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Allow me to introduce you to one of our new contributors for Tiny House Talk.  I’m excited to have someone else on board who loves the topic as much as many of us do.  Newt will be contributing once per week so stay tuned for her updates.  For now I’ll go ahead and pass it on to her!  – Alex

Hi everyone! I’m a 20 year old freelance writer living in Portland, OR. I was born in Venezuela where my family did volunteer work for seven years.

When I was one, we moved to Wisconsin.  The farm we created is where I grew up: 20 acres of wild Wisconsin woods, an acre garden, a milk cow, a dog, some cats, a mule, a donkey, chickens, horses, and my mom, dad and sister.  Both my sister and I were unschooled.

We ran our house on solar panels and a gas generator and had a latrine out back. We pumped water from our well with the power from our car batteries into the horse trough in our attic so that it could gravity feed to our kitchen and bathtub-room.  In summer, we used a gas fridge; in winter, an outdoor fridge with a huge hole cut in the side to let the winter cold in.

We left when I was thirteen but Wisconsin still feels like home.  I ended up in Portland at eighteen sharing a five bedroom house with six people.  I now live in an uncomfortably spacious one bedroom apartment.

I work online, bike everywhere and love Portland, but I’ve got wanderlust in my blood.  In the coming months, I’ll be buying a car, converting it into a portable home, and traveling the US until I feel like being still again. This is a dream I’ve had since I was 12 and, while I plan to keep a few boxes of art supplies and old journals in a friend’s basement, I’m excited to start drastically downsizing my possessions.

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