Dee Williams was diagnosed with a heart condition when she was 41.
Faced with her mortality, she radically changed her life. She built a
tiny house and reduced the number of things she owns to about 300. She
wrote a book about her experience,
The Big Tiny.
Time
is precious, and she wanted to be spending hers with the people and
things she truly loved. That included the beautiful sprawling house in
the Pacific Northwest she had painstakingly restored—but, increasingly,
it did not include the mortgage payments, constant repairs, and general
time-suck of home ownership. A new sense of clarity began to take hold:
Just what was all this stuff for? Multiple extra rooms, a kitchen
stocked with rarely used appliances, were things that couldn’t compare
with the financial freedom and the ultimate luxury—time—that would come
with downsizing.
Deciding to build an eighty-four-square-foot house—on her own,
from the ground up—was just the beginning of building a new life.
Williams can now list everything she owns on one sheet of paper, her
monthly housekeeping bills amount to about eight dollars, and it takes
her approximately ten minutes to clean the entire house. It’s left her
with more time to spend with family and friends, and given her freedom
to head out for adventure at a moment’s notice, or watch the clouds and
sunset while drinking a beer on her (yes, tiny) front porch.
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