Episode #45 TRAVELING Tiny HOME & RV House PLANT Ideas - Decor & Display Solutions
What happens when you mix house plant lovers with a traveling tiny house on wheels?... an opportunity to solve a creative and “wonderment” inspiring challenge. As full-time RVers traveling with a custom wooden fifth wheel/traveling tiny home on wheels, we are bringing you along on our journey to live big, bold, and beautiful while we ‘tiny house America’ finding and appreciating countless daily wonders...often inspired by nature.
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While sharing our tiny house living experiences and small space DIY ideas with you, we also are bringing you along on our travel adventures. In this episode, we reveal one of Oregon’s lesser known state parks that may just be one beautiful well kept secret. Join us as we share the summer magic of Catherine Creek Oregon State Park with you. As ‘wonder seekers’, artists, and nature lovers, we are finding great wonderment in the natural wonders of northeast Oregon. Nature bathing next to flowing freshwater and beautiful trees always rejuvenates the mind, body & spirit. As we “tiny house America” with our wooden tiny home on wheels, we are exploring and discovering must-see travel destinations and beautiful campgrounds. We have created a tiny house channel with small space living ideas, along with travel adventures, inspiring ideas on how to live joyfully even when life is tough, and what life on the road can be like as two female RVers.
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By now you have probably picked up on the fact that we really love our house plants. Many of these houseplants have been with us for years, and honestly feel like part of the family. We really enjoy being around plants and we are determined to find a way for our houseplants to be part of our new traveling tiny house/full time RVer lifestyle. That being said, having house plants on all of our counter-tops or window sills is not going to work long-term. We need a solution to get these plants off the counter-tops and window sills AND in a setup where they are already secured for travel days, “any-day we tow our traveling tiny house” somewhere… which we will be doing a LOT of!
Before we begin cutting wood, drilling holes in our walls, or screwing anything into our beautiful pine window sills, we need to have a really good idea of what this is going to look like and see if the idea is actually going to work out in real daily life. We decided to create full 3-dimensional mock-up prototypes. Using cardboard, we made prototype shelves and corbel brackets. We loosely rolled paper to the width and height of our different houseplants so that we could decide what the ideal shelf size and placement would be both for our everyday life in a tiny house AND for the health, safety and needs of our houseplants. In a small space with lots of important multi-functional needs, optimizing space while at the same time creating a feel good, beautiful, homey, and personally relaxing home environment is very important. We created these prototypes, placed them, adjusted them and lived with them on our window trim edges for almost two weeks while we decided on our measurements and shelf placements.
The time came for us to cut out our wood shelves and corbels so that we could proceed with this tiny house diy project, and here is where a wonderful wonderment unfolded… the wonder of friendship. A long-time friend invited us to come and cut out our wood pieces in her woodworking shop. We took her up on her offer and spent the day together measuring, marking, and scroll sawing every single needed wood piece, plus a few extra wood corbels and such in case we need them later or if anything breaks during installation. The project took all day, though we all enjoyed spending time together.
Before we could complete any more work on these plant shelves, the time came for us to depart on our first big road-trip with our traveling tiny house. We departed northwest Washington and towed our house through a city, over two mountain ranges and several rivers, 450 miles to northeast Oregon where we are now, ready to pick up from where we left off on our tiny house DIY project...
Now that we have ALL of these wood pieces cut out, we have some major sanding ahead of us. Right now these wood pieces have pretty sharp edges. We decide to use a dremel tool to take the sharp “edge” off with this tool before we use our own muscle and pieces of sandpaper. While dremeling down all the sharp edges on these pine shelves and corbels is not exactly a piece of cake, it will certainly save us some time when it comes to the sandpaper part.
Here we are… we have an important diy house job to complete, and yet so too the beautiful and awe-inspiring great outdoors is calling to us and we are needing some time in nature after several indoor full-time work days. We realize that instead of having to compromise and either stay at home and get the sanding chore done, or go on adventure and delay getting this much needed task done, we could do both. Remember, life is meant to be filled with joy, reasons for gratitude, and adventure… and it just so happens that the feeling of wonder, or as we like to call it, wonderment, actually helps to cultivate the ability to creatively problem solve and see answers where there previously were none. Now, I am not saying that we never would have come up with the idea of taking our sanding chore with us on an adventure into the great outdoors, though I would say choosing to live intentionally and committing daily to choosing to find and appreciate wonders, does open the mind to creative ideas. We are going to go on an outing to a really beautiful place that inspires enormous wonderment for nature, and we are also going to get a lot of wood sanding done… well that is our plan… let’s see how it actually goes…
Our day at Oregon’s Catherine Creek State Park is absolutely glorious! A couple solid hours of sanding does get completed even with all the wonderment inspiring distractions. Even if we got a little less work done on the shelves than we would have if we had stayed home instead, the benefits we receive from spending quality time in nature will certainly improve our ability to focus on completing this plant shelf project on the next day. Being able to go into nature and bask in all its splendor while also getting a house chore done was in itself a wonderment, a definite reason for wonder and gratitude!
The installed plant shelves with plant rings look fabulous! We are really happy with the final look and functionality of this completed tiny house DIY project, and our houseplants are probably really happy too! We are really glad we decided to make really rounded shelves. They look awesome and there are no pointy edges for us to run into… we find ourselves staring at them in awe… awe for the final results of all our hard work, and love for ourselves for having completed the project from start to finish.
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Living in a tiny house is not at all about living a tiny life, quite the opposite really. By living in a tiny house, we actually find we live a bigger life inside our home and beyond its walls. Finding everyday simplicity in the complexities of everyday life is really helpful no matter how big or tiny your home is. Letting go of extra stuff that is no longer needed and important to you, frees up your physical and mental space for the things and experiences that are meaningful to you. From this whole experience so far, we are learning that living simpler and tiny in one area opens countless opportunities for exploration and new experiences in other areas. Realizing how capable and empowered we can be, makes the previously impossible, possible, and with a mindset like that, everyday miracles really do happen.
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Creating an Eco-Tiny House...
In our mission to create a mostly non-toxic and the healthiest home possible, that we can afford, we found a really great made in the USA company creating very natural wood finishing products, Real Milk Paint Company based in Tennessee.
**Note: this is NOT a sponsor. (We have no sponsors.) This is the company & products we chose because, for us, it was the best option for our needs.
For most of our exterior and interior wood finishing work we used Real Milk Paint Company's 'Outdoor Defense Oil' (exterior) or 'Half & Half' (interior) which are both products consisting mostly of natural tung oil. If you would like to see more of how we used these products in our tiny house and the wonderment we found in our tiny house DIY journey, watch these two episodes.
For some of our interior wood projects (LIKE THESE PLANT SHELVES), we used the all natural Soapstone Sealer & Wood Wax that is made from food-grade Walnut Oil and T 1 Carnauba Wax Flakes. There are no solvents added which means no VOCs (volatile organic chemical) or added fragrances are in this product. Soapstone Sealer is made with entirely plant-based ingredients making it a vegan-friendly finish. We really like using this finish because it has very little scent and cures much faster than the tung oil and citrus solvent Half & Half product. We used this wood wax in on wood pieces that we needed finished and usable in a several day time frame versus closer to a month like our tung oiled wood pieces. While the finish is not as "hard" as tung oil, due to it's easy and quicker application, we can reapply additional coats of the wood wax when needed. We highly recommend this product!
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We are best friends, daughter/mother, adventure buddies, tiny house dwellers, and now traveling creative digital nomads. We are seeking and finding wonders around every bend and curve in our path and sharing the “wonderments” we find with you in regular video episodes. We are learning that if we consciously live our daily life with a “wonderment mindset” and “wonderment perspective” daily life is filled with a whole lot more joy, adventure, meaningful moments, and wonder! We hope you enjoy these inspiring videos about life as we share our finding wonder journey with you.
Be sure to subscribe to our channel on YouTube, give this video a thumbs up, and leave us a comment of one of your wonderments. We are building a community of people finding & sharing wonderments with each other on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and also on Patreon through the special Sea Tree Wonderist community.
Make life an adventure filled with wonderment and awe.
If you want to see our current and updated frequently tiny house travel miles & trips dashboard, then visit the "Our Tiny House" page at the top of our website or click this link.
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We a traveling full time with our custom wooden RV tiny house on wheels and we are sharing our adventures, experiences, challenges, and wonderments with you in regular video episodes. Right now our video episodes are published fairly delayed from our real time experiences and locations. If you want to find out what we are up to and where we are in our travels in present moment current time, then become a patron of Sea Tree Wonder on Patreon. Your monthly monetary support, even if small, will help make it possible for us to dedicate more time to creating and sharing these inspiring video episodes more frequently, and we share updates with you regularly through fun, inspiring and live time posts, photos, messages and video updates. Become a Sea Tree Wonder patron, and make a meaningful impact in our lives as dedicated artists. Visit Sea Tree Wonder on Patreon, or click on this link.
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We are building a FINDING JOY ONLINE COMMUNITY and we look forward to sharing our joys and wonders with each other. Together, we can inspire & uplift each other through sharing gratitude, joy, inspiration, and wonder with each other.
The WONDERful MUSIC that goes into underscoring our videos
is ALL licensed through Artlist.
Musical Artists heard in THIS FILM:
~ Jakub Pietras, Marco Martini, Ziggy, Ty Simon, The Original Orchestra, Foster, Dan Pundak, The High Jynks, Ziv Moran, and Lance Conrad
In this film, all video & photos were filmed by the two of us with the exception of some house plants and wood working video clips licensed through Unsplash & Pexels.
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and "Wonder DOGS" Uluru & Konane
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