that my boy lived, that we were able to continue on with our dream of building our home and most importantly, that we get to live every single day so intentionally. Not everyone does that, but really, it is the only way to live!
Dave’s wave and attempt at a smile sustained me during the drive to the larger hospital 40 minutes away. As the life flight helicopter took off and raced my boy south for emergency brain surgery to stop the bleeding in his brain and stabilize him, I stood for a moment on the top of the hospital roof and just asked God for peace. And I felt it, immediately.
By that time, my sister, Shannon, was by my side, holding my hand and said she would drive me to the new hospital as I didn’t have a car. As we drove, I called my children and our elder and asked to be placed on the prayer chain. Dave was being lifted up within the hour by hundreds of people and the peace I felt about the new, unexpected journey that Dave and I were now on, was surreal. I didn’t know how this day was going to end, much less the new path we were on, but I knew that somehow, we were going to be okay.
Defying All Odds
I made it to the hospital in record time and rushed inside to check on his status, expecting him to be in surgery. To my amazement and surprise, they directed me to an emergency room and when I walked in, there, my fighting man sat, in the bed as the doctors and nurses continued to monitor his neurological status and vitals. A doctor introduced himself as head of neurology and said that while Dave was in critical condition, he was already stabilizing and they had not seen any increased signs of distress in the brain since he had arrived. He was not sure why Dave was was awake and not declining, or what the next 30 minutes or even the hour held, but at that moment, they were going to wait on brain surgery and fall into a watch and wait pattern. Thank you, Jesus. It had been a little less than 2 hours since Dave had called me in distress, and now he sat here, amazing the doctors with his status. Dave was not well, but he was alive – another miracle!
Reality Check
The doctor then pulled up the CT scan of Dave’s brain – the one taken in the last 30 minutes, Dave’s second of the day, on the imaging board in Dave’s room and showed us what we were dealing with. I am not going to lie; seeing the size of the blood pool in Dave’s brain was terrifying. Hearing the doctor say that he shouldn’t even be alive, much less awake and coherent, was nothing he could explain. He was hopefully optimistic that Dave would continue to stabilize and that the bleed would not progress beyond it’s current borders. It was currently almost 2” x 2” and laying deep in the left side of his brain.
As I looked down at my best friend, and then back to the image of his brain, tears pooled in my eyes. Dave could still hardly speak, he had no feeling on his right side, his brain had an active bleed, but against all odds, I felt him squeeze my hand with his right one and say, I love you. It was more like a pained whisper and the faintest of squeezes, but he was speaking, attempting to make his right side work, awake and so very alive!
Dave was stationed directly outside the nurse’s station in the Emergency room of the new hospital. There was so much activity in and out of his room as they waited on pins and needles for him to take the turn for the worse that the doctors were all expecting. But, Dave refused to give in to the sleepiness that called his name. He held my hand with his strong left one like it was his lifeline. He sat in that bed and refused to give up – to him, closing his eyes and going to sleep, even though he was so very tired, felt like giving up. He refused to leave me!
After almost 5 hours of monitoring him every 10 minutes, accessing neurological function, another repeat CT scan and so much lab work trying to figure out what was going on and why this had happened, they notified us that they were once again going to be transferring Dave to another hospital – the 3rd one that day. His insurance was Kaiser, and so they wanted to get him to the nearest Kaiser facility to continue monitoring him. Thankfully, this time they were willing to transport him via ambulance and we got to ride together 🙂
Expecting Another Miracle
We arrived at the Kaiser hospital and they admitted him directly to ICU to give him one on one nursing care as his condition was still so unstable and very critical. Within a few minutes of arriving in the ICU, the neurosurgeon arrived and assessed Dave’s current status. Dave had not shown any signs of decline in the past 5 hours but the size of bleed that he had experienced in the location of the brain that it had occurred was very much life threatening.
The doctor gave it to us straight. He didn’t understand why Dave was even conscious, much less coherent. In his experience, these types of bleeds had a very small survival rate. If Dave made it through the night, we would re-access in the morning and do an exploratory brain operation to see if they could identify the source of the bleed. If there was a sudden turn for the worse in the night, they would proceed with the emergency brain surgery, that thankfully had been postponed for more than 8 hours at this point.
Because of the paralysis that Dave was experiencing on his right side, he wasn’t allowed any food or drink. They needed to do a swallow study and have the feeding therapist evaluate him to minimize the chances that he would choke on anything orally. Also, because he may have surgery at any moment, they needed him prepared and ready to go under anesthesia.
It was going to be a long night, but I pulled a chair up right next to my best friend, grabbed his hand and we settled in to watch and wait and pray. Finally, after almost 14 hours since he had first called me, Dave let himself rest. I didn’t sleep at all that night – praying constantly that Dave made it through the night and defied the odds that the doctors were putting on him. ‘Please, God, let Dave live.’ That was my prayer and the miracle I was expecting. I didn’t even care at that point that he ever walked again, I just couldn’t imagine life without him.
New Adventures Ahead
I had no idea what the future held as I sat in that hard hospital chair and held Dave’s hand throughout the night. The home we were building, the future we had envisioned, the dreams we were chasing – that all seemed so distant as I looked around at the multitude of machines monitoring Dave’s every breath and heartbeat. I didn’t know what this new adventure looked like, but I knew that we were going to experience it together…
My husband wanted to have the ‘WOW’ factor for our house. I wanted the most economical and yet livable solution available when you are trying to make an 8’ wide metal box your home. In the beginning, we talked and dreamed of the possibilities as far as design and stacking them together like Legos – everyone’s initial thought of building with shipping containers 🙂 We discovered quickly, it isn’t quite that simple or cheap to start stacking them willy-nilly. So we had to put some hard thought into what exactly we could and couldn’t live without in our future shipping container home.
My Husband’s Ideal Space
Dave is a practical man, with a ‘WOW’ factor mentality 😉 He needed a sink and counter, a hot plate would suffice with a mini fridge, a toilet if we could figure out the plumbing and a place to sleep. He was more concerned with the structural components, the welding and the infrastructure for the land. He didn’t really care how many windows we had, how the natural lighting would infiltrate the living spaces, where we were going to have space for our youngest son who was 10 at the time or where we would eat. He gave zero thought to laundry or family dinners, how his wife would stay clean or really anything that would make these cold metal boxes a home for our family. He’s a man – he could eat on an upside down bucket in the corner, off of a paper plate and take a shower in a portable tent behind a tree – God bless his heart 😉
My Ideal Space
My idea of practical also takes into account long-term usability and how to prevent me from running wild into the woods or going even more crazy than we already felt even contemplating this build 🙂 A kitchen with full size appliances, a washer and dryer, a bathroom with a large shower where I could shave my legs – girl goals 😉 and of course an INSIDE toilet and sink, lots of storage, a separate bedroom for our son, a master bedroom large enough that I could walk around my bed to make it, a living-room space where we could have our older children over for family meals, and windows; lots of windows and natural light – and it had to be pretty. I might be a Pacific Northwest girl, but I like my comforts 😉
We Compliment Each Other
Initially, our individual ideal spaces were quite different. But in our separate visions, we both addressed items that not only made our future home functional and solid, but also usable, comfortable and inviting. As we started to think ‘outside the box’ at all the possibilities of what our shipping container home could become when we combined our ideas, the magic really started to happen and our imaginations and creativity took flight. Our number one realization – when you are building tiny, you can have nice finishes and still not spend a fortune because of the small footprint. Suddenly, granite counters, tile showers, stainless steel appliances, zebra flooring, spiral staircases, multiple bedrooms and a large deck overlooking our valley right off our master bedroom were our reality, just on a very small-scale.
What Could We Live Without
We had lived in a much larger home prior to building our tiny home and took a hard look at what parts of the house we used in our average American family home. We only really used the kitchen and bar seating area, occasionally the living room to visit if company was over, the bathroom and 2 of the bedrooms. We rarely, if ever used any of the other rooms of the house. We knew that we could live with a living room, kitchen, laundry space, bathroom and 2 bedrooms. Now, to make it all fit in as small of a footprint as possible – exactly how many containers could we get away with using was the hard question? We decided that if we could get away with 2 shipping containers – a 20’er stacked on top of a 40’er or 480 square feet, it would help keep costs down and the footprint on our very hilly land easier to build on.
The Initial Design
I am an accountant, not a designer or an architect. So, I opened up my Powerpoint on the computer and started stacking rectangles on top of each other, because after all, that is what we were working with. I then dug into our local building code for the minimum square footage requirements in the spaces that we wanted to include in our home. The bathroom, bedrooms, stairs and entry points/doors had to be certain dimensions in order to meet the code for our state. With only 480’ to work with, the challenge seemed daunting. But, I have always loved a challenge – and so I measured and moved and measured and moved, over and over until I got everything to fit in the 480’ we ‘thought’ we had – Success!!! Or so I thought…
Back To The Drawing Board
To the casual observer or newbie like ourselves, 2 shipping containers provide approximately 480 interior square feet. But – and that is a very big BUT, when you start adding things like framing, insulation and sheet rock you lose approximately 6.5” on each interior wall in order to facilitate those basic finishes. Metal conducts moisture – and mold was not something I ever wanted to deal with inside my home. Taking this into account, we knew we couldn’t frame directly up to the metal interior walls. The obvious solution was to build a wooden framed box inside our metal shipping container using 2 x 4 construction and make sure that the metal and wood never touched each other, ever. (Because the strength of our home comes from the metal box, we didn’t need to use traditional 2×6 construction except on the end walls where the doors were for wind shear.)
To simplify for those who are new to the shipping container building process like we once were – when you add the framing, insulation and sheet rock, you lose approximately 6.5” on each interior wall and suddenly your 480’ tiny home, really becomes a 406’ ‘super’ tiny home.
Note – Our interior living space is 1” shy of 7’ wide – cozy living at it’s finest! Don’t worry, you get used to it. It does help to have the right size furniture to make it all work together – no oversized lazy boy recliners for us 😉 I know that in the world of tiny homes, our 406’ is a mansion, but moving from a 2,000 sq ft home to 406’ was a huge obstacle to work our minds around.
Now – to rework those rooms sizes to fit into the space we really had to work with. Back to the drawing board to design our shipping container home for me!
More to come… but until then, what is your dream? Never be afraid to chase it!!!
In hindsight, we probably were a little crazy; or maybe a lot. But, everyone’s adventure has to begin somewhere, and this is where our’s began –
‘that tiny life love’
I remember it clearly – the day ‘that tiny life love’ story started – the day that my husband talked me into building a Shipping Container house on the 5 acres of rocky, hilly goat country that we had just purchased in southwest Washington.
Let’s Rewind
Do you ever just dream of something more? Do you look around, or look at yourself in the mirror, or look at your bank account and ask yourself – ‘There has got to be more to life than this?’ That was us. No matter how many hours we worked, or how much we saved, the constant challenge of keeping up with those around us just weighed us down. We just didn’t want to do it any more; so we made a radical, life-changing decision to rewrite how our story was going to go. Little did we know how little control we really had 😉
Our initial goal was to be mortgage free after building a tiny house on our new property. We had a little nest egg saved and some basic skills. My husband is a fabricator, so metal was right up his alley, and I, an accountant/controller, have never been afraid of a challenge and loved the thrill of problem solving and thinking outside the box (pun intended). How hard could it be? ‘WE CAN TOTALLY DO THIS! No one else has, but WE CAN!’ – That was our pep talk to ourselves daily 🙂
It wasn’t very elegant – the start of this journey. We spent months searching the web and reading every available piece of information on how to build a shipping container home. And after all those months of research and learning, we were almost exactly were we started. Knowing next to Nothing about how to build a shipping container home!
Truth
The internet was about 5% helpful; meaning it was also 95% not helpful. There are a couple of resources from other DIYers, but nothing that worked with what we wanted to do. But hey, who needs an instruction manual on how to build a shipping container house? How hard can it be to put 2 metal boxes together and make it livable? And it couldn’t cost that much – I mean you can buy shipping containers all day long on Craigslist. Easy peasy! –
Our family was right – we were definitely crazy! We will own that 🙂
Here is the honest truth; it was hard, and expensive. I am not going to lie or sugar coat this part and tell you that it was no big deal, because it was a big deal. It was really, really hard and very, very expensive. But again, there was not much usable information available on just how challenging and expensive it was going to be until we were already well on our way. And then we only figured it because we were living it. Every evening after work, every weekend, every vacation day and holiday – yes, even Christmas.
We weren’t quitters. This was OUR dream and nothing was going to stop us. And we had our pride too. Yes, you read that correctly – OUR PRIDE. All the people who said it was silly, and crazy and there was no way we could live comfortably in the same box you see on the bed of a semi driving down the road – yes all those people who said it was impossible. We refused to let them see us fail. True, we could have taken the easy route and built an ‘off the grid’ container that would have been much cheaper. But, we wanted to live in it and be comfortable and healthy while living in it; and all those corners that we could have cut meant things like – not passing inspections, mold and moisture problems, unsafe electrical, leaky plumbing, poor venting, pesticide soaked flooring – just to name a few.
Fast Forward Ahead
And so, 10.5 months from the time we got the go ahead to proceed from our local Building and Planning department, we held in our hands our Certificate of Occupancy for a Single Family Residence. We had done it – we had accomplished what we set out to do!!!
Not to shabby for an accountant wife and a fabricator husband who had a massive brain bleed mid way through our project, if I do say so myself 😉 I know that I mentioned how hard and expensive it was – did I forget to mention that my amazing husband had a major brain bleed in the middle of our project that left him with a 2″ blood clot on the left side of his brain? So, when you add a life-flight helicopter bill and 4 days in the ICU to the cost of building our house, we realized exactly just how hard and expensive our dream of building a shipping container home had become.
That Was Where Our Story Get’s Really Exciting!!!
That’s where we got to see miracle after miracle take place; the first one being that my husband LIVED after suffering his major ICH that left him with little feeling or sensation on the right side of his body and a seizure disorder. That was where we got to see those same family and friends who said we were crazy step up and help us continue building our dream. When my husband could barely walk or talk – they got to be part of something amazing too! That is where we got to see God take our pennies and give us hundred-dollar bills and grow our faith by leaps and bounds. That is where we got to see our persistence and never-give-up spirits keep fighting. That is where we got to see exactly what we were made of and for…
God saved my husband’s life – period. Our dream, our goal to turn 2 shipping containers into a house – that gave my amazing husband purpose to get out of that hospital bed and to work through 5 or more therapy sessions a week so that he could finish what we had started. And finish we did!
That silly, crazy dream – it was just the beginning! We thought we knew exactly what we were doing – we had it all planned out. And that is the beauty of our story – that simple dream has turned into our new life’s story, and the dream is still growing. Everyday, just like the flowers and vegetables infront of our 406 square foot home.
So, I Ask Again
What is your dream? What are you working for? Do you look at your life and ask yourself, is there more to this? Our dream started as turning 2 shipping containers into a mortgage free house. God took that dream and multiplied it and grew it by turning 2 shipping containers into a home.
So, welcome! We are glad you are here. In the past 4 years, we have learned so much about building and health and life and diet and living and loving. We can’t wait to share our story with you and invite you to learn as we do. We will be covering lots of different topics like simple living, food, diet, exercise, chemical free options and we will continue sharing our story on how we got here and it all began with our dream to build a shipping container home. We hope you come back soon!
that tiny life love 