Living in a TT requires that you vacuum Every day. Really. The amount of crap that your feet bring into a travel trailer is amazing in its volume and composition. If you don’t believe me, just go take a short walk (say to the laundry room and back) in the average park during a break between rain showers. Enter your tiny home and walk to the kitchen sink to rinse your hands, then into the bedroom to put away your coat and back to the door.
Take a look over your path and see just how much dirt you brought in. Don’t remember walking over pine needles? There they are, so you must have. You wiped your feet on the mat at the bottom of the steps? Not very well, eh? And where did the mud come from? Your shoes are perfectly clean…wait…on further inspection, not perfectly clean…
And don’t even ask about the dog and cat hair that is generated even with daily brushing. How do they do it? They should both be bald by now, I swear!
Folks in Japan and other civilized countries take their shoes off outside the door (or immediately inside on a nonporous surface) and put on “house shoes” that are soft, comfortable and above all clean. It’s a good habit to get into AND it means lots of perfectly fitting, fabulously designed slippers to wear 🙂
Alright, vacuuming is a must, but what to use? If, like me, you are on a budget, one of those fancy $300 models is out of the question, and besides, where in the world can you store it?
I decided on a Micro Shop Vac back in January and it was the perfect choice! Yes, it does mean getting up close and personal with the floor, but it also reaches into all the ceiling corners, heating vents and around the edges where dirt and hair accumulate. It was cheap and small enough to fit under the kitchen sink, until I re-arranged and no longer had room under there. It came with a hanging bracket, but I never found a good place to hang the thing, TT walls being what they are. Now I had a real problem – the darned thing didn’t fit anywhere and became a Trip Hazard – a Very Bad Thing if you’re as clumsy as I am. AND it suddenly wasn’t sucking like it should last week. I guess seven months of hard use was all it could handle, but it was cheap and did the job admirably until then.
I decided to get the next larger model, the Hang On. At more than twice the power and capacity, it seems to be a good choice, but now the storage problem is even bigger. I hate the look of the thing sitting Over There in the corner, cord snaking into the traffic pattern because the kitten can’t resist anything that looks like a snake.
Giant kitty jungle gym!
At the local Crap-Mart I found this faux leather storage cube/ottoman for not a lot of money. I put casters on the bottom (found at a yard sale for the grand sum of $1.50 US) because everything has to be easily movable or it’s just impossible to get anything done. The top can be reversed and has a hard tray on the underside.
Red feathers AND a ball, all in the same toy!
The little vac with hose and extension cord fits neatly inside.
Foot stool, extra seating, cat perch AND storage.
The dark brown color fits in with the color scheme nicely, although I might have preferred red 🙂
Every new thing that comes in has to have a designated place or it just won’t work. Because I fold out the couch to sleep, I have even more constraints – the floor space in front of the couch has to be cleared every evening before bed, so I can’t be stashing stuff there – a good way to impose discipline that I don’t naturally have.
Everything has to do at least double duty and nothing that isn’t useful will be tolerated for long. It’s a constant Shifting of Stuff, but as I go I’m discovering what is really important to me and what I can live without.
Life is good!
Travels with Towanda 