Returning home.

It’s Friday night and I’m sitting in my former childhood bedroom, which now serves as a crude mixture of sports room, guest room and my current workstation ever since I moved back in with my parents in February. Since none of us knew how long that would be (initially it was supposed to be ‘a couple of days’), we never really transformed the space so I’m still sitting in an old chair with odd cushions on it (my back can’t handle most chairs) and I’m using a TV as a screen. Cables are everywhere. Somehow I managed to adapt to the chaos - something I usually despise.

Street sounds are coming in and if I turn slightly to the left, I’m overlooking the nook of the property where my tiny house sits. The transformation over the last few months is hard to miss. Fresh paint everywhere, plants are in good shape and the corner trim is completely redone. I’ve been quite active recently. (More recovery-dedicated posts are coming.) It started out with the necessity of repainting the exterior of the house; something I’ve needed to do every couple of years so far. There’s a lot of sun exposure on the house and for reasons of weight, some of the wood used is rather flimsy.

As I was preparing for this big job, I realized that in order to do this properly, more needed to be done. The window trim, parts of the windows themselves, the railing, … I was hesitant at first - since I moved out of the house in late 2023, I had been unsure of what to do with it. I still paid for heating, until we emptied all the pipes so we could let it freeze. The tiny house served as an art studio for a while but I eventually moved my art supplies to my apartment as well so it mostly sat empty, which was stressing me out. After all, I cared about this little place I built. I just didn’t know how to put it to good use now. When I visited the empty room, it often made me sad.

So this year when I looked at the work ahead, I was still unsure if the countless hours would be worth it. I knew I was looking at several weeks of sanding, painting and more to do it properly - the paint I had used previously isn’t available anymore so I had to switch brands, which also meant painting everything twice. I was still in the middle of my recovery, which meant that energy was sparse and there was a lot of ladder-climbing and power-tool-using in the sun to be expected.

And yet. Something itched me to do it right this time. Before I had moved out, actually already by the time I had moved onto the parking spot back here, I knew it wasn’t going to be ‘forever’ anymore, since I planned to find a place for me and my husband. Which meant that a lot of the work around the house felt like chores that weren’t really getting me anywhere because my mind was already set on the next thing. Some of the final jobs I had done on the house tell of that story - haphazardly built furniture pieces, bad paint jobs on the exterior where raw wood started to show.

I have since been cured of the impatience of wanting to move on, at least for now. My illness has played a massive part in this. I can now live in the here and now in a way I couldn’t before - and obviously not just because the original plan to move in with my husband has been wiped off the board because we’re no longer together. In fact, one of the biggest wishes for this year was to arrive. To really be where I am, and not putting my foot into the next apartment, job, life goal already.

As I started washing, sanding and painting the cladding, which indeed took many weeks and many days of rest and pain in between, I had time to think about all that. As hard as the job was - early summer had the hottest days, so I would sometimes try to beat the heat by starting before eight, but even then I ended up in 36 degrees eventually - I once again realized how grounding it was to work like this. How good it felt to be taking care of something I had built. And not just anything - my own home.

Over the course of several weeks, I slowly started seeing the potential. When I had moved out, there had been quite a few things with the house I wasn’t happy about anymore but was unwilling to fix at that stage. The heating, for one, because it was becoming unreliable and very expensive (propane gas). My oven was broken. The faucet in the bathroom turned itself on all the time. It was hot as hell in summer sometimes. None of these things were impossible to change, but eventually I just hadn’t had the energy to tend to them anymore.

Ironically, while still recovering from an illness that had quite literally taken any remaining energy out of me for months, I started to find the conviction to do something about those things and give my tiny house another chance. I had initially moved away with the intention of starting a new life in a ‘new’ town where my parents weren’t the only people I knew who lived there. But my apartment, as gorgeous as it was and as promising as some of the events of early 2024 had been, ended up isolating me even further - because now, and especially when I got sick about seven to eight months into me living there, I didn’t even have my parents around.

I have since learned a lot about my actual social needs that I’ll maybe share another time, as it’s quite fascinating for someone who only recently realized they’re neurodivergent, but in any case, this summer I started to see my house with different eyes again. As a sanctuary, in close connection with my family, that no other place could provide. It’s a big responsibility to take care of a house, yes, but at the same time, the responsibility felt much bigger when I didn’t live there, because I wasn’t around as much and eventually only came to take care of the chores without being able to enjoy what it had to offer.

Eventually I decided to get a new heating system, which is going to be installed later this year, and fully renovate the space to accommodate for my needs better. It’s interesting what the house could tell me about my past self. For instance, I never had living room seating that was truly comfortable, even though my back, like I said, tends to hurt after a while. I was stubbornly trying to make do with what I had, and in my initial plans from 2017, there wasn’t even a full living room in my design. I was kind of expecting myself to spend all my time at my desk. Yeah.

The more time passed, the more the renovation got intertwined with my recovery. The progress I made on the house matched the progress I made with my stamina and with how my nervous system reacted to new stimuli and heavier work. I never put myself under pressure to finish anything at a given time, instead I found that most days, whenever I was fit enough, I wanted to go out and continue.

A few weeks ago, still going back to my apartment once a week to water the plants, I finally made the decision to give up this other space and fully move back into my tiny house. It’s daunting still - I can’t really know how I’ll like it after all this time. But I’m also excited. It’s like this project never made it to the true finish line and never received the final trophy or reward it deserved. The entire time I had been living there I was going back and forth between there and my husband’s place. In fact, as I recently realized, I have almost never lived in just one place in my adult life. It feels incredibly relieving to do that now.

In terms of YouTube, returning to my tiny house is a bit like returning to my roots, obviously. Building this house and documenting the journey was what turned my channels from a side hustle to a full-time career, and no matter what happens, I’ll always be grateful for that. Over the years, I kind of thought I had gotten as much out of the tiny house as there was to get, in terms of videography. At some point, I struggled to find new angles to film from or ‘make it interesting’. However, when I picked up the camera this year to do exactly this - document the journey -, it seemed easy. Resting has served me well, and now that I’m starting to live again, I’m also ready to share the first bit of my new tiny house journey with you. My English-speaking channel has been dormant for two years now but this Sunday at 11 am CEST, the first episode of a new series is going to go live. If you like Martijn Doolaard’s videos, you will probably like this one as well. It’s calm, slow, more show than tell. You’ll see!

So yes, after almost two years of absence, I will return to my tiny house for good in a few weeks. It feels like a good next step in this journey and I’m excited to share more in the coming videos. Go subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already (or don’t if you don’t want to, I won’t be sad, I promise) and I’ll see you, or, more like, you’ll read from me very soon.