Aaron's Tuff Shed Cabin

This is an interview with Aaron Brachfeld who owns and writes for the Meadowlark Herald and lives in a cooperative in Colorado. He is currently building a little house using a Tuff Shed as a boat cabin.

• Check with local regulations for homes.  The County or City building inspector will not like your small home, or a Tuff Shed unless you make considerable modifications to it.  However, in many places, it is legal to dwell in an RV.  Some RV’s have wheels, others have pontoons.  RV permits are very affordable in most places.
• Also, check with Child Protection Services or the police for regulations required for children.  In Colorado, each child needs about 75 square feet, their own bed (at least 2 feet wide) and numerous other details.  If you don’t have children, it is likely you won’t need to modify your plans much.
• Sanitation is regulated too.  On boats in Colorado, you are required to have on-board sanitation before entering waters, and most RVs are required to have toilets.  Sanitation may be easily provided with a marine toilet in any case, combined with an off-board processor, or septic dump.  There are numerous solutions, but the most cost effective will be determined by the site, the regulations and your own requirements.  An on-board sewage tank will not likely require a permit from the government, and may be sucked clean like any other… or dumped.
• If you are making a small or tiny home, shelving is vital.  So is furniture that serves double purposes, easily stored or hung, and moved about.  Your room will need to be reconfigured several times a day from bedroom to kitchen to office to…
• Electrifying your RV requires not connecting it to the ground with a permanent attachment, usually.
• Adequate research into the law is vital.  You are not allowed to live freely anymore, and everything that we do and how we do it is regulated.  Boats are regulated differently from other RV’s and RV’s are regulated different from mobile homes.
• We found a barbeque is cheaper than a kitchen stove if you want cooking facilities on board.  Mounting it or altering the barbeque is not necessary, but possible.
• There is not much special about a Tuff Shed vs. other buildings in terms of lifestyle, but it is a choice to make a home you can afford than take one pre-made you cannot.  With Tuff Sheds you can customize the number of windows and other structural elements, and that is certainly nice.

Good luck with finishing your house, Aaron!

Have you considered a Tuff Shed as a house? Could you convert a shed into office space or a guest house?

There’s always a decompression time between Christmas and New Years when the holiday festivities are wrapping up and the Winter begins to set in. I can’t say that I’m all that knowledgeable about the “winter blues” per se since I live in Southern California (and it’s in the 70′s right now!) but the end of the year feeling definitely creeps up on me around this week. To stay cheery and have a positive outlook, I find that participating in my favorite activities seem to help.

For instance, I’m an outdoor kind of person. I’d much rather be outside gathering some much needed rays of sun than cooped up indoors. Some activities that motivate me during this time of year are:

• Bike riding. It’s no surprise that I enjoy biking around town (just check out my gravatar!) On a beautiful winter day I hop on my bike and take a short ride around the neighborhood. The nice thing about a winter ride is that even when it’s cold outside, biking gets my blood pumping and warms me up.
• Hiking. Another outdoor activity. I’m surrounded by hillsides that offer easy day hikes and during the winter, snakes are less likely to be squirming around which is a good thing.
• Reading. I really don’t have much time to enjoy novels except around vacations. My winter vacation is just long enough to enjoy a novel or two. And, if the weather is gloomy, I can always catch up on some National Geographic Adventure magazines (dream of tropical locales without actually leaving my living room!)
• Meeting friends for coffee. I’m a huge Starbucks lover (or addict depending on how you look at it). Spending a couple of hours chatting with a friend or two and caffeinating myself is a good time.
• Playing a board game. Board games aren’t boring I say! It actually takes social and cooperation skills to play a game and follow directions.

Most of the activities that cheer me up are frugal activities that cost little to nothing. So not only am I engaging in activities that boost endorphins, I’m accomplishing my on-going goal of saving money. Two for one deals are my favorite!

How do you beat the winter blues this time of year? For those who live in more severe climates, what activities do you participate in?

Maybe I’m a bit late to the party, but I just figured out how to scan my checks from my Android phone and deposit them into my bank account. Let me just say, It’s really freakin’ cool! Why do I think this is the best thing since sliced cheese?

Well, for one, I’ve just been too busy to run to the bank and deposit checks, even through the ATM. And two, since one of my banks is an “online” bank anyway, there isn’t anywhere for me to “run to.” My only other option for banking with my online branch is to mail the check to them – no thanks, snail mail.

When I signed up for my online savings account, I knew I had the option to scan checks from home and deposit them (which I’ve done before). But I was having some computer issues the other day and decided to venture into mobile banking and make my Droid phone work for me. I didn’t want to misplace my check or forget to deposit it, so I downloaded a barcode scanning app first, then scanned the bar code on my bank’s website. It took me directly to my banks app, which I downloaded. I’m still a little confused how I was able to install it, since it made me visit the Android App store twice, but it now works beautifully. I am now waiting anxiously until I have another check to deposit. I think I’m hooked.

Technology can save time…and money.

Do you bank online? Have you tried a mobile check scanning app?

Homemade Pumpkin Pie - courtesy of Mr. LH

Have a wonderful, safe, enjoyable Thanksgiving Day! I’ll keep this post short and sweet; My thanks go out to….

• Mr. LH. He’s been neglected lately with all the school work I’ve been having to do on my “off time.” That will soon change come mid-December. He’s looking forward to the end with anticipation.
• My cohort peers. They’ve been so supportive through this crash-credential semester. Thankfully, we’ve been able to lean on each other and act as cheerleaders for one another.
• The Yakezie members. For their continued support through guest posts (thank you, thank you for providing them in a time of need!), their comments, visits, and promotion. Oh, and Sam who spearheaded this whole network.
• My family. I’m thankful I got to visit my family in New York this year and even see my brother for an afternoon (he lives in Dubai which is half way around the globe!)
• My cats. Their cuddles are always so sweet.

Now some special thanks to my guest posters over the past few months (sorry if I forgot anyone!):

• Corey from Passive Income to Retire
• Stock Market Basics
• Melissa from Mom’s Plans
• Tony from Investorz Blog
• And Corey again from 20′s Finances

Many thanks and have a wonderful weekend!

And now a silly Thankgiving poem from my professor:

May your stuffing be tasty
may your turkey be plump,
may you potatoes and gravy
have never a lump.
May your yams be delicious
and your pies take the prize,
and my your Thanksgiving dinner
stay off your thighs!

The thighs stanza made me think I’ll be sure to bike ride a little more this weekend.

Keeping up with the Joneses - We never knew them!

I was tagged by 101 Centavos to take part in the “7 Links Project“. This project highlights 7 of my past posts that directly relate to the following 7 questions, sort of a “blast from the past” type project.  Trip Base initiated this project with the intention of uniting bloggers and bringing to light old posts that may have not gotten as much attention due to the blog’s infancy at the time of posting. Without further adieu, I’ll address each of the 7 categories below.

Your most popular post - It may come as no surprise to anyone that my most popular post happens to be Little House Plans I Adore. This post’s popularity has a lot to do with the fact that the first 3 words of the post match my blog’s name and tag line, hence this post appears on the first page of a Google search when someone types in “little house plans.”  No surprise here.

A post whose success surprised you – What is surprising is that people are searching for Tuff Shed house plans. I guess that’s why Tuff Sheds as Living Space? post is surprisingly popular. I’m not the only person who has seen a Tuff Shed and thought, “I bet I can live in that!”

The post that you are most proud of - I have a couple of posts that I wrote early on that I’m proud of, but the one I’m most proud of is Who are the Real “Joneses”? I wrote this post after I read The Millionaire Next Door. I poked around the web investigating where the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” came from and found out it originated from a 1920′s cartoon. The irony is that the cartoon’s main characters never see their neighbor’s, the Joneses, but they try and out-spend them. How ironic.

Your most beautiful post - I don’t know if I would describe any of my posts as beautiful, but I guess my most “beautiful” post per se is Lose the Lawn, Save Money. I learned a lot about gardening and lawns while living in our last rental house. I know that when I finally do purchase my own little house, I’ll go small on the lawn and big on the drought-tolerant local flora and fauna.

Your most helpful post - I was working on a series of helpful posts (and still am), but the one I think was most helpful, I hope, was Savings Account Non-Existent? Try a New Approach. It was a problem/solution style of post that clearly defined finding the problem and creating a step-by-step plan to solve it.

Your most controversial Post - This happens to be a post I didn’t write. It was a guest post I hosted, Is Owning Your House Outright a Bad Idea? It just happened to get picked up by The Consumerist and many of the comments were down right opposed to the ideas presented in this article. All I can say is it’s good to look at both sides of an argument and weigh them equally.

A post that didn’t get the attention it deserved – Selling the American Dream is by far my favorite post that didn’t get the attention it deserved. I wrote this post one month into my blogging endeavors and was truly inspired by what I was seeing every night through Netflix; main characters barely employed and living in some McMansion in an expensive city. This is propaganda at it’s worst.

As part of the 7 Links Project, I have nominated the following bloggers:

• Afford Anything
• Life and My Finances
• Mom Vesting
• The Penny Frugalista
• Ultimate Money Blog

It was refreshing revisiting these posts through this project. I’ve written over 500 posts in 2 years and have forgotten some of what I’ve written. I’ll have to go through my posts more often.