The Rustic "Temporary" Microhouse

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If two souls are to live there in harmony, you'll need a way to segment space for those times when one party needs solitude. A porch with a comfy rocking chair is one answer in warm weather. An all-weather answer is a folding screen or a blanket hung from the ceiling in front of the sleeping area. Working out the words or silent signals to communicate the need to be alone without hurting a companion's feelings is a lot harder than segmenting the space.

A rustic microhouse will have primitive utilities such as hand-carried water in a pitcher on the nightstand. It will freeze on top on winter nights and must be heated on a woodstove before you can wash up in the morning. You can keep perfectly clean and tidy in a microhouse, but it takes time. Indeed, just keeping body and soul together by hand can be a full-time job during bad winter weather.

Minimize the staff

Plan to have plenty of windows; windows to the outside will expand your sense of space. Indeed, you'd do well to get your windows first and design the house around them.

Don't overdo windows, however, as walls are a good place to hang what stuff you do keep. 1 have a theory that anything you really need should be in sight and available for instant use. Anything you squirrel away in a drawer or closet is as good as lost forever; it ought to be stored in the woodshed, discarded, or never acquired in the first place. The same is true of stuff that gets dusty; it's not being used enough to warrant keeping.

Speaking of dust, another inadvertent advantage of microhousing is that your cooking improves. You soon learn that you can't fry or over-cook anything. If you do, minute particles of smoke or vegetables carried in steam settle on everything in the room. Dust on those unused tools becomes greasy, and the windows get cloudy on the inside.

My main storage problem has always been finding space for books and tools. I've discovered that walls covered floor to ceiling with shallow bookshelves are not only ornamental, they take up very little floor space and, as literary agent Gunther Stuhlmann suggested once, they make excellent insulation. Books get dusty from disuse, so I donate idle books to the library and go there if I ever need to read them.

Most hand tools can be hung on the walls with one or two nails or screws. So can pots and pans, cooking implements, lanterns, beaver traps, canoe paddles, and most outer clothing. I tie boot laces together and hang them up.

Don't neglect the ceiling. Exposed rafters will hold a lot. My rafters have nails hammered into each side to hold boots, fishing rods, reels of cordage, balls of twine, and all the storage food that needs to be kept warm and dry. The best place to keep dog food from both dog and mice is in a feed sack hung from a spike in the rafters.

With colorful feed sacks, corn dried in the husk, chili peppers, onions in braids and mesh sacks, smoked hams, sides of bacon, dried strips of venison jerky, green waders, and yellow slickers hanging all around, you don't have spare or a need for oil paintings, stuffed fish, or other frivolities. I'll not offend architects or interior designers by quoting Thoreau's disdainful opinion of mere ornamentation.

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