Here’s the view into my living, dining, kitchen at my new apartment at Punalu’u. Still getting moved in. Hence the tote that has served as my dining/work chair and likely will until I find a chair!
On Tuesday, I moved from My Brattleboro Landing Pad into an apartment on the property of my friends Erin Maile O’Keefe and Kevin O’Keefe. They call this place Punalu’u (part of a longer story about Erin’s family’s home in Hawai’i). This little area around the house (which would be our block if it wasn’t the countryside) has been dubbed Circus Hill because Erin and Kevin and their surrounding neighbors are circus folks. As I told them, I hope to add to the beauty and the zany and the laughs of this wonderful place. And the neighborhood is Wickopee Hill, a name that comes from the Abenaki people who are the first peoples of this area. I’m living in concentric circles of learning about the land and the people who have cared for it (and vice-versa).
When Erin and Kevin first moved to this land from New York City it had the house and an attached studio apartment that had been used as a weaving studio. (In many places in the country this would be called an ADU. Here it’s called an Apartment in Home.) Erin and Kevin updated it and started renting it out as an apartment while they lived in the house. That is where they were living when I first visited them on this land. Within a couple hours of my arrival here in August five years ago I was toolbags on, preparing for the inaugural Tiny House Fest Vermont, and the construction of their tiny house, The Paper Boat, which I chronicled the start of in the O’Keefe Build Blitz posts.
I’m appreciating the generous mudroom, even though we didn’t get the big snowstorm they were predicting this weekend!
Now Erin and Kevin live in their tiny, which is considered a detached bedroom by the town. The house is occupied by some great folks, too, and now I’m in the apartment, which means that I am once again living in a tiny house community. This is the third one I’ve lived in, after Simply Home Community and Going Places.
When I decided to come live in Vermont I told Erin to let me know if the apartment opened up. She called me when I was driving across Montana to tell me that their apartment tenant had made an offer on the house the day I started driving and that her offer had just been accepted. (The fortune cookie blessing I’d uncrumpled a few weeks earlier “Be decisive now. Worry about precision later,” came floating back to me.)
Loving this cozy nest of a bed! (The bedframe was a $20 score from Facebook Marketplace - it had been stored in someone’s barn!)
I was great to get my bearings at My Brattleboro Landing Pad and it was nice being in a furnished place because I came here with just what fit in my Honda Fit. And I’m delighted to be in my apartment at Punalu’u now because this will be a fabulous place to hunker down for the winter. I unpacked just the essentials over the work week last week and this past weekend I started settling in. We were supposed to have a massive snow storm, which would have been especially fun for nesting, but instead we got some rain, some sleet, a bit of snow flurry. With some music playing, and the company of an audio book, it was pretty cozy.
I don’t know the exact square footage, so I’ll measure one of these days. But it’s amusing to me how much bigger than The Lucky Penny this studio apartment is. For instance, as I unpacked my kitchen things I realized that the kitchen here is fully twice as large as the one I’m used to. Several of the shelves and cupboards are still empty. It will be nice to really be able to stock up, but I imagine I will likely also have some breathing room. I own far less than I did a decade ago, the last time I lived in a “normal” house.
I’m loving cooking in this spacious kitchen! it’s more space than I need, but that means plenty of room for baking and food processing! Hooray!
It’s interesting that because of the layout and the arrangement of storage it’s actually been harder for me to find a place for everything. There was sooo much built in storage in The Lucky Penny with the tansu and the cupboards under the bed. I am borrowing some furniture from a friend who was storing it anyhow, so I have time to find the furniture pieces I want. Still, there’s a wide open space that I’ve been joking I might need to turn into a roller skating or floor hockey rink. (Okay, so it’s not THAT big, but it’s all relative, right?!) It might just become a lounge space for stretching and reading with a big rug and some pillows. I’m curious to see how I end up using the space and what I decide to acquire or build to make it work well for me. And I’m so grateful to have landed close to friends so I can be in community again, especially during these strange Covidian days.