The Shed

Nate and I are moving for the first time since getting married. When we were engaged, we heard about the first homes many couples had lived in. The themes were all similar: too small, inconvenient, and often riddled with pests. For all that, they have a certain charm to them. Our first house, bestowed with the winsome title “The Shed,” was no different. 

The Shed is actually a tiny home with a kitchen/living room, two small rooms off the kitchen, and a bathroom. The windows and light are probably my favorite thing about it. The main room has two large windows facing North, as well as a big raised window facing East above the kitchen sink. In the morning it pours light into the room, and one could sit on the couch, drinking coffee, watching the dancing shadows of leaves, and listening to the baby play on the floor. 

The bathroom was a constant source of amusement. When I was pregnant, I could sit on the toilet, and just get my chin on the edge of the sink to get sick in it. There was no bathroom counter, only some shelves above the sink that went deep, deep into the wall. What lurked in the very backs of those shelves—the dark places of the world—I know not. If Nate wasn’t home, I would close the lid and stand on the toilet to reach the top shelf as there was no room for a stool.

In the summer, cooking of any kind made the Shed feel like a greenhouse that exclusively grows tropical plants. The window in the bathroom was the only one in the house that would fit an AC unit. But as the only outlet in the bathroom was across from the window, we had to drape the cord over the toilet to plug it in. Forgetting to mention this fact to a visitor once, they sat in a blast of cold air, the cord hanging in front of their face while doing their business, unsure whether they could unplug the unit as we usually did. In the winter, when the temperature dropped to the single digits, we left the faucets all dripping to keep the pipes from bursting. This resulted in a shower covered in a sheet of ice that refused to melt until we propped a space heater up on the toilet lid. 

The bathroom was not the only room with a great personality. A wedding gift from both our parents was a king-sized mattress and bedframe. The bedroom, however, was too narrow-minded to accommodate such luxury. It had a closet on one wall, a broken baseboard heater on another, and an odd trim along the other two walls that came out six inches into the room. Why this little shelf was there, I’ll never know. But as the only way to fit the king mattress was by putting it up against the wall, we lifted the bed frame onto the trim and propped up the remaining frame supports with books to keep it even. At first, I slept in the corner by the wall. But by the third trimester, I was getting up so much in the night, crawling over Nate everytime was too much work. We switched sides. Often my cardio for the day consisted of my pregnant-self trying to put a fitted sheet on a king-sized mattress up against a wall. 

The Shed had no laundry, but fortunately my brother lived up the alley and let us borrow theirs. A couple times a week, I’d take a sack of dirty clothes, hoist it over my shoulder, and hike up the steep alleyway like a peddler with his pack. If it had snowed anytime recently, the return trip over the layers of ice and gravel with the clean clothes was a little more harrowing. 

Anyone who has lived in a small home knows one must embrace the eclectic lifestyle. Even when everything is in its proper place, stuff is everywhere. In our case, plants, vases, and coffee mugs lined every windowsill. Books lay about on shelves, in stacks on the floor, or on side tables. The baby swing, basket of board books, and borrowed play gym sat by the armchair and the kitchen island. At dinner, we would sit on the couch, our plates on our laps, laughing and looking forward to a future where we could use a dinner table. The microwave on a side-table, with a lamp propped up on top of it. The baby’s crib in the spare room, which also stored a bookshelf, a desk, a rolling cart, and dresser. When the baby came, he was a good little sleeper, and so we hardly used the desk. Large ceramic pots and the cast iron pan were stored in the oven. If I baked, I unloaded them onto the stove. But if I needed to bake and use the stove, the counter was inevitably covered in food prep, so the unused pots were left by themselves, blushing a little, on the ground. 

All these things and many more contributed to the Shed's quaintness. The list goes on—Nate getting a ladder and squeezing through the tiny bedroom window when we got locked out, the slugs found on the rug, the electric box in the kitchen I tried to make “look cute” by covering it with gingham contact paper, the squirrel who begged for nuts on the fence outside. I will miss it all. But nostalgia won’t keep me from appreciating the blessings of our second home: a washer and dryer, a bathroom counter, and a table, to name a few. I am very thankful for The Shed. And I am thankful to be leaving it.