New Zealand’s south island in the winter has something amazing. It is this random white stuff that falls from the sky. It is fun to play with. But boy is it cold! One thing I didn’t anticipate with our current location being surrounded by trees, was how cold it gets in the mornings outside here.

Thank goodness we insulated so well. It takes so little heat to keep this house warm, that we just leave the heater running all day on a thermostat. I would certainly like to see more solar power input though. We are getting about 50amp hours of the panels @ 24v at the moment. Which is great until you realize that we are using 150amp hours. Its not an issue where we currently are, but it tells me that when we find land, we need to ensure we don have any trees even partially blocking our solar panels.

The only thing that has gone wrong this month has been another water pump. It appears that there is a miss-match between the pressure the pumps can supply, and the diameter of the pipes/restrictors in the taps. The pressure switches in these pumps are turning on and off constantly when we are showering, as it’s too powerful for the flow of water being used. I need to find a smaller pump I suppose. But for now, I decided to just disconnect the pump from the water system, as we have water pressure from the house anyway. Its certainly something we need to fix before we move the house later.

On that note, We have started looking for land to purchase. There are restrictions we need to be careful about. As with most councils nowadays, they hate Tiny Houses. We need to find somewhere outside of the city center which has less restrictions. Thankfully, when we built the Tiny House, we did so to perfectly road legal specifications (Length, width, height, weight). While this made the inside quite skinny (2.2m wide interior), it means we fall into a special category when it comes to land. Court’s in New Zealand have already decided against my city council on the matter of a Tiny House which they deemed a movable vehicle instead of a building. Due to it being perfectly road legal and easy to move. Which means, building codes simply don’t apply to our Tiny House.

(Here is a link to the article which also has the law change.)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/07/good-thing-for-small-packages-tiny-homes-movement-wins-big-in-new-zealand

The land hunt will be slow. We need the right place. Somewhere with access to water. Somewhere with good sunlight. Somewhere perhaps not in the city, but not too far away, and of course, somewhere not too expensive. These are the only way Ill be able to achieve true ‘off-grid’. I’m not in a hurry though, as we are quite comfortable here. 2 months of living in a Tiny House without it being a construction zone has been healing for the soul.

This morning I woke up in my nice warm house, made some breakfast, opened up my kitchen windows and sat in front of the kitchen bench overlooking the snow on the ground outside. In that moment, sitting, eating my avocado on toast, I felt…….
‘millennial as fuck‘.

(For those two old, or two young, to appreciate that joke, in New Zealand, Gen Y tell us we can’t afford a house because we eat too much avocado on toast and not because they fucked the housing economy here).

Lastly, as you can see from the photo, I still need to build some stairs.