After a long winter’s wait, it’s finally warm enough to put on the roof! The adhesives used to hold down the EPDM roofing require a period of 48 hours above 50 degrees, and we’re getting there, slowly. Of course, the winter was tough on the exposed plywood, and due to…

Regrets, I’ve had a few. This week I did an interview with photographer Amanda Tipton, who is working on a project about, as she calls them, “strong choices.” She and Sam Pike of The Forum Stories came to my studio, and we talked about the circumstances around my choice to…

On my birthday this week, someone threw a rock through Tiny’s largest window. The rock, only about two and a half inches across, went through both panes and bounced off the opposite wall twenty feet away, leaving a constellation of sparkling glass shards and a disappointing comment on humanity. I…

The central question at the root of everything I’m doing now: What is a home? This question raises others: What does it mean to have a home? To build a home? What does one need to live? When I first conceived of building this tiny house and taking off on…

It’s easy to forget what I’m doing and why. Though I walk by the tiny house several times a day, the winter months have meant less good weather on which to work on it, and fewer daylight hours, too. But more than that, the realities of the financial struggle that…

My relationship to carpentry is complicated. My dad was a master carpenter. He built everything from custom, hand-carved gun stocks to a beautiful easel for my 24th birthday. I grew up with him building dune buggies, sewing fringed buckskin suits with antler buttons from deer he killed himself, and putting custom…

The funny thing about this entire crazy Mayday Experiment? I’m an introvert. Now, no one who knows me ever wants to believe this, but I swear it’s true. I’ve managed to get past my awkwardness and shyness over the years with a lot of practice, but deep inside, I’m just…

I was never very good at math. I blame Mrs. Mercer, my second-grade teacher at Foothills Elementary School, who told me that “boys are good at math and girls are good at English.” It was like a pass for giving up, which is just what I did. And I take…

I was making another interminable hardware-store run after one of the heavy rains that had been slowing our progress on the tiny house last summer. Even though I was often up late working, Philip Spangler, my friend from graduate school who was helping me build the tiny house, was generally…

The road to simplicity is complicated. I crave simplicity. Even sitting down to write this now, my mind races with my extensive to-do list, between the tiny house, my three jobs, my studio practice, design gigs, needs of students, trying to plan this giant project…this constant dance to stay afloat…

I have lived and worked in over thirty spaces in Denver. Most of them have been in Five Points, City Park and Northside if you’re old school, Highland if you’re new. But notably, I was also involved in founding the third gallery on Santa Fe Drive back when it was…

I have a confession to make. I’m a hoarder. Not in the “as seen on TV” sense, thankfully — though I suppose I’ve come close at times. I don’t hang onto things out of sentimentality, but because everything is useful in my eyes. Everything. See also: Everything You Ever Wanted…

With the bad weather and the holidays, progress on the tiny house has ground to a halt. The cold has me thinking about this past summer, when the garage door to the studio was open to the neighborhood and we were working on the tiny house constantly. Passersby would stop…

When I first revealed my plan to build a tiny house and take off across the country, at an artist’s talk at Mai Wyn Fine Art for my show Nest/Shedin March, I was terrified. I hadn’t planned to talk about the project in public, but it was a spontaneous response…

All I want for Christmas is…what, exactly? The tiny house done, that’s the big thing. Which, given my need to earn a living and function in the world, is happening much more slowly — and expensively — than my initial unrealistic expectations had predicted. Isn’t that always the way? When…

After a big problem when we tried to level the tiny house, I returned the broken jacks to Harbor Freight. (Thank you to the kind manager and clerk who took them back, even though they were past the ninety-day deadline — when something looks that dangerously broken, I suppose you…

After returning from its journey to City, O’ City for a fundraiser last week (thank you to all who came and contributed!), the tiny house still needed to be leveled so that we could install the windows — a task that requires, as much as possible, a level house. I…

I recently had a conversation with a painter who has had, from my estimation, a great career. He’s been gifted with museum shows, his work is in big collections, and his exhibitions have always met with critical acclaim. I don’t feel that I’ve had a shabby career myself — far…

A door carries symbolic weight. It is the way we close out others, it is the signifier of home, it creates a suggestion of privacy and a feeling of safety. A door defines our place in the world. Yesterday was the day that, with the installation of the door, the…

The tiny house was supposed to be showcased this past weekend at ArtDenver, and even though getting it to the second floor of the Colorado Convention Center sounded challenging, I was thankful to receive the invitation. So at the beginning of the week I scrambled to get the door in…