Tiny House Walk Through
If you read our last post then you know that we have moved out of the tiny house and into Aimee's parents house until our larger house is built. Last Saturday, we were getting ready to pack up our stuff but there was something I needed to do first.
Definitely a lived in tiny house.
I had been planning to film a full house walk through of the tiny house since we moved in but there was always some reason not to. There were a few small pieces of trim that I needed to install that I never seemed to find the time to complete. We had a couple of makeshift curtains that were slightly embarrassing; one is a garbage bag and the other a baby blanket. Our most common reason was that the house was just too cluttered and we didn't have time to clean, organize, and make a video the same weekend.
Yes, those blinds are made of a garbage bag and an old baby blanket...
Anyway, this was pretty much my last chance to take the video before we moved out. I felt it was important for us to show the tiny house the way we lived in it rather than half empty and meticulously staged just for the sake of appearances. I've seen many tiny house tours where there is barely anything in the house and it is basically set up like a show home to look as good as possible. While living a minimalistic lifestyle is possible, realistically the majority of people have more possessions than they know what to do with. Presenting tiny houses in such an easy-to-live manner isn't doing anyone any favours, especially people who are seriously contemplating living in one.
The Problems Begin
I was planning on filming with my phone camera which normally takes pretty amazing video. So good, in fact, that it has been my go to camera for the past six months. Once I started filming though, I could tell something was wrong. The video was jumpy and shaky even when I was holding the camera steady. I don't know if the lens was having trouble staying in focus or whether there was a glitch with the memory, even though I had five gigabytes left on internal memory. Whatever the problem was, the video was bad enough that I couldn't use it.
Aimee's camera takes great video but has horrible audio even though we have a Rode microphone for it. For some reason, this expensive mic has a ridiculous amount of background noise. So much so that if I run it through a filter to remove the noise the audio starts to sound tinny. Due to this issue, I figured we wouldn't use it and it was already at her parents place.
I did have an older camcorder. A back up, you could say, but I hadn't used it to film video for probably six months. I decided to give it a shot but it wouldn't turn on. Dead battery? I put it on the charger and was able to turn it on while it was plugged in so I thought the battery just needed a charge.
Twenty minutes later, I removed it from the charger and tried turning it back on and it wouldn't even power up. What the hell? It was working fine the last time I used it. I put the camcorder back on the charger but by now I was really starting to get annoyed.
The offending camcorder.
I had already lost over an hour messing around with equipment and we still needed to pack up our stuff so we could leave before the babies bedtime. They tend to get really cranky if they stay up too late and it just adds to our daily stress.
Just Do It
I was really looking forward to making this video and it just wasn't panning out. This really was my last chance to do the video in a lived in state though. Aimee suggested I try filming with the camera plugged in. This really wasn't how I wanted to film the video, it was going to interfere with how I presented the house but what else could I do at this point?
I ended up filming the video in a foul mood with the power cord distracting me and limiting my mobility. I still haven't looked at the video to see how it turned out but I do remember referencing my issues a few times while I was recording just because I was so annoyed. Even still, I will be editing the video and putting it out in the near future. Hopefully, it will turn out OK.
The "Super Pooper", pretty much how my day was going.
I'm not sure why but these challenges always seems to rear their ugly heads in groups. If it was just one issue, I probably could have worked through it a lot easier. Sometimes, life just kicks you in the nuts but man it seems to be happening to us a lot more frequently lately. I am pretty stubborn though so I am just going to work through it.