Sailing Baby Blue

They say the two happiest days of a sailor’s life are the day he buys his boat and the day he sells it. I find that I don’t relate, and not only because I’m not a “he”. We are selling Baby Blue today and it breaks my heart. I’ve had quite a lot of time to get used to the idea of letting go, but now that the day has finally arrived I feel a knot of regret in my stomach. Despite my gripes and pining for creature comforts while onboard, I miss living on Baby Blue. I don’t often get attached to objects and typically prefer to avoid referring to anything inanimate as “she”, but it’s never been so hard for me to move on. She was my first boat and I love her. We worked long and hard to fit our lives into the space of her tiny cabin. She taught us how to sail, kept us safe in the face of some extreme circumstances, and allowed us to experience so much beauty. Through my trials and triumphs living on that boat, I felt the constant clash between my faith that everything will be okay and my anxie...

  While we would love to hold on to our trusty cruising vessel, we are ready to let her go on to her next caretakers and future adventures. Now that we have our own little boy blue, (tiny house) life on the hard is keeping us busy and too far away to give our beloved Baby Blue the attention she deserves. Our family of three will be on the water again someday, but we’re going to trust that there is another boat out there that will be just as good to us when we’re ready to set sail again.

  The tiny house is finally finished and we’re ready to make our move south! As with any home project, we still have a few finishing touches we’d like to add at some point, but it’s complete enough for us to start living in it. So far, we’ve managed to find a place for just about everything we need. Some of our storage solutions aren’t exactly ideal, like the two surfboards on the ceiling and all the tools in the back of the truck, but it will work temporarily. We’ll post a video tour and a breakdown of our expenses and final cost as soon as we get a chance. For now, we’re working on securing everything so we can hit the road tomorrow!

  We add a shed to the front of the tiny house, rough in our electrical wiring, and get most of the siding in place. Progress has slowed down a bit, partly because we spent over a month traveling around taking care of non-tiny-house-related business. That means we have a cold month ahead of us as we try to complete the project as a Christmas present to ourselves! We’re looking forward to getting the siding completed and the insulation in so we can start working on more exciting things – inside the house!

  We took a rather long break from our tiny house build to head down to Annapolis. For three weeks we camped out and worked to set up, tear down, and man the gates at both the sail and power boat shows. Since we were in the area, we also stopped by Baby Blue to get her ready for winter on the hard. We thought we’d share what we’ve been up to in a new Sailing Baby Blue episode. To see our progress on the tiny house, check out the  photos here  or watch the first  two videos .

The exterior of the tiny house is finally finished! Let’s take a little trip down memory lane to review all the work it took to get to this point. Our first priority was getting the house weathered in. Taking tarps off each morning before starting work and the epic struggle to get them back on each evening was putting a significant damper on crew morale. Getting Tyvek on the walls was no problem, but protecting the roof would take a lot more effort. We measured carefully and placed our custom order for $620 worth of WeatherEdge 29 gauge steel roofing in blue. We went back and forth about the color for a week and then just went for it. I wasn’t sure we made the right choice when it arrived, but now that everything has come together, I think it looks downright adorable. If I do say so myself. The only challenge we ran into was that some of the edge trim was oversized for our teeny tiny house. We were able to use the ridge cap and drip edge but the gable trim and wall-to-roof trim around ...

  The first time I remember discussing tiny houses was when we were living in Denver. It was the winter before we sold the house and I was looking for something to do for the night. I saw that Dee Williams, author of “The Big Tiny: A Built-it-Myself Memoir”, was speaking at the Tattered Cover. I hadn’t read the book, but it sounded interesting and like something Jon might enjoy too, so we went. On the floor of the bookstore, the author had taped off a life-size layout of her tiny house. As I listened to her talk about the tiny house movement and gazed at the taped off partitions for the kitchen and toilet, I thought to myself: I am never doing that. Jon on the other hand, was all about it. My main objection was the trailer. I understood that the point was to avoid needing permits, but it just didn’t seem worth it if you had to build such a  tiny  space. I enjoy a small, cozy house, but the idea of limiting the size to something that could fit on a trailer did not app...