Josie the Jersey

May 21, 2013 – Our tiny house doesn’t have a roof and we don’t own any land – so the obvious next step would be to buy a dairy cow! Yes you heard right; Pete and I are the proud co-owners of a beautiful Jersey cow. Our friends Eric and Theresa, who have a small farm, wanted to get a dairy cow and they were looking for someone to share in the responsibilities. For months I have been dreaming of making butter and cheese.

Josie came from Hidden Acres Dairy Farm in Houghton. We’ve had Josie just over a week and things are going very well. Pete and I milk Josie in the evening and Eric and Theresa handle the morning milking. Eric and Theresa have four dairy goats, so they are already established hand milkers. I milked a cow once in high school, so it will take me a while to build up the hand strength and coordination, plus Pete doesn’t like to give up the milk stool if he can help it. Pete is also already a good milker due to milking the goats while he was laid off for the winter.

I currently have five gallons of milk in the fridge; I plan on making Leipajuusto, a Finnish squeaky cheese, this weekend.

Hidden Acres Dairy Farm.

Off to her new home.

Meeting the Scottish Highlands, her new pasture mates.

One of the goats wanting to say hi.

Meeting the goats.

Isn’t she a beauty!

1/2 gallon of milk with a cream line.

One of four baby goats.

The piglets, nine total.

Tiny House on the Move

March 29, 2013 – For the past 8 months we have been renting/caretaking a house from friends of ours who were trying to sell it. We always knew it would sell eventually, but we hoped it wouldn’t be until the end of the summer. Fortunately for our friends and unfortunately for us, the house got an offer in the winter and the buyers wanted to move fast. We ended up having to be out within a month and not only find a new place to live, but also find a place for the tiny house. Weather was also not on our side. We had a crazy winter this year; it was very late and not much snow to start, but mother nature made up for that and we got hit with snowstorm after snowstorm far later than many of us would like.

Jeff and Cindy were gracious enough to let us bring the tiny house back to their place. Now the only problem was finding a good time to move the house. We made a couple of failed attempts earlier in the month. Pete borrowed Eric’s truck, since his is a 3/4 ton and Pete thought it would pull the house easier, and we made attempt number one. However, the concrete blocks that the jack stands sit on were frozen into the ground. Pete had to rip them out of the ground using the truck and a heavy-duty chain. By the time the blocks were free it was too dark to move the house. The second attempt failed due to several inches of ice in the driveway preventing the truck from getting any traction. All of these complications kept delaying the move because we were trying to move the house in the evening when there would be the least amount of traffic and hopefully the least amount of cops (not that we were breaking the law, or were we…it’s a bit of a gray area).

We finally got a beautiful day and decided to move the house in the middle of the afternoon on a Friday while everyone else was heading out of town for the holiday weekend. We only had about four miles to go so we figured traffic could just deal with us. We also scouted the whole route ahead of time to make sure overhead lines wouldn’t be an issue. We had one very low cable line running across the road in our neighborhood, but we were able to avoid it by going around the block. I followed behind Pete in our truck and everything went off without a hitch.

Now, if only spring would come, we might be able to start building again.