In April my cousin aka heart sister aka Fish in the Water came by to visit and meet Baby Pickles.  While she was here she stayed in my Wagen aka Trash House aka my kitchen and workspace.  Back home again, I asked her if she would write something about what it was like for her to stay in a Bauwagen for a week.  Turned out she already had.  So without further ado, her thoughts on Bauwagen life.

the real thing

There are some moments you are simply happy to be alive. I find these occur more frequently when you’re living your life outside. My sister lives in a wagenplatz. I won’t go into detail because she explains it herself here. But picture the Boxcar Children and you’re well on your way. When you’re living in a wagen the weather becomes of utmost importance. It was rather cold when I was there, and that mostly means heating with a wood stove. While I did finally learn the secret of lighting the woodstove (thank god for matches, because I’m horrible with lighters), you don’t always feel like lighting it, or you won’t be there for very long, and this leads to heating with candles. It had never really occurred to me that you could heat with candles, but duh, fire.

The first night the wood stove was lit, and I snuggled into bed with a comforter and read by candlelight. It’s actually about the same level of light as a bedside lamp, if you do it proper. And it feels infinitely more cozy. More real, somehow, more true. You have to watch that they don’t burn all the way down, and somehow, that increased level of attentiveness makes you feel all the more alive—that, and the occasional pops from the woodstove, and the rain beating against the roof.

Because of the small space, many things are done outside, or at least in another wagen. It’s a walk to the bathroom, which is the only thing that can sometimes be a pain in the ass when it’s warm inside from the woodstove and you just don’t feel like putting clothes on…

Otherwise you just wait for the weather. For the sun to dry your clothes, a clear day for chopping wood, a warm one for washing dishes. I can’t use my phone here and there’s no clock so I never have any idea what time it is, which can be a blessing and a curse. When time is irrelevant, all you have to go by is the weather. And when it’s raining, you wake when the rain starts making enough noise, and schedule your day around when you can manage to get outside without getting wet.

To go about dishwashing, you start by hauling a tub full of water from the tap. If you’re me you attempt to do this all in one go and get fairly wet. You set the washtub on the porch or somewhere similarly elevated (because wagens have wheels, doors, and thus porches, are 2-3’ off the ground) And then you go about it all in the usual way—wash, rinse, set out to dry. We handwash all our dishes at home, so it’s not a big chore, but it’s different outside, wagen door open, Florence and the Machine blaring. You notice things. Birds watch you work, and there’s a snail in the ivy under the tree. A leaf falls in the washtub. Like reading by candlelight, it somehow feels right, and more real than being indoors with a faucet. You use biodegradable soap, and when you’re done you dump it in the weeds, which are actually nettles and henbit and ivy and other useful plants.

A perfect moment, an immense feeling of satisfaction, having done a job well while standing in the sun. More alive than I’ve felt in ages, I can finally hear my thoughts again, and they are full of quiet and the snail and the song of the kohlmeise who has been watching me all along.

There are going to be some changes when I get home.

This post was originally published here.

With the possibility of a move, not just for the Beard and I, but for our entire community (if you missed my post on the subject last week, you can read it here), I’ve been taking more pictures than usual.  Even if the university may be bulldozing the magic of this place in the next couple of years, it will be remembered in snapshots at the very least. This is the first of a number of Mainusch Wagenplatz sets I’ll be posting during the next months.

Sheets and blankets and towels don’t make for good headlines.  But from them I built my comfy sleeping nest (well, not the towels), and my comfy sleeping nest is pretty much the most important place in my little house.  Because we live so tiny (our main dwelling being 7 meters by 2,20 meters for those of you just tuning in), our bed tends to serve as both bed, couch, and living room.  When I’m inside, I’m usually hanging out on the bed.

I’ve written about the bed in my Wagen before, about how I built it out of dumpstered materials, got a mattress from a friend, and then clothed it in dumpster-dived pillows, sheets, and blankets.  And the bed in our main Wagen is pretty much the same deal.  Though the main frame was in it when we moved in, the extension that we added to make it huge (so Baby Pickles could sleep in it with us) was largely dumpstered and the mattress extension was cut out of a bit of foam headed for the trash.

Though I haven’t been checking the trash across the street so often for booty (and the university changed the type of trash cans there, which makes for slightly more work for the diver), I still managed to find one of the recurrent “bed bundles” this season.  What is a bed bundle?  Well, it’s when a student, for no reason I can ascertain, takes the fitted sheet off of their bed, wraps all of the rest of their bed clothes in it (blankets pillows etc) and then tosses it as-is in the trash.  It blows my mind every time I find one, and over the years I’ve found quite a few, and it is the reason that all (with three exceptions, one from a flea market and two old fitted sheets from my mom) of my sheets, the sheets (and towels) that you see in that photo, are from the trash.

As usual, thanks to the wasteful students!  (But really?)  How ironic (is this actual irony?  I have never bothered to really hammer the true definition of that word into my head) that I profit from the same waste that frustrates me so.  Oh those twisted webs.

Every couple of years the university, which owns the land on which our community stands, comes along and starts making threats.  We have to leave, they say.  They need this parcel of land, they say.  But it has never panned out.  Bluffs?  Maybe.  At least a couple of times the money for their proposed project has run out.  And once about four years ago, just when I was moving in, they relocated half of our Wagenplatz to a plot of land in the middle of a field about a kilometer away.  But this year they were serious. And it looks like we might be moving.

At the beginning most of the group was skeptical.  The uni had threatented so many times before, why should we get our panties in a bunch this time?  But after a number of meetings and negotiations we are working on a pre-contract for moving the Wagenplatz.  I don’t know exactly when, but it appears that sometime in the next year or so our community will be moving to a spot in the field next to what used to be our other half.  After over twenty years of successful squatting of this parcel of land we will be entering into a much more rigid (it is assumed) agreement with the university about our rent, about what we can and cannot do with out little piece of green.  What will happen to Haus Mainusch is still uncertain.

One of the biggest issues is that the land they want to move us to is not green at all.  Currently a field, it will take years before any trees grow big enough to provide any shade.  The first spring we’ll be living in a puddle of mud.  A windy, shadeless frying pan.  It was one of the reasons that a lot of people were (are) so adverse to the offer in the first place.

Yet I find myself looking forward to it.  I’ve always found change cleansing in that “new start” sort of way.  I was one of the few who was ok with the idea of moving from the beginning, and I’m glad that we are being offered a replacement parcel of land, that the Beard and I won’t have to leave entirely because I wouldn’t feel comfortable living with Baby Pickles with the threat of eviction hanging over our heads.  Police have compacted people’s Wagens right before their eyes in the past.  I don’t know if I am strong enough to handle that kind of wait-it-out situation alone, but I am not strong enough to handle it with a baby in tow.  Nor do I want to be.  So there’s that.

But when I think of leaving this parcel of land, of the university building yet another one of their borg-ship constructions on it, I feel sad.  We can move. but what about the snails, the birds, the hedgehogs?  They won’t be offered a new parcel of land, and whoever survives will be forced to squeeze into the ever decreasing bits of greenery.  When we move, I will mourn the walnut tree who has taken so many years to reach such majesty, whose fruits have fed us, could feed us in an emergency, and which they will cut down as if it was just a bowling pin to be struck down in sporting whim.

A college buddy of mine (who by the way runs a totally delicious blog—seriously, looking at it makes me want taking a bite out of my computer to make sense—just published her first e-cookbook, Puff Pastry at Brunch, which you should all check out) forwarded me an email a few weeks ago.  It was an email I had written to her after first deciding to move to the Wagenplatz in Frankfurt.  It was so fascinating to hear myself describe my life and my decision (particularly the negative comments some friends let off that I had completely forgotten) that I wanted to share it with you too.

Writing this I had just moved back to Frankfurt from Dresden, had been re-hired to teach English at the same school I had worked at pre-Dresden, and was staying with friends while searching for an apartment.  Not so very long after writing this, I would be meeting the Beard.  So, want to know what it’s like to have just decided to live in a teeney tiny house in an intentional community in Germany?  This is what it was like for me…

Hello hello lovely ladies,

I hope this finds you all well.  I’m back in Frankfurt.  It feels like I’ve been go go going nonstop since I arrived which feels good, yet strange, hectic, yet refreshing, and well, rather stressful actually.  Every time I come back to this city I get sick (another sore throat and cough as of yesterday, awesome).   I shouldn’t be surprised.  My doctor told me that a lot of people develop lung problems when they move to Frankfurt.  It’s as good a reason as any to get the hell out and live in the country, tell you what.  Dresden spoiled me a bit.  I missed Frankfurt like fuck, and I’m really really happy to be back, but Dresden is a much greener city, with much cleaner air.  Add to that the fact that I’m neck deep in reading Endgame by Derrick Jensen, and well, I’ve been feeling a little claustrophobic since I’ve been back, as if the concrete is going to swell up into giant waves and swallow me at any moment.

Which is a very big part of why I’ve decided that I’m not going to move into an apartment, but buy a Wagen and live at the Wagenplatz (Borsig, for future reference) here.  A friend has been trying to convince me to do this for a long, long time, and I was never quite ready to take the plunge, but now I am, and oh oh oh, I’m really excited.  I found a Wagen on the internet that I want to buy; it’s seven meters long, finished with rather attractive looking wood paneling on the inside (if i do say so myself), and has the wood stove and whatnot already inside.  And according to the seller, has no leaks.  It looks like shit from the outside, but I’m not so much concerned about that, as long as it’s dry and heated.  And the cost will be about the same as what I would have paid for one month of rent.  (Note from Future Nikki: I so didn’t end up buying that Wagen.  Shit, I don’t even remember looking at that Wagen. And like many Wägen on the internet, I bet it turned out to have some secret Money Pit-esque flaws.)

This move is going to mean a lot of things that are going to take a while to get used to and that are sort of making a lot of my friends raise their eyebrows in shock and surprise and well, be generally non supportive.  It means 1. no electricity (I can install solar eventually if I so desire) 2. no bathroom (this will vary depending on where I end up, and I’ll probably build an out house with a compost toilet eventually) 3. heating with wood, cooking with a  gas stove, and a number of other details (hauling water for one) that closely resemble permanent camping.

One friend’s comment when I told him a few weeks ago that I was considering moving to Borsig: “Oh nooooo.  No no no.”  Another friend said: “What?  You can’t be serious?  I hate pseudo 20th century hippies.”  Almost all of the reactions I’ve gotten have been defensive, as if my decision to live this way is an attack on other people’s choices, simply by being.  Which is aggravating because I’m excited as fuck, because this is the way that I can live and feel really good and relaxed about a whole bunch of things, and this is the way where I don’t have to work for anyone besides myself or on other people’s time schedules or worry if my writing is making money, I can just make money from a few hours of teaching a week and make money from writing when I can, and when I can’t, just enjoy it because it is what I love to do.  Woohooo!

Oh and so you can get more of an idea of what a Wagenplatz is like, don’t think trailer park, think boxcar children.  God I loved those books.  When I was a kid I always wanted to live in a boxcar.  And now I’m going to do it.  Sweet.

Soooo.  Woooo!  And moving!  And Wagens!  And spring is coming!  Lots of happy changes in the air.  My first class is tomorrow.  Should be interesting.  It’s a one on one, whew.  I was excited about teaching again before I got back, but one day in the office washed that right off.  Remembering the whole “we’ll make this all seem like some best of times great interactive learning bullshit, but it’ll really be all busy work and not nearly as useful or practical as you thought or would have wanted to pay for” and then re-hearing the entire “I moved here because of my boyfriend but I fucking hate germany and everyone in germany and germany sucks and on and on” attitude that almost all of the teachers that work there have.

Anyways, apprehensive about working and getting burned out again very quickly, but by then maybe I’ll have escaped to Mainz (Mainz is an hour train ride from Frankfurt, aka pretty close by, doable on bike in an hour and 45 minutes).  I never thought I’d agree with that part of Anonymous Friend’s plan. (Note from Future Nikki: My friend had wanted that I move into a Wagen in Frankfurt where she already lived, and that we then both moved to the Mainz Wagenplatz together, as she was always singing this community’s praises.  I ended up following the plan to a “T” but she didn’t get a “yes” at the time from the Mainz community, so she did not.  Awkward situation, but our friendship survived it.)  But let’s just say the idea is growing on me.  Especially because they have what I’ve heard is a fantastic communal kitchen with internet and vegan voküs every day of the week.  Yihaw.

Oh my cod, hello nostalgia! So while enacting Operation Sanity (aka preparing some bloggy stuff for baby kick off time and gathering material for the second issue of Click Clack Gorilla: The Zine) I reread everything I’ve written since the beginning of 2009. And 2009 just happens to be the year that I got trash house aka my very own Wagen/trailer. Pre-trash house the Beard and I had been sharing one trailer, the red Wagen that you’ve probably heard me refer to as “the sleeping Wagen.” Re-reading my post from post-first-trash-house-viewing and pre-trash-house pick up was so much fun, that I decided I really needed to drag you all down memory lane with me. Wow. I had no idea how much work I was in for.

wagon wheel, june 2009

I imagine that it went something like this.

I was sitting in the red Wagen, thinking about how I was freakin’ never going to get the money together to buy my own wagon (a room of her own, blah blah blah, etc etc). “Maybe I should just give up beer for a while, put a euro in a jar every time I want a beer. It worked for Sleeveless.”

Zoom up into the clouds were a gaggle of white-toggaed, beer-toting, white-haired old men are looking down from the heavens on me. “Another one’s talking about giving up drinking,” one says. They looked at each other, worried. “We can’t let another one go. They’re dropping like flies. Somebody go talk to the Dumpster God.”

The next day I got a call from Workshop. There was a wagon in Rüsselsheim, and the owners were giving it away. I did a cartwheel, walked to the trash, and found a carton with six unopened bottles of wine.

The wagon owners are giving away their cute little wagon because the gardens are being “evicted” so that the city can build something else there. They’re a little older, and, 20 years ago, had the great idea that they would bury most of the wheels. Why, I’ll have to ask them when I meet them. I like to imagine it was a zanny solution to not wanting to build an extra step to get in the front door.

I have yet to go inside, but have been assured that it’s “tip top” in there. The only flaws on the outside are a missing window, two or three rotten boards, and two missing bolts on the towing bar. I’m pee-my-pants excited and at the same time, don’t believe it, won’t believe it until we’ve managed to get the thing home.

The foggy plan so far is to try to dig out part of the wheels, left the fucker up with a jack, fill in the holes/put boards in the once-wheels holes, and then come back with a truck to pull the thing home. If the wheels still work. I imagine that beneath the wheel top you can see above the ground there is nothing left, that the wheels are just phantoms of what they buried 20 years ago. Cross your fingers for me.

Aaaah, what a feeling of gratification to know that we got her home alright, that I fixed her up myself, and that she looks so damn pretty today. See what I mean? Ah. Today the high fives are for me, for actually following through on a huge long-term project. (Unlike my follow through on many larger writing projects. Ehem.) This is one of those moments when I really wished that I liked champagne.

So you moved to Germany. It took you a while, but you mastered the language. You understand all the words that your friends are saying, but you still don’t understand half of what they say; because you didn’t grow up in Germany, when people start talking pop culture nostalgia, you don’t have a fucking clue.  When you were a kid (you being me, growing up in the United States) you watched Sesame Street, The Smurfs, and Rainbow Bright.  And so did they.  (Though they called them Sesam Straße, Die Schlümpfe, and Regina Regenbogen.)  But they also watched Sandmännchen, Sendung mit der Maus, and Löwenzahn.  (Say what?)  Which brings us to Peter Lustig.

Peter Lustig is probably Germany’s most famous (fictional) Bauwagen dweller, made famous by his role as moderator on the children’s show Löwenzahn, an educational number where Peter, more or less, explains how the world works in 25 years of episodes.  He’s Germany’s answer to America’s Mr. Rogers.

In the very first episode (which you can watch in three parts, here, here and here) Peter trades in his house for a Bauwagen (being pissed at the noise caused by a new airport and after discovering that the usual travel trailers are inflexible, too small, and too expensive), which he buys from a building company, parks in his friend’s Schrebergarten—a rented garden plot, where, I might add, it is actually illegal to live full time, though I do know some people who do it—then fixes up using scavenged materials.  As if that didn’t make the show interesting enough, Lustig ends every episode with a direct look in the camera and instructions for kids to turn off their televisions and go outside.  Even the opening sequence is full of radical imagery: a dandelion (dandelion=löwenzahn) growing up through a crack in the pavement, a saw cutting into a television.

Of course, for the English speakers reading, the most interesting thing about Peter Lustig is probably his Bauwagen.  Which is why I wanted to share a few pictures of it with you here.  It is currently sitting in the Babelsberg Film Studio Lot, where folks touring the studios can get a good look.  I love the old-chair stairs (visible in the photo above), and I’ve had fantasies about a similar roof terrace as well.  I haven’t watched much of the show myself, but what I have seen has been full of interesting ideas for re-purposing household objects for Bauwagen and tiny house living.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Peter Lustig was personally responsible for the existence of a large number of Bauwagen-dwelling adults in Germany today.

Episode two, Ein neues Zuhause (A New Home), finds Peter trying to figure out how to make such a tiny living space work for him.  The neighborhood kids come by to tell him his house is too small, and he tells them about all the folks around the world who live in tiny houses.  (Watch it here.)  If they can do it, so can he.  (And this in the early 80s, long before the “tiny house movement” began to roll.)  If you want a tour of his Wagen, almost finished, as of the second episode, click here and start at 0:45.  You’ll see the chair steps, a toilet in an armoir, a carpet used as an awning, a glass cabinet as a bay window, and a number of other “lustig” innovations (hardeeharharhar, “lustig” means “funny” in German, fyi).

Funnier yet is what the Beard told me about Peter Lustig this morning.  At the end of his 25-year career as moderator for the popular children’s show (today the show has a new moderator), Lustig admitted to interviewers that he can’t actually stand children.  Fans everywhere were horrified.  “Children should watch the show and have their fun, but I don’t like having them around me.  Like all adults, I am of the opinion that children are sticky or disruptive or loud.  I’m no fan of children, that’s a misunderstanding.”  I was amused.  What irony!  You can’t expect an actor playing a part to be the part he’s playing in real life, after all.  But whatever he thinks about children, at least he had a pretty neat Wagen.

Photos (cc) static_view (top) and honma (bottom)

I had almost forgotten what it was like. The frozen water. The biting chill in the air. The layers of clothing. The intensity with which the wood stove must be fed in order to keep the Wagen warm when winter finally decides to show its frosty locks.

In preparation we’d turned off the water in the bathroom Wagen (during the winter we use the “flush with a bucket of water” method rather than risk burst piping), and I’d even remembered to move the two packages of hair dye in my Wagen to the sleeping Wagen. (Purchased for the orgy of chemical use which will ensue post Peanut landing. By which I mean, the single beer I will drink and the dye I will use on my hair. Wooo, bring on the poisons! Haha. Sounds a lot less appealing when I put it that way, doesn’t it?)

But, being out of practice with the concept of winter after a mild three months of fall-like “winter” I forgot about the bottles of water on my counter and the milk on my stoop. Oops. This morning I laughed when I saw my favorite glass bottle spouting ice. And frowned when I saw that the glass had cracked in several places all the same. Damn.

The two liters of milk I had on the stoop hadn’t exploded (guess I should be thankful that I’ve been too tired to get to the farmer’s market to buy my beloved brown bottles of raw cow juice—they definitely would have exploded), but even balanced between the wall and the very edge of the wood stove it took several hours before I had enough liquid to pour into my oatmeal. Lesson learned, winter, lesson learned.

long live the wood stove

Though winter weather always comes as a bit of a shock to me, I was excited to cook on the wood stove again. Sure, I could have cooked on it earlier in the season, but when it gets really cold, the stove tends to, more often, be consistently hot enough to use for food preparation. I filled a small pot with a package of frozen spinach, a package of gnocchi, and a little water. After about forty-five minutes the extra water was gone and everything was warm and ready. The final touch was a splash of milk and a package of gorgonzola cheese crumbled into the mix, and wa-la, wood stove gnocchi with a gorgonzola sauce. I’m eating it right now. And thinking that maybe I should start wearing a bib.

Is winter still playing at mild where you are? Or is the cold weather hitting everywhere simultaneously?

This post was featured on Homestead Barn Hop at The Prairie Homestead.

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.