Book ‘From a Small Dream Home to a Ready-to-Move-In Home’: RELAXED MOVING IN

“OUR TINY HOUSE IS ALMOST FINISHED. NOTHING CAN GO WRONG NOW!”

Here’s how to keep your cool in the final stretch.

If you’ve reached the final chapter 10 of our book *From a Small Living Dream to a Finished Home*, you’ll no doubt recognise yourself in the following lines. If you’re still planning to get started on your project, these insights will be just as helpful, as it’s never too early to start questioning your current living situation...

You’ve probably already got the hardest part of your journey to a tiny house behind you. You’ve worked out what your needs are when it comes to living arrangements. You’ve found a tiny house model that suits you and suppliers or tradespeople to help you build your dream. You’ve bought, rented or leased a plot of land and obtained planning permission. Now all that’s left is to get the house onto the plot and you into the house. To ensure that the assembly, the move and your first few days in your new home go as smoothly as possible, we’ve summarised some tips and insights for you in this chapter.

Downsizing to the essentials is a process – as you’ve already learnt in the previous chapter. Once you’ve decided to go down this path, you should make sure that the things you throw out the door don’t come back in through the window. In other words, by this stage we’ve already thought very carefully about buying new things. As you should now be aware of your future storage options, it can help to think carefully and plan exactly where each item is to be stored. This way, you’ll keep track of things and avoid immediately filling your new home with clutter again. After all, moving house is always a moment in life when you can reinvent yourself, and part of that involves wanting to surround yourself with new things. Make sure, however, that the move or the process of setting up your new home doesn’t undermine your original plan at this stage. Draw up a list of the essential items that should find a place in your new home: from the hoover to the washing machine. Get a mental overview of your current household contents. What’s left after you’ve decluttered and downsized? You’ll no doubt realise once again which items don’t necessarily need to be moved into your tiny house in their current size or quantity. Just before the move, we sorted out things that had survived every selection process up to that point and which had seemed indispensable to us until then. [...]

The anticipation of your future way of life can unleash unexpected energy. Use that to keep going in the final stretch! For the last few months leading up to the move-in, we created a ‘Yay list’ and, of course, celebrated every tick we could put on it to the full. Towards the end, we still had the following milestones on our list:

• Check the progress of the mini-house’s construction on site
• Get the architect to confirm the completion date
• Terminate the existing tenancy agreement
• Maintain regular contact with the transport company and clarify any outstanding questions regarding delivery
• Carry out a site inspection with the civil engineering firm and assess the utility connections (water, waste water and electricity) and, if necessary, the foundations

On 9 May 2023, the big day was finally due to arrive. More than 4 years – 14,000 kilometres spent searching for a plot across southern Germany – 550 pages of paperwork and 540 emails with suppliers and authorities – that was our journey from initial interest to the day our tiny house was delivered – far longer, further and more intense than we had initially imagined. On several occasions, we felt as though our goal lay just around the next bend, only to realise that it didn’t matter because we’d had a flat tyre. All the hard work, the sleepless nights and the emotional conversations between us were an important part of the process and showed us that choosing to live in a tiny house is not like building a conventional house, as you’re not just changing your living situation, but your entire lifestyle. With the experience we have today, we would certainly have done many things better. That’s why we’re sharing our journey with you right up to the very last metres.

To prepare as well as possible for the day of delivery and avoid any nasty surprises, we worked through the following list in the weeks leading up to it:

• Distribute information leaflets to residents on the access roads so that no cars are in the way on the day of delivery and the neighbours know why huge machines are driving through their village
• Ask neighbours about any known narrow spots, access restrictions and gradients in the surrounding areas
• Check the weather forecast daily (Be prepared for any weather-related eventualities, particularly if there is still some final work to be done on the house or the plot. Make sure you have a Plan B in case it does rain or storm.)
• If necessary, ask the civil engineering firm to recompact the ground beneath the crane truck (This may be necessary if the weather is changeable in the days leading up to the assembly.)†
• Mark the locations where pipes and cables have been laid underground so that it is clearly visible which areas cannot bear excessive loads (e.g. from heavy vehicles)
• Coordinate the house delivery with the joinery workshop, taking the weather into account (one of our modules was open at the top.)
• Pass on the delivery date to local tradespeople, such as civil engineers and electricians
• Book accommodation for the night before the house is delivered, so you can be on site early
• Coordinate follow-up trades, such as roofers, in the days following the installation of the modules

You can find plenty more insights into the final stages of our own Tiny House project, our first few weeks in the Tiny Loft and ten things we’d do differently today in Chapter 10 of 10.

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