Living in a minuscule home is so crazy, you’d have to be a lunatic to do it. And it turns out I am that lunatic …
t is November. It is 3am and I am lying awake listening to the sound of rats chewing the electrical wires within the walls of my house. If you’ve ever heard mice or rats scuttling around in the walls, you’ll know how annoying it can be. Imagine that, but with the rats separated from your head by only a slice of MDF. The scratching and gnawing is so loud, I can’t get back to sleep.
Living off-grid is mad. You’d have to be a lunatic to choose to do it. And, it turns out, I am that lunatic.owards the end of the coronavirus pandemic, the world gave me an opportunity to look at all the elements of my life and change them. By which I mean I went through a separation, then divorce. So many people grumble along in vaguely unhappy situations simply because that’s what they have always done. But sometimes life forces us to reassess our choices.
From that point on, every time I moved, I acquired a bigger garden. I got out of London into Essex. The bath was replaced with veg beds and fruit trees. The thing was, though, that the houses got bigger and bigger, too. And the cars. And the carbon footprint. At my most bloated, I lived with my family in a five-bedroom house.So back again to the divorce. I found myself in a position where I was able to really think about how I wanted to live. I had always felt happier in smaller spaces.
I would love to write that the house was great when it arrived in October 2022. Unfortunately, it turned out the people who built it didn’t seem to know anything about living off-grid, or electricity, or how to tell the truth. I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt. I wondered if maybe we had just been unlucky with our house. Then I decided that maybe they were incompetent – well-meaning but out of their depth.
So we did our best to forgive them and try to find a way to make things work. They agreed to pay a UK-based company to replace the solar power system with something that actually worked, and switched the oven and hob for gas ones to take the load off the electrics.ne day, in the middle of all this, I heard a big crack, like a whip or a bolt of lightning. I walked around the house to discover a colony of bees. On fire. A hole had been left where the old inverter had been screwed into the wall.
There are no solid walls between the sleeping lofts and the rest of the house, so I definitely know if someone is snoring
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