Eileen Kirkland

I appreciate the help with perspective taking. (I’m on the spectrum btw.)

John F reminds me of what I shorthand as the ‘mere mortals’ problem. Yes, people just keep making mistakes because we’re human. I was taught adamantly that we needn’t make all of the mistakes ourselves, we can learn from others’ mistakes. It really grinds me that others don’t make this effort. When I pay someone a lot of money to do a job professionally and they botch it I feel taken advantage of, but maybe they’re just human (and certainly care less than I do).

Anne has been there. Amen to positive thinking and Tomorrow is a new day. I say that to my kids a lot and do try to reset with my husband even as the errors accumulate and compound.

Catie is right that gratitude isn’t a healthy default expectation. Joy is a gift. I can’t remember the last time I was pleasantly surprised. I do feel disrespected. I can also draw a dotted line back to some resentment about feeling subordinate. I earned my bucks in the US as a corporate trademark paralegal and the dynamic of supporting and reminding someone else (especially a man when he knows less than I do about something) bothers me. I used to do the research and provide informed legal opinions that were blessed by my supervising attorney only to watch ‘business decisions’ made over and over again that ignored the effort and input. It undermines motivation in the extreme.

Although I know I specified the door swing to the salesman who ordered the insert and showed him where wood will be stored, I believed incorrectly he would also be performing the work and would take that detail seriously.  The bid we got was essentially just a price on letterhead, so I had to push my husband to specify what was being done and the completion deadline in writing. The model number of the insert eventually got specified, but not the door swing. The installation method was specified, that it would be built up (for better air circulation below/improved ergonomics for cleaning out ash). That didn’t happen, but there’s no way for me to enforce it. I’m also disappointed that the drawer for catching ash is tiny. It holds less than a third of the ash we typically generate in a day. I thought it would extend all the way across the bottom but it’s just a small drawer in the center. I regret looking at the catalogue instead of in a showroom (learn from my mistake).

Sorry about your roof! I have lived in urban areas, too, but have really only managed to make one good friend in all the years I’ve lived here. She was in our last town, Sant Cugat del Valles. We left in a hurry this spring - got evicted due to fraud by our landlord and the apartment reverting to municipal ownership. It is hard for me not to be frequently in the mental space of, “Give me a reason to live here! Make it better!” My husband doesn’t have the right to live in the US legally and our kids have at least 6 more years of school here. I will stay to spare them another disruption, but there’s not much for me here. I am close enough to town to walk (eventually) or bus (eventually) but only after after I have fully recovered from major surgery.

I do sometimes take language classes. I speak Catalan at about a 5th grade level officially. My Spanish is worse and I can’t easily bounce between them like J can. If something requires a lot of technical vocabulary I’m at a pretty big disadvantage and the misunderstanding can always be blamed on my lack of Catalan/Spanish if I’m the interface person for labor, so we don’t do it that way. Amen to unhired help coming with unsought opinions. I’m making modifications on someone else’s property though, so I can’t really avoid the opinions even if I don’t get the help.

I hear Matt’s skepticism that he’s only getting half the story. Thanks for the sympathetic line. Yes, It should be corrected but I can tell you from experience that it won’t be. I married an ‘it is what it is’ guy.

I’m going to think a lot about your questions about the state of the relationship. Honestly it’s not great. I have given up everyone I know and love to live on the other side of the planet for the last third of my life and I wake up to that reality every day. We’ve built something new, but a lot of the time it doesn’t feel worth it. The honeymoon has been over for a long time. Our life is dominated by his culture, his language, his family.

My partner doesn’t have any projects (other than ‘placate wife’). He seems to want to read, play video games and do the bare minimum. We’ve had conversations about greater ambitions, but ‘grow up, finish school, get job, get married, have kids’ were the only things on his list. I want more out of life, whether it’s optimizing a comfortable and well-functioning home, creating a homestead environment, raising animals or seeing the rest of the world...

I’m not financially dependent on him and the things I’m asking him to manage I used to do for myself in English in Seattle when I owned my own place as a single person. I feel like the little mermaid. Did I really give up my voice for a man? I have studied his languages for years, but I have plateaued at a level that is not mastery. His English is ok, but I rely on multiple repetitions to try to be sure I’ve gotten through and that’s not great for the relationship dynamic either. Even more so when it doesn’t work.

You know the idea of ‘fight, flight, freeze, fawn or fix’ in crisis? Forgive me if I’m projecting this on your comment, but it often seems to me that when I want to be in fix mode men want me to be in fawn mode. I will agree that it’s not positively reinforcing to get criticism instead of praise. The phrase ‘weaponized incompetence’ often comes to mind though, too. There’s a lot of ‘didn’t notice, too busy, forgot’ in our general domestic division of labor that seems awfully male-socialized to me.

From the mental health standpoint I think if I set my real boundaries the relationship would end. I don’t want that for our kids. I have a list of firm ‘deal breakers’ and this isn’t on it. That said, I love my husband, but I don’t need him. The expat context forces the codependency. From my point of view, I either need to create a home I want to live in or I need to be somewhere else. I have always told him that I don’t want to be with someone who doesn’t want to be with me. (My mother ‘stayed for the children’ and wasted her life on someone whose choices formed my deal breakers list.) Basically, I'm ok with relationships ending, just don't move on and make me the last to know. I’m not looking for a new partner, but if we get to the point where we’re just coparents and no longer true partners in life I might prefer to say, ‘We’ve had a good run’ and try to part amicably. This is a first, and I hope only, marriage for both of us but as I mature I get ever farther from the Catholic dogmatism I was raised in.

I use the word disappointed, but his apathy is soul-crushing. I can't understand having the power to make something better but being totally unmotivated to do it. There's an argument we keep having Him: Nothing is ever good enough for you! Me: How can you possibly think things staying how they are is good enough? Maybe he is waiting for me to get fed up and go?

Welp, this went to the autistic overshare place pretty quickly. Thanks for coming with me.

I'm an American expat living in Catalunya trying to find my happy place and stay in grateful mindset. I had a major health crisis this year that I'm recovering from still and I've got to say that my just-so-happy-to-be-alive phase was a heck of a lot shorter than I expected. I'm not as physically able as I was before and it's pretty depressing. Maybe this is just a rant. We've moved somewhere fairly remote. I don't have any real life friends close by, so my main interactions are as wife and mother. This isn't new, I've been a fish out of water since 2013.

There's a lot of work to do on the summer house to make it fit for all four seasons and my husband is the default communicator with salesmen and workmen because he speaks the local languages natively and I don't. He doesn't manage the details though, although I know him to be capable of it in his 'real' work. In the early years of marriage 'miscommunication' was the explanations for many conflicts and sometimes a shortcut to resolution. Lately though I sometimes feel like it's used as an excuse to just ignore me.

Today's example is that we finally got the fireplace insert but the door hinges are on my non-preferred side for where I want firewood to be stored. It can't be changed and it's going to bother me every day. I know I told the salesman where I wanted the wood storage to go and how the door should swing and that I asked my husband, probably more than once, to make sure he communicated that requirement. The salesman, the owner of the business I think, came and measured and helped us select the insert. The workmen who came however spent much of the day smashing out the back of the fireplace to make it fit and mortaring it back up over some kind of insulation. I have no confidence that it was well done. I'm not even sure we got the one we ordered; I thought there would be a full row of intake vents along the bottom, a much larger ash catcher for cleaning out, etc. It was meant to be at least six inches higher off the base than it is but they say they underestimated how deep the mantel is. Bottom line I wasn't the interface on the job. I missed my chance to say the door was wrong before it was installed and my husband is mad that I'm mad. (I spent the evening rearranging our furniture to try to make it work with the firewood storage on the opposite side of the fireplace but it's going to be in the way of the walking path to the kitchen. It's a weirdly shaped room and I already had it optimized for plan A.)

Thanksgiving weekend my brother-in-law framed out the basics of a chicken run for me onto an already-built pergola, but I said NO STAPLES and he ignored me. I showed him a picture online beforehand of hanging galvanized hardware cloth with screws and washers so that it could be easily removed and repurposed, but he put in tons of staples in the small project, made cuts in the expensive wire and had to pleat it where the tensioning was sloppy. Those staples will be a hazard to chickens for years as they rust and fall out. There's also a six inch gap for 3 meters for me to solve where I can use skirting wire, but I wouldn't have had to if he'd listened about wire being hung from the outside vs. the inside. He insisted on making something 'square' that leaves this enormous gap instead of attaching it out of square to the sturdy beam of the raised garden bed that was already adjacent. The message to me was, "You can make suggestions but not demands." But at the same time, "If it's really a problem you have to be adamant or you shouldn't complain afterward." They're going to do what they think is cheaper/easier and I can stuff it. The drawings I make keep magically disappearing. On the same project I asked repeatedly for a dutch door, but not half and half, more like one third two thirds so that I can step over the bottom one while keeping birds in. Ignored. I asked for the door we made to be accommodate width the hardware cloth span 110cm but the frame was made 90cm, which is going to make it way harder to maneuver a wheelbarrow.  The point of custom projects is to make them how you want them, not to some manufactured standard. We left it on bad terms with his realization that the modification he made to the pitch left us short of roofing materials. I think I'm going to turn it into a potting/greenhouse area because of all the freaking staples. But the real question is how do I get out of this pattern. The tools are all his. We're renting a home my mother-in-law owns. I don't think it's straight up misogyny. I think it's more like, "You can ask me to do it or you can tell me how to do it, but not both." I want to be the 'client' not the 'nagging' wife or ungrateful sister-in-law.

I could make a long list, the solar installers who didn't pass inspection until all of the hardware was moved and who didn't patch the first wall they used. The chainsaw guy who unsupervised dropped half of next year's firewood to a lower terrace in a place we can't easily reach it and where it will have to be hauled back up 35 steps back to the house. The messed up plumbing that makes our tub belch sewage-smelling gas if the stopper isn't in. My husband didn't do it, but he didn't prevent it either. Maybe I'm expecting too much that he can tell who is competent before hiring them, but when I have specific concerns ahead of time he still doesn't prioritize them. I'm the person looking for best practices and perusing the comments section for the ones that say, "Hey man, I do this professionally, you'll be happier with your result if you X."

We once took a kite to the beach with the kids. These two grown men who had never flown a kite spent an hour yelling at me about how to do it. I sometimes remind my husband with this shorthand, "It's like that day at the beach with the kite." I'm not always claiming to be an expert, but in this case I read five books on building chicken coops and runs, watched all the avoidable-mistakes-made videos, etc, but they've built some stuff and don't listen to me. I posted earlier about a ADU tiny house that I'd like to build, but I have so many years of planning and dreaming invested in it that I'm not sure my relationship would survive the build the way things currently go.

I'm open to ideas about how to change this dynamic, find (not fake) gratitude, or otherwise find the joy again. I recognize that part of this is feeling triggered and rehashing old wounds about my alcoholic father letting me down over and over again, but there's also some built-in codependence to living where a language deficit infantalizes you. I'm really not sure how much more of this disappointment I can take, but if this year taught me anything it's that I can't afford to live in the US anymore.

Talk to me.

Good thoughts from Tommy Bolin and Morfydd St. Clair

My jumbled reply:

Morfydd, I think multiple outbuildings are allowed on the property if they don't exceed the max sqm and don't call too much attention to themselves. (If a tinyhouse village cropped up there would be issues, but spaced around and relating to the main house they seem to be allowed. Many in my neighborhood have wooden kit outbuildings for tools or by the pool, etc.) The chicken run is being adapted from a pergola near the carport on the first terrace (street level); It's a different project from the tiny shed house (on the third terrace a.k.a. house level). I perhaps should have said monopitch instead of shed, but ideally it would kind of read as a shed/greenhouse to bypassers in addition to having a monopitch roof.

Books are fabulous. I think I go to the internet a lot because libraries don't have a lot of resources in English. Books with well-labeled diagrams to show Jordi and Enric would certainly be helpful and might be even better in Catalan, but then I feel a bit left out ;) I'm made a crazy by how much vocabulary it takes to correctly describe various pieces of wood based on their position and function. I know these terms all exists for a reason, but it's easy to get bogged down in it all when translating between English and Catalan (or even just trying to communicate about it in English).

I found exterior grade lumber, but not exterior grade plywood at the local big box store. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it might be harder to come by. Comments on OSB noted.

I'll work on the mental shift to top-down design. When I know which bathtub, toilet and sink then I'll know how big to make the bathroom. (Reminder to self: I'd like a tall toilet and sinks and counters set taller than the usual. I'm 5ft7 but my sons will be very tall.) The rest is open plan, so otherwise the floorplan just looks like a rectangle with some doors and windows as described. Left to my own devices I'd make a spreadsheet with sizes and prices and keep on adding materials to it until I have something like a materials budget. Semana Santa (Spring Break before Easter) might be a good target date for framing the shed with help. I'm writing this up as the worst of the windy and wet weather begins here. Local low temps are in January.

Tommy's order for getting started makes sense to me. I will avoid calling anyone a helpermonkey though as they certainly wouldn't appreciate it. Enric built the garage and is the owner of all of the tools I'm hoping to borrow, so I should put a proper plan together and loop him in. He tends to 'overbuild' compared to what I'm used to (aforementioned drunk father making things relatively quickly out of whatever was on hand being my primary example), which can be a good thing or can be a budget-buster depending on how it plays out. If my inlaws/landlords want it permitted and approved despite size being within the size exemption, then I'll probably need an architect to draw the plan, but I'm hoping we can just go for it.

Thanks for indulging me as I try to think this through.

Tommy Bolin: "Toilets have a fixed distance from the wall that works, only constraint unless adding grab rails.
Your post foundation allows you place fixtures anywhere in the  future, just crawl under to relocate drains."  Good to know.

A wood fired/RMH hot tub would not count towards your sq. footage, and if part of a 'separate' deck/porch with trellis would be almost like a second room.
I'm under Spanish law. It would count. Anything built to create usable space does. Husband read it again and it says (paraphrasing) 'build over usable area' so I'm wrong in my previous post about having to step in for the eaves (.3m/1ft arguably not usable) to avoid exceeding 20sqm, but I really shouldn't plan to put anything major under trellising like a RMH or hot tub (even though that sounds magical). I probably could shade my front door with plants later. They're not monsters.

My daughter's school mini claustrophobic box apartment in Seoul had a 'bathroom' that was really just a toilet located next to a small shower, with a tile floor and glass partition separating it from the bed and workspace/kitchenette.
Sounds interesting. Any pictures?

Poach storage ideas from the mass of online tiny home builders. Nothing makes a small space smaller as fast as clutter.
Yes. Bryce Langston made a very comprehensive video of top storage ideas for tiny houses for his Living Big in a Tiny House YouTube channel, which I recommend.

I think in my case the kitchen, eating bars/desk will become multistorage - plus storage bed, medicine cabinet and possibly a closet on the bed side of the bathroom wall. I'm earmarking half of the south wall for future shelving or storage potential, but I think this will mostly be 'she-shed' (don't love the term) as I will not need to move out of the existing house to have this be my retreat. A lot of potential clutter is left in the family home where the rest of the family seems content to live like packrats.

IKEA Kallax shelves have many many moves with me and I will factor in the possibility of some of the 4 tall, 4 wide ones that're cramping my style in the existing house coming over. They're not terribly elegant, but I'm used to using them for multifunctional storage. One might stand in as a room partition for the bedroom and be adjustable until anchored. I will leave a generous Kallax width from the end of the wall if a slider/egress goes in the southeast corner, make sure the clerestory is above the likely shelf height and will think about where outlets go based on possible positions, too.

I'm still looking for a stellar solution to laptop, tablet and phone docking that isn't bedside and doesn't take too much countertop/desk space but also isn't too close to water/kitchen sink.

Dunno what it's like where you are at, but here, the packrats will destroy and carry away the insulation of your floor. Plywood sheet it for durability and airtightness. "BubbleWrap", "plastic sheets", fully useless.
I'll consult Jordi (husband) and Enric (brother in law). I think the local style is mostly brick and gaps (being cynical) but I'll keep in mind that. I have a lot of those gym floor mats that wouldn't appeal to rodents so maybe those are incorporated into the floor.


Have a look at my skid shack thread. An awning, posing as a wall, would allow you some indoor/outdoor space for many seasons. Lightweight rolldown screen, the mosquito plan.
Stack plumbing vents in a common wall, reduce roof penetrations. In wall venting also possible. That would allow you to put a sink in a small island for example.
I'm interested to learn more about these ideas. Thanks.


Casement windows open out and when placed properly cross ventilate a small space well.
Yes.

Do you have a friend with a small crane? Build your roof on the floor/deck. Nice, flat, level, and square. Slide it aside, frame your walls in place, brace them plumb and SQUARE, pick the roof up and drop it on.  Save a ton of ladder work if you cannot walk wall tops.
No crane, but we do have scaffolding. I need more friends ;)


In your mind build/plan the house from the roof down. Start at the end and work back. Allows you to foresee problems, not react to them.
A good mental exercise.

Build the hot tub deck first, practice a little power tool usage, layout measuring and placing/fastening.
Cut a few decorative 'milk crates', garden benches, cabinets to store building supplies and tools, whatever. See if this really is something you are comfortable with.
Properly/respectfully handled power tools are neither dangerous nor scary. But inexperience and carelessness are.
Don't let your mind tell you it can't be done.

Can't have the hot tub or deck but could build myself some cold frames or raised garden beds to get more comfortable. My father was always can-do, but also often drunk or hungover while building, so the example I grew up with stresses me out, too. DIY is not my happy place. I like watching reference videos but then there's always someone in the comments ripping them a new one about mistakes or what they should have done instead. I try to learn from it but don't know who to rely on. There are a few shifts for me to make for comfort beyond safety - metric, cost of materials when making mistakes, etc. I also get vetoed by my husband and BIL when I enlist their help and end up mad when they take big detours from what I drew/planned/wanted, then they declare me ungrateful about the finished product. (Small things like a vertical plant wall, a quail cage and a backpack/shoe rack; I can't even imagine how far wrong a house could go.) BIL is Catalan-speaking and deaf from birth so when we miscommunicate sometimes we really, really miscommunicate. We're building a chicken run this month. I almost guarantee the door will not go where I want it. I'm ok with easier when it's still functional, but I don't think he understands yet that I'll be moving a ton of compost material in and out.

Anything done with or around special needs kids can have its share of anxiety. I once took my boys bowling and could barely focus on the lane when it was my turn. I want and appreciate pep talks but balance them with my life experiences. One kid is extremely cautious and prudent (arguably anxious/avoidant like me) the other is the kind you find trying to light a fire with a magnifying glass...indoors. Kid ADHD where at most one step of an instruction sticks at a time makes even our everyday life tasks hard. My sensory profile means that anything loud already has me at the edge of my tolerance.

Work hired out has been done badly, with no regard for delivery dates and contracts aren't easily enforced her even if you do have a solid agreement. My mother-in-law's telling of the building of the existing house in the 1980s includes several steps in which work was bungled and/people kept her money and never completed work and simply became unreachable. The solar package we bought (from the monopoly power company earlier this year) was delivered several months late, the mechanical room had to be redone, they didn't patch the first wall they put it on, and the we still don't have the rebate. For my part I feel like a foreign target for being cheated and am mostly good at getting bids from people who can never be reached again or scheduled if they do answer. :P

It may sound like I'm trying to talk myself out of the whole endeavor, but I'd rather try and lament than die with the money in the bank.

Hi Sarah,

If you're still around would you please give us an update and share any lessons learned from your build choices? I'm thinking about building a small house on piers in the mountains near Cubelles, Catalunya (Spain). (It's a different climate for sure, but minimal earthquake risk, so similar in that way. I have a 20 sq meter/215 sq ft ADU in mind.)

Cheers,
Eileen

Thank you!

Interest from Permies got me out of bed today. Here's a more optimistic view of my spring efforts. Astroturf was pretty effective where it created full blackout. Regrowth since spring isn't rooted nearly as firmly as older vines so it pulls away across the terrace more easily from safer places to work. It's still bothersome where it has direct contact with the wall. Runners crossing the astroturf were starting to adhere to the top, so it's good I cleared as much as I got to today. There were ZERO SNAKES living under there, fear of which I admit had been holding me back. (I once reached for a garden hose that wasn't one and may never recover.) New briars are shallowly rooted. My next step might be trying to figure out how many days of cover it takes to get a similar result. These were on at least five (mostly hot) months. I'm certain I could reduce the hand-trimming work significantly in much less time if I were around to check and drag them to new spots.

Cheers, E

Dian Green wrote:How vital is the short soaker tub to you? You said there is a pool already on the property.
I've been looking at tiny builds for a few years and also considering some of those ideas for our basement upgrade.
Being able to age in place is something I've been putting at a high priority so am trying to plan in accessibility.
For a small bath, making the whole room a "wet" room seems to give the best space, access and usefulness value. A folding, wall mounted seat and a flexible shower head, with no closed stall, would make it very accessible, even with the small size. Easy to clean too!

For the kitchenette, my uncle did a bunkie a few years ago and the one he did was to put in a short bit of countertop that was just wide and high enough to go over the top of a bar fridge. Total length is a bit over double the fridge space and the rest is closed shelving. Open shelves above and there is lots of room a kettle, some canisters and any room temp foods on the countertop.
The same bunkie uses sliding glass doors as both the doors and the full length windows. Shows the best views and you don't lose another wall to a door.

Last thing I can think of is if you can cheat on the porch issue by using a sun sail? It's not permanent, so it shouldn't count but could give you almost the same benefit.

Dian,

The bath is pretty high on my list. Hot baths are one of my main sensory joys. Ideally I'd read a couple of hours a day there. I used to recover from my office job that way before I married and had my kids. (The pool is an unheated, above-ground pool...in a mosquito war zone (bat boxes are on my list). When the pool fails (hopefully after the kids finish high school)  I don't want another one. I have psoriasis (an autoimmune condition that comes with skin issues as one of its outward symptoms) so chlorine is terrible for me. I would like to create a natural plant-filtered pond someday, but not here. I will keep accessibility in mind (psoriasis may come with severe arthritis sooner than later, too) so faucet fixtures, door handles and drawer pulls should be well-chosen, too. I love the idea of a shub (shower plus tub) generally or a 'slipper tub' (a high-sided tub with the back shaped for comfortable long baths) particularly. I don't know what's going to be available where I live yet. I have an Obramat catalogue (think 'Lowes' if you're American) and there are specialty sellers around, but I'm not sure what my budget is yet. If I hadn't married into a Normie family I might go the livestock trough 'who cares' route, but my landlords are going to expect/prefer/demand something more conventional.

(A basement won't work here. Replying to another commenter, not because you're working on yours.)

A sunsail is a good solution. We have a lot of 'outdoor living' areas already. I'd be as likely to sit on the porch of the main house, which has a table and bench seat I like as anything. (Except mosquitos! That one might get screened in.) I mentioned it mainly because decks and porches are big in tiny house design and they're kind of ruled out here if I try to go the too-small-to-require-a-permit route. After the tiny shed is an accepted fixture for a couple of years it might magically grow a pergola or a grape trellis to the north to shade that door ;)

Really happy to see the Bunkie site. Those are new to me. Thanks. I probably won't buy one but I might emulate them. My last apartment's bedroom had two sets of sliding doors as the wall to the balcony (unfortunately right next to train tracks!) Heat gain and loss were a problem seasonally, but I agree generally about sliders. The house my parents built where I grew up on Vashon Island had double French doors as the main entrance. They reduce privacy and they're a bother to keep clean, but that would feel like home away from home, too.

Cristobal's comment about integrated half-level lofts is totally valid, but it's probably not my preference. I've moved a lot around Barcelona. In Sant Cugat had a room with a loft for a couple of years and I only used it as (dusty) storage. It never became the office or crafting space I thought it would even though it had a nice desk and chair and lots of supplies. That probably says more about me than the design element (or maybe that it was too far removed from my kids to adequately supervise them at that age). Also heat rises, so as a Pacific Northwesterner who already thinks Catalunya is too hot for a lot of the year I'm likely to stay below. The twins had a big loft, too but without full ceiling height.  They loved it but it made 'bedtime' awful for me as the mama. As a kid, I had the top bunk for years and didn't like it. Climbing down to use the bathroom is a drag. My vision is poor when uncorrected. I'd like to stumble to my bathroom safely without glasses in the middle of the night. Although my kids might feel strongly about me sleeping in the tiny shed. Perhaps it'll be a daytime napping bed and reading spot more than an overnight bed.

On a side note, I often hear people in videos refer to ADUs (accessory dwelling units) as 'a marital aid'. I never know whether they're implying that it's a love shack or a way to keep partners from divorcing because they're spending too much time together. I love my guy, but quantity time post-pandemic rather than quality time before it hasn't been great for us. He eliminated a long train commute, but still seems to have given those hours back to his employer while working remotely. It's like I live in a call center. He writes code for banking clients and it's like I've returned to a fulltime job an Amazon co-office without getting paid. The upside is that he comes to me for a hug when he needs to annouce, "People are so stupid!" but I miss having a couple of quiet, solo hours while the kids are at school and he's working.

I'm looking forward to feeling 'home alone' in my own space!

Cristobal Cristo wrote:Eileen.

I would also recommend to build with local style, which makes Catalonia one of the best looking places on Earth.
Please do not build from timber in fire prone areas with arid summers.
If you build using Porotherm bricks, you will have both insulated and natural, breathing walls. Otherwise I would recommend a normal reinforced concrete frame infilled with light clay.
20 m2 can easily fit a bathroom and a nice living/sleeping space.
It would also fit a kitchenette, however in hot summer places it makes no sense to use the kitchen anyway during half of the year and in winter time you could use a small masonry stove both for heating and cooking (and baking in the firebox).
If you could build 1.5 story tall, then you could sleep at the attic and have more space on the first floor.
If you could build 2 story house then it would be a normal small house with living/bath/kitchen on the first floor and two bedrooms on top.
Designing to fit existing dimensional constraints is fun and makes you creative and efficient.

Cristobol Cristo,

Thanks for your reply.

I hear you about the local style because the overall uniformity does add something special to Catalunya, but I've gotta say that individually I've seen some of the ugliest houses in my life built here, too ;) I almost want to make a little gallery of some nearby stinkers and say, 'but at least it would be better than this!' Competitive breeze block and ironwork decor make for some funny versions of keeping up with the Joneses. Paving and covering entire lots with tile so you don't have to manage too many any living things is a pretty stark choice even if you throw in a potted lemon or two after the fact! I have opinions about gravel and other rock gardens (I don't even want to know what Jordi spent on river rock before he met me!) The Franco-era assumption that thugs may be coming through the windows at any minute also makes for some crazy unsafe homes with fireplaces. I've been lobbying my husband to prioritize fire egress from bedrooms. The modern fear is okupa (squatters) and they can be a real headache, but I'd rather risk a break in than not be able to get out in a fire.

I will try to learn more about Portotherm bricks. I was hoping a sensible roof could mitigate enough of my fire risk. Getting lighter materials to the site is also a factor in favor of a little timber but I've asked for advice and should probably now take it.

Going up a half or full story would exceed the 20 square meter footprint exception under the rules (according to my husband, who admittedly sometimes fibs to discourage me from doing things he doesn't want me to do). They'd count the extra area on the addition floors. I'd like to maximize while still making this look like an outbuilding of the main house. If I tried to go up extra stories it would definitely attract unwanted attention and might dwarf the already petite house.

A kitchenette where you don't cook much still makes sense to me in any season. Tea, juice, museli, yogurt, fruit, sandwiches, salads, snacks, a place to store food and hand wash dishes, etc. I didn't grow up on a giant Iberian hot lunch so that's what I usually eat anyway. I would call it a 'butler's pantry' or some such bougie thing, but then people picture wine, glasses, liquor and an espresso maker. I won't have an oven, microwave or hood fan, but I'd like a plug in hob to boil pasta or make an omelet if I feel like it that I can tuck away when I'm not using it. My husband is celiac. It would also give us a chance to reduce gluten contamination in the main house. I'm a good pie baker, but never make them anymore since rolling out dough looks like a biohazard to him. I could bring prepped food in to the other house to bake but not risk spreading flour around where he preps food. I could also keep my husband and sons from eating my cashe of preferred foods before I get a chance at them ;)

I do like to work with constraints, too. Some things that haven't been fixed would likely get fixed up once they're the 'view' to the tiny. That bit of fence keeps anyone from going off a cliff but there's room for improvement for sure. Photographing in each direction made me want to repaint the existing house, too. My mother-in-law said she picked that color because the pine pollen blends in on it! Live and learn.

Cheers,
Eileen

Zach, if I cut it back again and lime it then when I make it alkaline maybe it gets replanted in lavender and a few valiant fig trees. They tend to be most productive when fairly miserable ;)