Sebastopol is the only town I’ve seen that has an independent bookstore, art supply store, and a music store right on main street, plus TWO organic food stores right near by.
Last week I wrote about how much I am loving living in Sebastopol California. This week I want to tell you more about how it’s healthy and the logistics of living here.
History of Sebastopol
Sebastopol was founded in the 1850s as a trading center for farmers and a site for a United States Post Office. After the Gold Rush of 1849m, more and more settlers came to California and many found a home in the fertile valleys north of San Francisco.
In 1875 botanist Luther Burbank came to Santa Rosa. Every school child in California knows Luther Burbank, who cultivated new varieties of fruits and vegetables through the traditional methods of seed-saving and grafting. No GMOs. With these simple methods he cultivated many new varieties in common use today, including the Russet potato, the most widely grown potato in the United States. Burbank’s experimental farm in Sebastopol is a wonderful place to visit, as is his home in Santa Rosa.
In the latest 1800s, a local farmer worked with Burbank to develop the Gravenstein apple for commercial use and Sebastopol became an apple boom town. Apples are so ingrained in the life of Sebastopol that even today, when many of the apple orchards have been replaced by vineyards, there is a free community apple press that can process 100 pounds of apples into cider in 20 minutes.
So from the very beginning, Sebastopol has been about food, farming, and health.
Coming Home to Sebastopol
I first came to Sebastopol about 30 years ago to visit the showroom of Shepherd’s Dream. While they are now located in Montague, California, Shepherd’s Dream started here in Sebastopol, and it was here that I worked with them to write the first standard for pure wool. The wool for the wool bed I sleep on came from local sheep near Sebastopol.
Around the same time, Larry’s parents purchased a lot in Sebastopol and built a house on it for their retirement. So I spent a lot of time in Sebastopol before I moved to Florida in 2002.
Today as I come home to Sebastopol after 15 years I see that much has changed and much is still the same. Many of the shops on historic Main Street are just the same, but there is now a vibrant farmer’s market, a wonderful new district called The Barlow that has transformed the site and buildings of an old applesauce factory into a vibrant artisan market district, and it’s just more crowded. Where before Sebastopol was a quiet town off the beaten path, it is now an integral part of the Napa-Sonoma wine industry.
I am here right now on grace. We didn’t choose to come to Sebastopol. We chose to come home and help our family. That our family is in Sebastopol is a gift. And I am thankful to be here every minute of every day. Life here agrees with me and I am loving exploring and experiencing this place.
The Cost of Living in This Healthy Town
Sebastopol is still a farm community, but it’s now much more expensive because of the value of the land for grapes and it’s proximity to San Francisco, which I think is now one of the most expensive places to live in America. Many of what used to be small family farms growing the foods of daily life, that same land is now growing gourmet wine. Still, there are many small farms growing specialty foods, but more and more land is going to grapes.
When I last lived in California in 2002. I had been paying a $2000/month mortgage for 12 years to live in a 700 square foot cabin. My whole life revolved around paying that mortgage and it was very difficult. This was part of the draw for me of moving to Florida. For the past 15 years I’ve been living in a 1600 square foot house with a $800/month mortgage. But even though I had a bigger house, I didn’t have quality of life.
Sebastopol clearly has the quality of life I want, but I wouldn’t be able to live here if I didn’t have family to stay with. I looked at the rentals just before writing this post and to rent a 700 square foot house is $3000. Hotel rooms on the weekend are $400/night. If you can find them. I mentioned to a farmer at the farmer’s market last week that I was looking for housing and she said, “Good luck. Any housing is hard o find.” And she was right. I think most people who live here now bought houses years ago.
Which brings me to tiny living.
Our Move Toward Tiny Living
Last week I wrote that Larry and I “have undertaken an enormous task of re-organizing our lives around ideas, abilities, relationships, experiences, adventures, and other such soul-satisfying interests rather than the pursuit of material goods.” With this goal in mind, we are simplifying our lives and reducing our possessions. And that’s why we are here. To reduce the pile of things Larry has collected over the years that are being stored at his parents.
But what has happened is pretty funny. My father used to say, “Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.” Well, we are intending to live more small and simple. We’ve actually been watching all the tiny house shows on TV for months.
And what has happened is…we came here thinking we would have two rooms in Larry’s family house but for the moment we have only one. So we really have to live tiny! I don’t get a separate room for my office. We have one 12×16 room, That’s just under 200 square feet. The size of a smaller-size tiny house.
We can do this. When we first met we lived and worked in one room together.
Two things come to mind….
On tiny house tv shows people in tiny houses are always talking about quality of life. That they have exchanged their big houses and piles of belonging for more time and resources available for family, travel, education, and other pursuits of happiness. And we are experiencing that now. I was remembering this morning many years ago when I sold my grand piano because I was tired of moving it and buying or renting places big enough to hold it. If I were a concert pianist that would be one thing. But I hardly played it, so I sold it and fulfilled my lifetime dream of traveling through the British Isles. Today I am feeling the same about needing to carry so much stuff around with me if I want to go from place to place.
I’m also remembering something an architect friend said to me a number of years ago. We were talking about the ideal size for a home. And she said something about physical space versus living space. And how you don’t need to have all your living space in your home. Essentially we need a place to sleep, store clothing and other personal items, a place to bathe, a place to cook and eat, and for me, I need a place to do my work. But all of these do not need to be contained in a home. She considered her entire city as her “living space” and I’ve never forgotten that.
As we are gradually emptying our room to make space for our present needs, an interesting thing has happened. Larry started looking for a used trailer that we could transform into a tiny house space for my office. And as we started thinking about it, we saw we could build our own tiny house while we are living here and then have a tiny house when the time comes to leave. And that day will come. The house will be sold and we will need to live somewhere else. With a tiny house we could live anywhere.
And two weeks ago when the fires broke out and we had to escape the smoke, we could have just taken our tiny house anywhere if we already had one.
Living tiny in a way that’s mobile is looking more and more like our future. We’ll see what happens next.
This is is in reply to Don Stephens. Yes, the cedar is likely the source of your wife’s asthma. I have had MCS and asthma for 60 years. At one time, I lived in a house that had cedar plank ceiling and had not made the connection as to the cause of my asthma while I lived there. Years later, I learned the oils in cedar wood are very strong. When I purchased a far infrared sauna to help with the MCS I was told to not get one made with cedar, only white wood because of the toxic oils present in cedar. I have no idea if the wood can be baked out. There is a possibility that the wood would not be toxic if it was unwrapped and left outside for a long time. I only know when I return to that house, asthma returns also.
Hi Debra,
I recovered from environmental illness in the early 1990s from following the advice in your book along with diet change etc. Thank you.
I’m very interested in your tiny house adventure. My husband and I currently live in a 744 sq ft cottage, but are interested in tiny houses.
We are happy with fewer possessions, and it would be a great way to get a truly non toxic home.
A problem seems to be kitchen space. We use ceramcor pots and baking pans. We use a pure effects water filter. We cook everything from scratch which means we need work room and a fridge to hold lots of OG fruits and veggies. I think you would have the same problem. I am very interested in how you will resolve that. We have actually toured a fairly good size tiny home, and the kitchen was totally non functional for us.
A loft bedroom seems to be standard. Will you have a loft bedroom? I’m concerned about going to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Will you use storage for things not used everyday like suitcases?
Lastly a few tiny house bloggers have said that finding a place to park can be an ongoing problem.
I am keenly interested in all these things, and I’m sure others are as well. I really hope that you will have a special section that keeps us up to date on your research and decisions in your tiny house quest.
You are lucky to have Larry who can build anything. Many thanks. Looking forward to all the updates on design, materials, etc. Best wishes, Adriana
Yes I AM lucky to have Larry who both has the ability to build anything and is happy to build anything for me.
I’m happy to have a special section on this adventure. For now I will answer your questions, but as I have more to report, I’ll make a new post and a new section.
KITCHEN SPACE
I totally agree with you.
First I want to say that we have taken a good look at what we need and what we don’t need and we’ve decided that what we really need is
1. a kitchen
2. an office
3. a bedroom + bathroom
We DON’T need a sofa or “living” area so that gets incorporated into the kitchen.
At one point I worked this all out and sketched it, but I don’t have access to that sketch at the moment.
But basically one end of the house is the kitchen and the other end is the bed/bath. And then there is space between these two and the door is in the middle of one of the long walls. We would have two lofts for storage with staircases that also would have storage areas within them.
The clever part of this design is that one of the short walls would be entirely kitchen and there would be a large island between the kitchen wall and the open space. While cooking, the island belongs to the kitchen. The rest of the time the island becomes the office. The long wall that isn’t the door would have wall space devoted to business activities.
That seems to work on paper as a design but we haven’t scoped it out physically.
The key to this was not trying to take a regular house and include all the functions, but rather eliminating functions we don’t really need by starting with how to we really use our house. At the time we had 1600 square feet, but we only used the kitchen, office, bedroom, and bathroom. And now that we are in smaller quarters, that is still all we need. We had this huge living/dining room in Florida and we never used it. To be honest, Larry and I spend most of our time in bed because he is more comfortable lying down after he recovered from breaking his back. So we sleep, talk, eat, write, watch tv and practically everything else in bed. So see we don’t need a dining table. We just need one table that can be multiuse.
We also have four Shaker chairs that we built together with our own hands. So we would hang those chairs from pegs on the walls and take them down when we need to use them.
We have also greatly simplified our diet, so we don’t need much equipment. But we do need a full size refrigerator or several small undercounter units.
I actually saw an episode of a tiny house show where a chef wanted a tiny house and it was designed around the kitchen. I saw this after I thought to do that.
One of the things I love about tiny houses is they can be—and often are—designed specifically for your own needs. We would build our own ourselves, not purchase one readymade.
LOFT BEDROOM + STORAGE
As I’ve already said above, we would have our bedroom on the main floor and use the lofts for storage. We do need to have space for a lot of books and research materials.
We currently have a storage unit a few miles away. It takes less than 10 minutes to drive there. I might get a storage unit, but part of our goal is to reduce possessions to a point where we could take everything we own with us wherever we go (unless we go to another country).
FINDING A PLACE TO PARK
This was a tough one for me. I loved the idea of a tiny house but I didn’t want to live in a series of RV parks. I tried to research this but got so dismayed that I just gave up. There are “tiny home parks” where you can rent space with hookups, but these cost more than renting an apartment. Parking in a camp ground at $30/night is $900/month. So that’s not a lot of savings.
The whole idea of living in a tiny house became more attractive for us when we moved to California and gained the possibility that we could park it on Larry’s family property. Then when this property is no longer available we might buy our own property somewhere.
We would building the tiny house on a trailer platform because that way we don’t have to get building permits.
I would love to see a network of places where people would allow tiny houses to park on their property for a reasonable fee. Maybe there already is such a thing. I’d love to park in a series of interesting and beautiful places, not Walmart parking lots.
The adventure continues…I’m sure I will have more to say on this subject.
Hi, Debra and everyone! This interesting tiny house movement has been on my radar for almost a decade. My husband and I did the downsizing experiment where we purchased a very compact house (not a tiny house) on twenty acres.
We overhauled it using only “healthy” products to create a “safe” living environment for me. (Debra, thanks for consulting with me during the process.) We hoped this space would give me a break from neighbors’ laundry and BBQ-ing odors, which it did for the most part. Although when they light up their fireplaces, I still close windows.
We whittled down our possessions and have stored some boxes of books on the property in a utility building. The thing is that the house didn’t get bigger so the books remain in boxes during these past few years—untouched.
Also, a heads up about digitalizing paperwork, photos, etc. (Always run backups!) Some programs/apps have changed to subscription models instead of owning the program (Aperture vs. Lightroom for photos as an example). So budgetary concerns changed. I will say, I love not having all that extra paper around. Definitely a bonus if one has allergies, asthma, MCS. E-readers and the computer have been way easier on my lungs than hundreds of dusty books lining the walls. (Yes, I do miss the nostalgia of having all my books…sometimes.)
The more we’ve downsized, we’ve discovered our incompatible needs for space (allergy and MCS require certain boundaries between the outside world; think, for example of allergy routines during extreme pollen season when thick yellow pollen coats everything but apply to year-round living). So now we’re back to needing more space! Yes, we could build or park an RV on our land.
We’re all different and have our own set of needs. I guess it boils down to really knowing each other and allowing “room” for personal growth. Will the space accommodate this? I’m glad we did the experiment. I wouldn’t want to do it all over again though. 😉
Best wishes on your adventure, Debra. Thanks for sharing the journey with us!
Thank for your comments on this Alonna. There is much to consider and this is not an easy question.
I’m at the point in my downsizing where I am still making decisions about what I need and what I don’t need.
About ten years ago I lived for three months at the top of Nob Hill in San Francisco. I literally lived right under Coit Tower in a tiny studio apartment. And I really got the idea of how little I needed to live. Like a really don’t need 25 plates. I had one plate and one fork and one spoon and 1 bowl and 2 knives (a chef’s knife and a paring knife) and one glass and one mug…you get the idea. And I was totally fine with that.
I found I was keeping a lot of books I no longer needed just because I liked having them around.
But now I am wanting more freedom to travel and not wanting to carry so much stuff around with me or pay storage unit fees.
So I’m getting down to what do I really need and want in terms of material things.
Things are becoming less important to me at this point in my life, and I am more interested in experiences and relationships and personal growth than the acquisition of objects.
So I think I will get to a point where it will be clear what my essentials of life are, and what space I need to accommodate that.
I’m still in process about this.
I do want to say though that I have spent many years living in 600-700 square feet or less and was very happy. The last 15 years I lived in 1600 square feet, sometimes with Larry and sometimes alone. It was this dream I always had. Living in California I could never afford that, and in Florida I could. I remember walking into that big living room and bursting into tears because here was my dream come true. Well, I’ve had that experience now, and I don’t need that much space. Most of it was unused except to store objects I wasn’t using.
With regards to space, I really am at this point where I consisder space outside of my home to be “my space.” Like there are places I love within the town where I live and surrounding areas where I go because I enjoy being in those spaces, so my sense of space is not limited to my home. In fact, I just printed out some maps so I could mark my “area of operation.”
A tiny house—or actually a house of any size—might contain my physical belongings, but it doesn’t contain or limit me. I can have all the space I want.
Hi Debra and everyone!
Debra, I love how you put this and feel similarly: “Things are becoming less important to me at this point in my life, and I am more interested in experiences and relationships and personal growth than the acquisition of objects.”
The map of “my spaces” is a cool idea. Now if I could just find some “no dogs/no fragrances” locations to put on it!
Thanks again for this interesting downsizing conversation thread. I look forward to reading more tips from you and everyone.
Well, since you asked, I’ll tell you something that happened with regards to this over the weekend.
As I’ve written elsewhere, coming from Florida I had few winter clothes suitable for the winter temperatures here.
Two items I purchased were a pair of thick purple wool socks, handknitted with wool from local sheep (like down the road sheep) and also a beautiful purple cashmere scarf from Germany with little flecks of color throughout.
I just love these socks and this scarf like I’ve never loved any piece of clothing. I actually almost never take these socks off. I wear them all day and all night and take them off to take a shower. I wear the scarf all day indoors and out. I have a whole pile of scarves sitting on a shelf, some of which I have loved in the past. But there is something about this scarf that I love so much that the others don’t even come close.
I am at this point where I only want to wear clothing that makes me feel this good and this happy. And this statement is from a girl who used to be a real fashionista with LOTS of clothes and hair and makeup and I read fashion magazines, if you can imagine that.
There is such a satisfaction having this simple, unrefined material next to my body. I’m feeling the fibers.
I’m starting to become aware of what the ideal clothing would be for me and I want that clothing. I don’t want industrial clothing. I just want a few pieces of clothing that are really wonderful.
I think when we can have quality we don’t need quantity. I just want to be surrounded by my favorite things now.
Also last week we were in Petaluma and I didn’t buy any of the little things I would have bought in the past. I only bought beans. Seven-dollar-a-pound heirloom beans. That’s what is important to me now. Food with original genetic profile.
I read with great interest your article outlining the challenges and frustrations in trying to find affordable housing in a healthy area. I had made comments in another post re your move that my husband and I are recently retired, early, and are having similar issues …..had discussed if there was known to be a specialty relocation or consulting service that considers multiple factors….medical availability, healthy environment, somewhat affordable housing. Your area in CA always feels wonderful, health wise, when we visit there on vacation, particularly compared to our home now in the central/South US. Anyhow, I am trying to find legitimate/professional websites that have scientific data, including the Lung Association State of the Air guide to best and worst cities. Your idea of a trailer is interesting, and I want to mention if you do that and keep the original bed set-up, you may be in the same situation as we are, having purchased a very small Airstream trailer for travel, made mostly of aluminum, with some plywood, but having a foam bed. I am currently looking online at White Lotus Home, Lifekind, and Shepard’s Dream to see if they might do a custom wool mattress, as many trailers have non standard mattress sizes. I think we do want a permanent house, which can be small, in addition to having the little trailer for some hoped for travel to areas such as the national and state parks…..of which CA has so many beautiful options. I very much enjoy and appreciate following your website and blog, and I have purchased several of your books over the years. Thanks!
It’s actually pretty easy to get the air quality data because there is a whole program that regulates air quality and is required to tell the public what the air quality is on a daily basis.
Just go to https://airnow.gov and type in the zip code to see current conditions.
I haven’t ever tried to get historical data for this site, but it’s where I would look first if I needed that. I suggest contacting them for historical data. If they don’t have it, they will know who does.
Hi Debra,
I designed my own first tiny-house while still at university (studying to be an architect, in 1960), at about 300 sq.ft. . Since then I’ve designed/helped build many others for owner-builder clients, using a range of alt-materials & techniques (see the “Don Stephens” entry in Wikipedia, for more on that, if you like 🙂 )
And now, in semi-retirement, I’ve been building on a tea-cottage (“Cha-an”, in Japanese) for my wife, in our side-yard, since 2014…about 140 square feet plus a bed-sized loft above. Since she suffers from asthma, I’ve done most of it from clean, salvaged and recycled (long since outgassed)materials, to avoid introducing any toxics.
But we’d been storing a bunch of sealed-up packages of 3/8″ interior western red cedar “liner”, (acquired about 30 years ago, in a client trade) and Barbie wanted to use that for interior wall and ceiling….it went in about 2 years ago. We’ve also super-insulated the cottage, built tightly, and installed two hepa/charcoal-filled air-filtering units and a particulate monitoring laser-meter, which typically reads 0 to 2 ppm in here, when outside the air is testing at 40 to 100, and says under 15 inside, even when recent wildfires gave readings of 200 to 350 ppm. outdoors!
But with the cottage closed up to exclude all that smoke, and Barbie staying inside almost 24/7, she’s still having increasingly significant asthma symptoms, and we suspect outgassing from the cedar to be the source of the problem!
So she’s arranging to get that possibility medically tested, and we’re researching on-line the how-to’s of baking-out the suspect cedar-fumes. Hence we encountered your informative site.
I love the ideas and benefits of today’s tiny-house trend, but would warn that living small also means living far more intimately with any toxics brought in by your choices of building materials and furnishings…..we’d love to hear your thoughts on this…
– Don Stephens,
dongreenershelter@hotmail.com
Well, I agree with you 100%. And in fact, ALL tiny houses should be made from nontoxic materials for this very reason.
I watch a lot of tiny house TV shows so I know that they are not specifically built to be nontoxic.
Of course, if I build one, it will be completely nontoxic.
And a woman has built a nontoxic tiny house. See TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO: Tiny Housse — Toxic Free
I would also add that a tiny house addition in a backyard might be a good option for folks who need their own nontoxic living enviornment but want to be close to family.