tiny house

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We moved to Puerto Rico... And bought a house. Here's why.

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It's three weeks into 2018, and I'm scared shitless.

We've filed all the paperwork. We've moved to Puerto Rico, and there's no turning back.

We're officially homeowners. We have a mortgage! In a hurricane-ravaged country, with businesses that depend on convincing people we're really great at what we do from thousands of miles away. We've sunk all of our savings into a gorgeous, needy, 200-year-old mansion in an uncertain housing market.

I'm told everyone feels really excited and a little bit nauseous when they buy their first house. 

In addition to being scared, we're also thrilled. Some of you who know us or have been following along on our journey, know the latter half of 2017 hasn't been easy. After being hit by two hurricanes, we are exhausted. Scallywag is looking worse for wear. She's floating, and will be dreamy again one day, but for the moment, our boat home isn't liveable. And our paltry insurance payout means it will take a lot of our own sweat equity to get her back into fighting shape. 

Jon and I decided, a few days into taking respite from post-hurricane rebuilding in our hometown of LA for a few weeks, that our plan to sail back to California just didn't feel like the right next move anymore. Despite everything, we missed Puerto Rico and all it offered us. And we wanted to make a permanent home there.

Why Puerto Rico?

We never planned to cruise full-time forever, but we also never want to give up on cruising. Working while traveling can be murder on you, physically, mentally and tax-return-ally. So we've been looking for a place to base ourselves during our entire trip from New York to Maine and back down. We found towns we fell in love with, but we just couldn't see ourselves staying there. And then we arrived here for hurricane season.

Puerto Rico, specifically San Juan, checked a lot of boxes for us:

-It is a friendly culture that welcomes new people

-It has a ton of great art and lively activities

-The food is killer

-It's beautiful and historical

-There are universities and art schools nearby (we realized all our favorite places had access to a great school.) 

-It's near an ocean 

-It's warm!

-The music is awesome

-It has a strong liberal and progressive community of locals and expats that we feel comfy in. 

-It's still U.S. territory, which makes it easy to relocate our work, but feels like we live in a magical distant land with castles.

-There's an awesome tech community

-There's a major airport just 15 minutes away with cheap flights to lots of cool places.

-Real estate and cost of living is affordable and awesome

-Cell reception and internet are rock solid (when no hurricanes are nearby)

-It's a place where the money we spend matters and contributes to an economy that needs it.

Those are personal reasons we looked toward San Juan, but we can't talk about moving here without talking about how Puerto Rico has been in the news A LOT lately: For its booming tech scene, great tax incentives and its post-storm utilities nightmares. Also for the crypto bros who are moving in by the minute. And for its fight to become a state and the fight for decolonization.

The last few months have intensified all those stories. People are making real choices to commit or to leave.

As stalwart institutions fold, new ideas, businesses and newly arrived friends are also blossoming. In short, after the hurricanes, things are getting better here... and they aren't. There's a lot of awfulness to be had, and half the country is still without electricity. It's a strange, uncertain place to be at the beginning of 2018. 

But it's an interesting place to be, and Jon and I decided we want our land life to be as dynamic as our sea-life is. This is a messy time to be here and not everyone's cup of tea. But for us, it seemed like a move that even if we completely failed with, we wouldn't regret. 

So we did it. 

The move from hell

Or at least we tried to. We began filing paperwork before the hurricane, and put an offer on our house just two days after Irma. It's taken all this time to finalize our new life here and walk through the doors of our new home. 

For a lot of reasons -- hurricane outages, oddball personalities, sketchy bank lending practices, #islandlife -- every part of the process was difficult. While moving apartments about every two weeks for almost six months, we watched our paperwork get lost, our escrow fall through three times and everyone involved in our move and house purchase make money and make the process harder at the same time.

We thought we'd be able to move in by Thanksgiving, then Christmas, then never. It's a longer story for another post, but there was a day, Christmas eve to be exact, when we gave up. We packed up everything, made a list of everything we needed to do to fully exit Puerto Rico, and had a last teary drink to our dream of island life.

A few days before Christmas found us living in a cheap motel with everything we owned pulled from our leaky boat and stored in a rented minivan parked on the street outside. 

One of our friends sent us a text: "Step back and make sure this house is meant to be your and Jon's next move! I hope it is bc it is awesome having you in PR, but shit, you should not be going through this!"

And at that point, we absolutely weren't sure that all the decisions we were making were leading us anywhere.

Looking back, it sounds silly and melodramatic, but the hurricane tore all of our life plans apart and at the end of 2017, we felt emotionally adrift.

Then, just two days before New Year's day, everything suddenly fell into place.

It was so sudden that we still had no place to live when we went to sign our mortgage papers. We had to take Honey to the bank with us.

sail-me-om-dog-mortgage

I'm still shocked that it all came together. We are residents of Puerto Rico. We own a beautiful house in the Unesco World Heritage site of Old San Juan.

So what's the plan?

Our house is divided into two apartments that are exactly the same. Each have three bedrooms and a huge amount of living space. To say it's a change from our 200-square foot boat is a an understatement. 

It's a mansion, built by one of Puerto Rico's first rum barons, 200 years ago. And it has some pretty cool features, including its own 36,000-gallon rainwater cistern. As soon as we recover from the down payment of our purchase, we plan to install solar panels on the ample roof, to bring it completely off the grid. It's not the tiny home we planned on, but we still hope to pursue the alternative lifestyle we've come to love.

We'll be living in the top floor and hosting guests on adventures from around the world on the bottom. In the longer term, I hope to make our home a site for movies, events and retreats.

My secret, lifelong dream has always been to be the next Gertrude Stein -- to be the ultimate host and curator of interesting people. I've always wanted to bring together great thinkers, artists and people with Big Ideas, introducing them to each other, and gently prod forward great work in a place that inspires it. 

I know. That's a really lofty goal. More realistically, Jon has always wanted to invest in something that was more than just a home -- an investment and a place where he could practice the restoration skills we learned through #boatlife.

We both think we got the better end of the deal. (Here's a gallery from our Airbnb page.)

 

But, as I started off this post saying, it's terrifying. We've lived debt-free and relatively without responsibility for several years by living a tiny, off-the-grid life. Now we have a mortgage! And appliances! And a duty to others besides ourselves. 

Business-wise it's also a risky proposition. We'll be running our home as a business, while investing even more in our own businesses (his/mine) that we've run remotely for years. The slow economy here means that our work has to remain top-notch and that we continue to receive the amazing referrals that have kept us going so far. 

That's a big bet to take on ourselves and also that business in general will become increasingly global in the coming years. Luckily, we still strongly believe in both. 

In the long run we hope to restore Scally back into top form and use Puerto Rico as our home base while spending several months a year sailing the Caribbean and nearby shores. We're taking our time on that one, because we know that no matter what, sailing will be a huge part of our lives, so there's no need to rush to get back out on the water. 

What about the dog?

dog-old-san-juan

Yep, Honey definitely misses Scallywag. But the good news is our new home has some excellent sunny balconies that she's already staked out as her own. From little boat to cavernous mansion, she's the most adaptable animal we've ever met. 

 

7 sanity-saving products that make tiny homes infinitely more livable.

It's been just over a month since we've moved aboard full time and we're settling into the swing of things. People keep asking me whether Jon, my husband, and I are ready to kill each other yet. But we've lived in fairly small spaces for awhile now, particularly after a year in downtown Manhattan, where we had even less storage and counter space in the kitchen. 

We're no stranger to making do with the square footage we've got. But there are a few things that we've collected along the way that consistently make our small spaces more lovely and comfortable, that may also have a place in your home, little or not.

1. A beautiful magnetic spice rack.

I love to cook but have realized over time that it's not the size of my kitchen that matters, it's the ease of pulling things out and putting them away that will make or break my joy of creating a meal. I get frustrated REALLY quickly when things start falling on top of me or out of cupboards as I'm searching for something to add as a meal simmers or bakes. 

We received one of these as a gift for the tiny kitchen in our New York apartment and it was the most complimented thing in our house. When we moved to the boat, we adapted the spice set with a sheet of metal tooled perfectly to serve as a backsplash behind our sink. It's functional, pretty, and even my wilder spices are at hand at all times. Protip: If you want to make your own magnetic board to fit your space or have spices ready at hand, just buy the empty jars from Gneiss and DIY your own set -- but don't bother making the set from scratch, it's not worth buying all the parts separately unless you want to do it in bulk. 

2. A super smart cutting board and colander. 

I found this on a tiny house article awhile ago and ordered it out of curiosity. I've loved it ever since. The colander is the perfect size for almost anything you have to wash for two people and takes up no space to store. And the board, while annoyingly awkward to wash, legitimately turns your sink into a real counter space. You can use the colander to catch scraps or hold food as you chop and it still allows you easy access to the sink if you need it. It's doubled my workspace for cooking and other counter needs in both our old apartment and our boat. 

3. A safe, romantic lantern. 

This little guy, dubbed the Candelier, is a new addition to the boat and so far we're really digging it. We were in need of some kind of lantern that didn't run off electricity and the beautiful old brass ones are out of our price range. I was afraid of candles getting knocked over and burning the place up. But the Uco has spring-loaded, drip-free candles that burn for 9 hours and are surrounded by a protective, windproof case. The lanterns come in different colors and even smaller sizes and cast a bright but romantic light. And the top can serve as a warmer for your coffee, which I haven't tried but nonetheless seems like a win.

4. A tiny, delightful fireplace. 

This was originally a boat-warming gift from my supportive parents, who resigned themselves to the fact that my husband and I would die of cold over the winter in New York. It has since been the coziest part of our winter evenings, both on land and off. Most fake fireplaces are loud and cheesy, but this one has form, function and vintage flair. 

It kicks off a nice heat and cozy glow. It also barely takes up a square foot of space. You can order it in white and black too. 

5. A set of unbreakable cups.

We foolishly went through an entire set of Ikea glasses before deciding that we had to invest in something more sturdy. These enamel cups look great and are impossible to mess up. Even drinking red wine out of them is doable (if you forget to rinse them out, just give them a quick Clorox spritz before your normal washing.) That being said, we're still on the hunt for the perfect unbreakable wine glasses.

I've seen these all over the place in difference colors and in much fancier locales since purchasing ours. We always get compliments on them when we have people over. 

6. A mess-free decent coffee maker. 

A tip from a coffee aficionado colleague two years ago turned me onto the AeroPress and I haven't looked back when making boat coffee. It takes about four minutes to make a super concentrated, delicious espresso or coffee with this press. It's a fun process to make a cup and the easiest clean up of any coffee maker I've used -- by the time you've squeezed out your coffee, you've already cleaned the entire device. And there's very little filter waste.

So. much. better. than shoveling out the grounds of a french press into a trash bag. Ugh. The bag is cheesy but I find it makes the whole set easier to store and travel with, so I've come to like that too and would recommend just buying the whole set for the price because you end up using all of it. Stow the bag and the ugly plastic parts when you have company over and you'll show off your super cool tool that I recently spotted at a Manhattan coffee joint at a $50 markup.

7. A reliable battery-charged vacuum. 

I was recently asked what product changed my life more than any other recently, and for the last two years, it's been this vacuum. It charges quickly, has an extendable hose, vacuums wet and dry substances, and goes after everything -- pet hair, spills, errant adhesive -- with zeal. It can handle any boat project or wayward dinner party we've thrown at it. I love this vacuum the way you love a family pet and it's small enough to stow away without a second thought. Every house, of any size, should have one of these. And the charger is the same for several of our tools, which makes it a space-saving win. 

8. Bonus -- A really good stain remover.

We're a wine-drinking household, which means inevitable spills. This stuff has saved our cushions four times over when we've splashed wine across our cabin -- because one spill means our entire house gets covered in wine. I live in fear of not having this at hand during a crucial spill moment. Which is why I buy two whenever I stock up. 

What are we missing? What can't you live without? There are great new products coming out every day for small living, so I'd love to hear your secrets. 

Finally, a little disclaimer and FYI: All of these products are things we love and use. If you click through on our links on Amazon, we do get a little referral tip for telling you about them.