Name: The Big Tiny
ISBN: 9780399166174

Dee Williams

"A personal memoir about downsizing and the author's experience building her own home and living the minimalist lifestyle"--

A Built-It-Myself Memoir

The Big Tiny

Ember Skies

An incredibly well-written page turner about the important things in life like living it as fully as possible. Delves into the importance of interpersonal relationships and a sense of home as much as it examines the often misguided importance we put on all of our "stuff" that we've grown so accustomed to carting around from house to bigger house. Highly recommended for anyone wondering about the tiny house lifestyle, but also those who could stand to take a few steps back and look at the bigger picture of life.

Corey White

Mandi Jayne

Dee Williams’s life changed in an instant, with a near-death experience in the aisle of her local grocery store. Diagnosed with a heart condition at age forty-one, she was all too suddenly reminded that life is short, 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. The lessons Williams learned from her “aha” moment post-trauma apply to all of us, every day, regardless of whether or not we decide to discard all our worldly belongings. Part how-to, part personal memoir, The Big Tiny is an utterly seductive meditation on the benefits of slowing down, scaling back, and appreciating the truly important things in life.

The Big Tiny A Built-It-Myself Memoir

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