How to build a tinyhouse in a desert

I've gotten questions about my tinyhouse. I've left Nevada for the winter, so unfortunately I can only use pics and videos I've already taken to illustrate the process I used to make it, and what it looks like now. And as I look through the video I took, it didn't capture the stuff I thought it was pointing at. It's mostly just me talking and pictures of a cloudless blue sky, so we'll skip that bit. The parts that aren't blue sky have been GIF'd for your viewing pleasure to the left, and my narrative in the video isn't really necessary as I'm writing one here.

The first part was building the road to the property. I won't dwell on it too much except to mention it, because if you're trying to do what I'm doing, property access is always your first consideration. Many people who live near me built their roads through other people's property. For the most part, that's okay - so long as you get on with your neighbors. But the moment a feud starts, you don't have the legal right to drive to your own property on the road you built. So literally, don't cut corners here. It took me three months to even just get to my property, because I was pulling out sagebrush and levelling the dirt and digging swales. But it all went through public property, where the developers of my ghost town had once planned for a road to go before never building it.

That done, draw up some blueprints. This is easier said than done, if you're doing it like me with recycled materials. I was never entirely certain just exactly how big the tinyhouse was going to be. My plans kept getting less ambitious as resources ran out, not least of which was my time and energy to build the thing. The image to your right is clickable; you can see the scope of my ambitions gradually dwindle with every iteration from 20'x12' down to 8'x14'. I didn't even get to build anything outside of it on the rest of the property, and I have yet to build any of the planned additions drawn up in the first blueprint.

But I dug a foundation to match the slightly bigger earlier ambitions. Digging that foundation let me know just how unrealistic they were. This was in the summer, when the heat in the middle of the day was oppressive and I might've literally killed myself trying to work in it. The hottest part of the day was spent smoking weed, reading e-books downladen onto my phone, and writing bookshelf entries like the upcoming Class Analysis and Revolution and the already-published "Ziusudra and the Conquering Refugee Nation."

So labor was confined to sunrise and sunset, mostly sunset; this meant that I was probably getting preached at on the weekdays by the megapastors on 102.5, in order to avoid getting preached at by the shitlibs on 90.9. As these bastions of conservativism told me about the righteous examples of William Wilberforce and Abraham Lincoln, about the moral value of hard work, I was cutting desperately into the hardened caliche, dripping bullets of sweat for every inch. Caliche is just calcium carbonate, the same stuff seashells by the seashore are made out of. Imagine someone powdered it up, soaked all but the first foot in water to make it even more compact, and made you cut through it. There were places where I had to forsake my shovel for a geologist's pick, and bargain with the soil for every inch. I had even imagined the possibility of putting the whole damn house underneath ground level once upon a time; as I dug the foundation I realized it was going to be mounded earth for all but the first two feet.

As I dug, I needed a place for the dirt to go. It would eventually be mounded around the walls, but it rapidly got as high as my shovel could throw it from within the pit. So I went down the road I built my road off of, and in a couple hundred feet in either direction are piles of large quartz stones. I used this to build a stone retaining wall that would let me pile the dirt higher as I worked, and when I was ready to start mounding the dirt for real, I pulled the stones out and reused them for the real retaining wall. The gas I burned to gather these stones was purchased with the $1200 stimulus check we all got, so it is technically true that I built a wall, and made Donald Trump pay for it.

To level the foundation, I bought the cheapest level Home Depot would sell me, and laid it upon a flat board. I raked and hoed the dirt back and forth, up-down then left-right, over and over, until no matter where I positioned that board, the bubble in the level stayed between the lines. Then it was ready for the real construction. My work had only just begun.

It was around this time that I realized two things: I didn't have a ladder, and I didn't have an extra pair of hands to keep a frame from toppling over while I fastened it into place. The first wall I built, on the west, was a frenzy of experimentation as things got built, things collapsed, imprecations were advanced towards the Divine, and expensive wood broke. It was also around this time that the price of wood began to jump. I should have bought all I could anyway, because the price just kept climbing, and it hasn't gone down since. When I went back to Home Depot, I couldn't even buy 2"x4"s anymore at any price, and the 2"x3"s were selling at more than the 2x4s had been the previous month. I literally had a breakdown one night in the truck stop as failure mounted upon failure. A real bro offered me a cigarette and I turned it down; I was just too distraught and I don't smoke tobacco anyways. But I did call my best friend, we compared notes, he cheered me up, and I drove home the next day filled with resolve to jump back on this horse and make this happen.

This is as much a part of the process as all of the technical things I did: the desert is brutal and unforgiving, the wind especially. The vultures will see you and circle, because evolution has taught them to expect you to die. There will be days where everything will break, and none of it will be your way. You have to be prepared for that. St. Paul once described devils as "the princes of the powers of the air" and I feel that verse in my bones now. You have to be prepared for the days when everything goes wrong. You have to have steel resolve, you have to need to do this. Nothing gets done in this desert unless it was imperative.

It was also around this time that some shitlib schmucks in California had a gender reveal party and set fire to half the state. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley and Hollywood survived intact; also unfortunately, I have asthma. Nothing burned in Nevada, but all that smoke came through the most direct route east: the I-80 corridor, smack dab through me. In the picture to the left, you can see that you can't see a goddamn thing more than a mile or two away. The East Humboldts were only barely visible at sunset, when that picture was taken. I did my best to keep production humming, but there was only so much I could do until I was short of breath and gasping. On the worst days I just drove into town and spent the day online, helpless to do any physical labor outside. It was so bad that I was actually rooting for the wind to pick up. But work continued all the same, and I solved my ladder problem by stacking tires and putting OSB splinter board on top of it so I could stand and fasten nails and screws at roof level.

I also figured out how to keep the walls standing up by leaving a couple pallets in their original state, and using their weight as anchors for the rest of the structure. I then built the west wall, the north wall, the east wall including the door frame, all the way up to what would become the chimney. Here I hit another road block, as I'd never built a fireplace before and was casting about for ways to make it. I finally remembered the old campsite halfway down my road, filled with rusted metal stuff. There were a couple old buckets from God knows when, and I cut apart the shittiest one and flattened it, and laid it upon the metal rails to a sliding glass door that didn't match the sliding glass doors I had, and that was strong enough to bear the weight of quartz stones on top of it. Upon that rusted stuff I built my fireplace. I used old rusted cans to build a chimney, and mounded earth around it to hold it in place, all the way up so the wind could pull the smoke through it.

All that was left was the south wall, which would be glass windows secured into a wooden frame. I had worried about this part the most; after picking up the windows in Boise I'd babied them as much as it's humanly possible to baby anything out on that range. If they broke, I couldn't easily replace them. So I measured, built, measured, built, and after the wooden frame was all in and secure, I slid the glass windows in. All my preparations made it feel like the easiest part of the whole job; and after they were in all that was left was the door. All the same, sliding a piece of OSB over the doorframe made the place mostly protected from wind. I brought most of my kitchen goods out of the van or out from right next to it, and inside my house for the first time. From then on, I worked indoors as much as possible, sawing wood to shape for the door until it was time for dinner, listening to music and taking care of head all the while. Then I'd make dinner, and after dinner I'd keep a fire roaring for heat and light (it was autumn by this point) and listen to music and get high until bedtime.

I'm proud to say that I built my door from scratch. I didn't buy one at Home Depot; I saved my couple hundred bucks and just bought a locking doorknob and hinges instead. I cut pallet wood to size and used it to secure heavier salvaged 2"x4"s into place, and it feels solid enough to me. I regret to say I don't have any good pictures of it; I'll be sure to get some in the spring.

After that, I brought stuff inside to secure it for the winter, and I built up the stone walls for the mounded earth as much as possible. When all is said and done, the mounded earth will keep the place inside at 55 degrees year-round, meaning I won't have to do a lot to heat or cool it. Those south-facing windows sure heat the place up in the daytime, but there will soon be plants there sucking up the excess sunshine and keeping it from being oppressive inside.

And I haven't finished the inside yet; I can't sleep inside it until I've rendered it vermin-proof, and that requires a wooden floor. My arachnophobia's chilled out somewhat since I began living in the desert, and my cat will handle the mice. I can't keep the mice out entirely because they've begun to nest in the mounded earth walls, and they can get in through the fireplace. I might try a metal screen when the fireplace isn't in use; I've salvaged one from the ruins of downtown Tobar that might work nicely. There's a lot of work to make the inside look like a home instead of a shack, a lot of furniture to be moved and brought in. But there's a there there to fix up now; a year ago it was a nondescript bit of sagebrush in a howling desert.