I have been wondering for two days what I would want to write about today.  But I can’t think about a fucking thing besides being pregnant and about hopefully not being pregnant anymore very, very soon.  I read things about babies and pregnancy all day (newly in love with The Feminist Breeder, by the way), and I hope the baby is about to come the fuck out of there already all night.  But I don’t want this blog to only be about kids and pregnancy.  I want it to be about tiny hosues and Wagens and travel and dumpster diving and weird recycling and everything else that intersects with my life too.  But there is nothing left in me except for this baby, and until she comes out, I’m not sure what else will get past and onto these pages.

So, behold!  My tallbike!

Looking at that picture is like a big serving of summer nostalgia.  The tank tops!  The need for sunglasses!  The rides aboard my purple giraffe!  Ahhhh.  Summer couldn’t come back into my life soon enough.

The tallbike I built myself, with a lot of help from some awesome folks in Frankfurt.  We spent a weekend building about eleven of them.  Which we then happily paraded around the city like the little kids we all still are inside.  If you have never been on a tall bike, I am here to tell you they are smile-manufacturing machines.  You ride down the street and people stare in awe, they smile, they gasp, they take pictures, and little kids jump up and down and point.  And everyone wanting to know: “How do you get off of it?”  A question which, once answered, always results in another: “But how do you get back on?”  Both of which I am usually happy to demonstrate.  You don’t take a tall bike if you have to get somewhere in a hurry.

If you want to learn how to build your own tall bike, I’ve got detailed instructions up right here.

I’ve done it, I’ve finally done it! Someone took a trip to the building supply store, brought me back some screws and some wood, and I built the baby-crapola storage shelf and fold-down changing table. Except I (cough cough) haven’t added the fold-down table bit yet. But who cares! All the baby crap is finally neatly in place, and now when she shows up we won’t be digging through huge piles on the floor! Just that thought alone makes me feel very calm. Plus now I can almost see the bed in my Wagen. Almost.

I kept the design for this shelf simple. For one because I’m not that good at building complex things and for two because moving a lot isn’t really my strong point right now. The materials were purchased new and as the nicely finished shelf boards I wanted to use to save time are kind of expensive, cost about 45 euros total, including boards, cheater wooden angle brackets, screws, and hinges for the fold down bit that isn’t attached just yet. It took a couple of hours to build, but would have been much faster had I been able bodied. Take a look:

Before:

How would a real carpenter attach a shelving block like this (scroll down to see the end product) to the wall? I had no frickin’ clue. So I put the top and bottom shelf on some L brackets…

…and screwed the middle shelves into the unit from the sides after adding the rest of the frame.

And that was it. Ta-da: the finished product. Behold!

While I’m at it, a very poor mousepad drawing of what the fold down changing table bit will look like, to be attached to the bottom shelf with hinges and supported with two lengths of tiny-linked chain attached to the wall.

To those of you who sent us some of the diapers on that bottom shelf: wohoo! I thought you should know that I still think you’re really awesome for helping us out with that. Crazily, we’ve ended up with more baby crap than we can possibly handle or use (gift clothing started coming in long after I had finished all my flea market über-preparedness shopping, unfortunately). So anything that doesn’t fit on the shelf is going into the flea market pile right now. Clutter makes me nuts, particularly living in such a small space. And how many fuzzy little sleepers that say “my cute friend” (barf) on them does one Peanut need? I may not know for sure, but I’m fairly certain the answer is not 25.

I had been dreaming of a new terrace for months. One slightly bigger than what I had fronting my abode—with a roof and an outdoor sink for washing hands and doing dishes out in the green during the warmer months. I had it mentally planned out to the last detail, but I needed to wait. No need to build it before we moved my Wagen to it’s new spot. I am not very good at waiting.

But, as always happens with time passing and waiting, the day arrived at long last. We moved my Wagen. We put my old terrace/steps construction (wow, remember when I built that? feels like a hundred years ago, which apparently translates to “about a year and a half”) in front of our sleeping Wagen to replace the wobbly pile of stumps that had served as steps before. They had gotten dangerous. I had fallen off them twice, which is not fun at the best of times and is really upsetting when your body is pumping with prego hormones and you were running out the door to throw up.

Once my Wagen was in its new spot and propped up off its wheels courtesy of the lovely Frau Doktor, I was itching to build my terrace. I had a big pallet, and scrap wood left from a dumpster diving excursion at the building supply store. But I couldn’t actually lift the pallet or bend down to screw on the leg supports. (This is the kind of thing I mean when I say things like “and pregnancy has rendered me pretty useless, physically.”) I needed help. I don’t particularly like asking for help—for weeks I used a chair as a temporary step instead—but when I finally did, two of my buddies agreed to do the job. So while I ran around fetching tools and screws, they put together this sweet little number for me. Aren’t they awesome? I feel lucky to have friends who will build me a terrace while I haul this baby and its water cave around in my abdomen.

So: the project:

First they put four leg supports on the pallet (which was a bit complicated on the right side because of the mini hill there). But the pallet was a little unsteady, so they screwed a flat peice of wood on top of it to add more stability. All the wood was dumpster dived.


Messing with the height of the support legs:


The “can it hold a human adult or is it about to break” test (preceded by the “will it break if I dance on it test”):

And the finished project, complete with lucky black cat:

It’s not entirely finished—as you can see there is no roof (well, not one big enough to cover the whole thing) and no outdoor sink. But those can wait for spring when I have my body back to myself and I can lug another pallet home to extend the terrace further in the direction of our sleeping Wagen (making the path between our two Wagens shorter), put on a bigger roof, and install the outdoor sink.

This post was featured on Farmgirl Friday at Dandelion House.

Every winter I write about Dragon Slayers. And every winter they keep me from getting sick at least a couple of times (or help me get better asap). When it comes to curing and preventing colds, you could take vitamin C in a tablet made of who knows what from who knows where, or you could take advantage of the magical healing powers of lemon juice, garlic, and chili powder. I promise that it doesn’t taste as gross as it probably sounds.

You can read last year’s post about Dragon Slayers here. Or you can just check out the recipe below, and tell me all about your own diy home remedies in the comments—I’m always looking to expand my arsenal. Here’s to not getting sick this winter.

The Dragon Slayer

Ingredients:
1/2 fresh lemon
1 medium-sized clove garlic, minced
a dash of chili powder

Method:
Squeeze out the lemon and place juice in a small cup. Sprinkle in minced garlic and top with chili powder. Down in one go and marvel at the force of nature that is vitamin c mixed with garlic and sweet, sweet (spicey) chili.

This post was featured on Wildcrafting Wednesday on Mind, Body, and Sole.

One of my pals prefers to heat with wood briquettes (as opposed to wood). So she usually orders a little bit of fire wood, and a whole lot of wood briquettes. But this year she didn’t order quite enough fire wood. So she did what all of us really should be doing all year long: she drove the tractor to the big university trash corral, brought home a huge load of pallets, sawed them into tiny pieces, built a shed out of some scavenged stuff she had around, and filled it up with sawed pallet bits. Free heat! I spent most of the summer fantasizing about doing just that. But now I can’t lift a pallet onto the table saw, so I guess I’ll be waiting until next year. And giving my friend high fives. Here are some photos of her pretty little trash shed:

Now you see it, now you don’t.

Moving is a pain in the ass. When I think of moving I think of packing boxes, of stress, of never having enough room in the car. Moving a house on wheels is a relief in comparison. You put all the breakables in boxes on the floor. You make sure the cabinets are sealed up tight. You get a jack and remove the blocks holding your wheels up off the ground. And then you hook up a tractor or a big truck and whisk your house off to it’s new spot. No packing involved. To move and be able to go right back to living as you did, to knowing where everything is, to unpacking maybe a handful of boxes is a luxury indeed.

My trailer presents two problems when being moved: the cellar box I built to store my firewood is really poorly placed and rubs up against one wheel when making hard right turns (whoops) and the axle occasionally sticks (I have no idea what the technical terms are for this stuff, but there’s a circle part that allows you to steer and it sometimes gets stuck on the straight part that holds the wheels). I would have taken the cellar box off, but the rubbing is minimal and doesn’t block progress. As for the axle sticking, we solved that when it happened by rocking the trailer slowly back and forth until we got enough space to quickly shift the towing bar into the desired position. Otherwise, she’s in real good shape. Not too shabby for a 61-year-old trailer, eh?

At first I wasn’t particularly excited about the new spot. As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been feeling rather resistant to any change beyond the scope of the coming baby. (How do pregnant ladies handle moving??! I’ve heard plenty of stories of people doing it, and I just have to say, wow. I couldn’t handle it. Moving right now would turn me into a weeping wreck.) But I’m sitting in my trailer in said new spot right now, and I have to say I love it. There’s more light, there’s just as much lovely green, and the feeling of change has me feeling exciting about everything. Excited about doing a little pre-winter cleaning, excited about building a new shed for the baby carriage and bike trailer, excited about the terrace with outdoor sink I have been waiting on building for the last five months. Below you’ll see the new spot pre-my-trailer, and then a shot from about the same spot with me snuggly parked.

I was pretty light-handed about my preparation. I took all of the glass jars down off of the shelves and put them in boxes, and I tied the doors to my built-in cabinets shut, but I left all of my books on the shelves and the wine glasses hanging in their rack on the ceiling. And despite the bumps, the fact that the trailer almost tipped over completely at one point during the move (I have never been so close to a heart attack), and our rocking to get the axle in line, not a single book fell off of the shelf. One picture fell off of the wall, but otherwise, everything remained as I had left it. The picture below was taken after the move was complete.

The period of waiting is over, and I’m riding the momentum of the change on into the long to-do list I had been ignoring. Having needed to remove my wood stove pipe for the move, I was inspired to finally clean it (as you really should do before the start of every heating season, ehem). And while I was up there I even started cleaning out the gutters. Today I’ll finish cleaning up the remaining chaos inside, and tomorrow, if the weather holds, I’ll start building the new shed. Ah, isn’t she purdy? Only four more wagons to go…

Want to read more about moving tiny houses? Check out these posts:

the wagon moves (wherein we haul my trailer home for the first time)
moving out, moving on
wagenplatz dominos part one

This post was a part of Homestead Barn Hop at The Prairie Homestead and Anti-Procrastination Tuesday at New Nostalgia.

How does my garden grow? Not well, not well. I started out the year with humble goals and reaped even humbler benefits. My very first garden in Mainz was a raging success. Beginners luck? Must have been because every year since some disaster has come between me and a decent harvest. I mean, damn, look at these pictures from the garden I threw together in 2009. We were up to our chins in tomatoes! I ate spinach salads every day! The sage plants I started from seed that year are still alive today!

Alas, the following year things did not bode nearly as well. I bought seeds from the flea market and none of them came up. 2010 was not a Click Clack Garden year.

This year I planned small. I would grow spaghetti squash (which I don’t see around here often, and I miss terribly), nasturtium, arugula, spinach, savoy cabbage, and red beets. Mama Beard gave us lettuce and garlic (both of which died very tragic deaths early in the season), strawberries (still kicking but non-producing), and chives (also still kicking). I decided against planting tomatoes, but got almost 30 volunteers from the unfinished compost that I used to fill most of the garden. But you all know what happened to them.

A week after the tomatoes went, the spaghetti squash plants followed. The arugula was lovely, the red beets were smaller than my pinky nail, and the savoy cabbage and spinach made brief, un-noteworthy appearances just before the nasturtium took over the rest of the garden in a brilliant show of orange and red that made me feel a little better about the loss of almost everything else. The herbs all came back on their own and did well (sage, lemon melissa, mint, oregano). Plants I don’t have to attend to always do come out on top.

RIP, garden, RIP. This week I’ve been working on getting the bed ready for winter—ripping out all of the weeds, mixing in compost, and collecting fallen leaves to cover the bed. The garden might have been a failure, but I did get five spaghetti squash, a basket full of beautiful purple beans (that someone else planted and placed next to my bed), and the red beets and lettuce from a friend’s garden who has been away all summer. In loving memory, a short photo stretch of Click Clack Garden 2011…

In the beginning there was a layer of cardboard, a long battle with a role of chicken wire, and far too many wheelbarrows of compost:

This year I decided against an early start in the greenhouse and went right for the seeds-in-the-ground approach (dumpster dived that little red watering can too):

And now it’s crossed over to jungle, the nasturtium the only surviver in the battle of the best-at-strangulation:

The harvest has been miniscule, but at least it’s been pretty:

New to Click Clack Gorilla? Try one of these on for size…

Wagenplatz FAQ – Find out more about the intentional caravan community where I live

Check out some sweet diy pallet furniture

Read a story about hitch hiking in Germany

Discover the euphoria that is dumpster diving

Imagine a life without electricity

Having a non-consumer pregnancy

This post was a part of the Garden Life Series at No Ordinary Homestead.

I am too slow for the internet. While I was off being too pregnant for anything but puking and sleeping, Click Clack Gorilla was featured on the prolific Deek Diedricksen’s website Relaxshacks twice. Take a look:

Nikki’s Super Bad-Ass Caravan/Tiny Home in Germany (and her ClickClackGorilla Dumpster Diving Blog)

A funktified/bizarre caravan sighting in Germany—”The Jesus Wagon”!?

Deek’s blog is about tiny houses, houses built from trash, treehouses, and other small and diy-able structures and is choc full ‘o eye candy of the same. He also wrote a pretty neat looking book/graphic novel called “Humble Homes, Simple Shacks, Cozy Cottages, Ramshackle Retreats, Funky Forts, and Whatever the Heck Else We Could Fit in Here.” I have yet to hold a copy in my hand, but from what I’ve seen on the web it’s a charming hand-drawn zine-esque creation about, well, I think the title covers that pretty thoroughly.

In even more exciting news, this summer two of my Platz-mates and I filmed for an episode of Tiny Yellow House (a series he does on small diy homes) that Herr Deek and Co. are putting together about my trailer. Maybe if we all cross our fingers at the same time, it’ll be done soon, and you all can watch me blab about renovating and living in Trash House on the teevee. Here here.

Once upon a time when the Beard first came into posession of the red trailer (which coincided with me moving to Mainz and us moving in together) it looked like this. And I looked like that.

These are both views looking to the right and left of the door, which is located about in the middle of the trailer. And a side note to save my pride: we did not do the ceiling. Someone who couldn’t be bothered to actually fit the tongue and groove boards together did the ceiling, and it kind of makes me nuts. But that’s another story for another day.

When I finished fixing up my trailer (click here to read the whole story), I moved all of my stuff over to it, and the Beard and I basically lived as if we had seperate apartments across the street from each other. Each of us would come over to visit the other, but our stuff lived in separate places, and each person was the master of his, her own little space. But with Peanut on the horizon we rethought our housing strategy once again. We have painted and built and rearranged, things are nearing completion, and we’re both falling into a new spatial routine.

Trash house (aka my trailer) will be our kitchen, my office space, and (since I am leaving the bed in place so that we can continue to sleep separately when one of us is sick or working late) guest space/extra sleeping space. Since I already use it for all of these things, not much will be changing there.

The red trailer will be our main living space: bedroom and living room and hole-up-here-for-the-winter room, and that’s where the bulk of the rennovation projects have been taking place.

We (and by we, I mean the Beard as he’s done most of the work this time around) started with a fresh coat of paint: purple on the one side and yellow on the other to create a feeling of having two rooms. To further the feeling of two-roomness, I built a floor-to-ceiling cabinet that acts as a partial wall dividing the sleeping area from the other half of the trailer. My logic in this had to do with creating storage space where there previously was none: by building the cabinet out into the room, we gained as storage space a part of the trailer that had only been available for walking through before.

The cabinet isn’t quite finished (still needs doors), but as I know it’ll take me a while to get around to cutting and attaching them, I thought I’d share the photos from the project today. You’ll also notice that we’ve moved the bed to the other side of the trailer (these photos face the same side of the trailer as is pictured in the second photo above). The bed will be further away from the wood stove (con), but it will soon be big enough to sleep the three of us comfortably (pro pro PRO, I love me some wide open spaces when I’m sleeping).

My inspiration for the new cabinet were the built in cabinets in my own trailer (I love whoever built these and put them in because they were capable of an exactness in building that I have yet to master). Here’s a look at them:

building a new cabinet

Whenever I build something, I spend a long, long time sitting in front of the project space and imagining what it will look like, what problems I will encounter, and how to go about handling each step of the building process. So, step one looked like me staring into space for a long time. And step two looked like this (the long beams I bought, but all the short beams were leftovers from the building supply store dumpster dive we did several years ago):

And oh! isn’t that a lovely color for a sleeping room? I think so.

Once the frame for the cabinet was in place I sided it with tongue and groove boards:

And today it looks like this:

Someday it will have doors, and someday the whole thing will be painted, but for now, we’re both happy to have a place for our clothes and a tv to live (the tv being our latest scavenge—before we were using the Beard’s ancient computer to watch rented movies, and let me tell you it was a huge pain in the ass). And I will be happy when I’ve attached the doors that will enable us to ignore the chaos that will inevitably dwell behind them.

Next week: the “podest” aka stage aka raised platform that the Beard built on the other side of the trailer to increase storage space and keep our feet warm in the winter.

This post was a part of Motivate Me Monday at Keep It Simple, Just Something I Whipped Up at The Girl Creative, Made by You Mondays at Skip to My Lou, Anti-Procrastination Tuesday at New Nostalgia, Show and Share at Just a Girl, Fresh Friday at Release Me Creations, Frugal Friday at the Shabby Nest, and Frugalicious Friday at Finding Fabulous.

Pallets. They’re everywhere. In Germany at least, some of them have Pfand on them (that is, a deposit that you get back when you return them), but all the ones not tied up in Pfand end up in the trash. I’ve used them to build sheds, and I especially like to chop them up into kindling, but making really sweet furniture out of them never even occurred to me.

One of our stops on the Black Diamond tour was an absolutely delicious (gorgeous! let me stay here forever!) squatted tennis court. On the edge of the city but completely surrounded by trees and inhabited by birds, the inhabitants have fixed up the old clubhouse and made it into a pretty little home.

We played outside between an old Russian car (see photo above) and a bonfire whose smoke almost caused a calamity during Silver Dagger when I was certain that the pinnacle of my punk rock career had finally come and I would throw up on an audience–which I miraculously managed to avoid, by the way–to folks sitting on pallet furniture. I don’t know how exactly they were built, so I don’t have any specific how-tos for you, but I took a bunch of pictures hoping that, if any of you were interested in creating your own, you’d be able to figure it out from the visuals.

The morning following the show I watched a fellow work on putting together another bench-table set from across my regurgitations, but I admit it: I was too bleary to take in any of the construction details. That turned out to be one of the worst days in recent record (even though the show we played that evening with Blackbird Raum in Recklinghausen was pretty awesome), the day when I finally gave up on wearing a seat belt and rode the highways from the bed in the back of the van, coddling the pot in which I had decided to keep my head. You know, now that I think of it, that pretty much sums up the whole Black Diamond tour for me: shows awesome, Nikki puking behind the van. Maybe I don’t need to tell you any more tour stories after all…

But vomit aside, if any of you end up building something like this (or have already), share the pictures with us, purdy please with a pallet on top. I for one would love to see what else can be done with them.

This post was a part of Frugal Tuesday Tip at Learning the Frugal Life.