Hello, we are Joseph and Sarah, the team behind Seeds with Wings. This website tells the story of our tiny off-grid house on wheels.  We’ll be exploring the nuts and bolts of the building process and the decisions we make along the way.  Building a tiny house is our particular way of both supporting our lives and dreams, and expressing the world we want to live in.

What is a tiny house?  It is a small building created with the specific intention of being a home. (Thanks to Tiny, the Movie for that definition.)  Our tiny house will be eight feet wide, twenty feet long, and thirteen and a half feet tall.  It will live on a flat-bed trailer instead of a traditional foundation.  And, it will be off-grid.  “Off-grid” means that we will generate electricity from solar panels, run our stove on alcohol, etc.  We are  excited about making other green/sustainable choices  in the construction, like salvaging materials, using natural insulation, and more.  We bought plans for the Cypress 20 from the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, and are modifying them for more “green” materials, and for our needs.

More about our story…

• We met at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, where we were both living and working,  in 2008
• We got together in 2012 (after maintaining a long-distance friendship)
• A couple months later, Sarah moved to Red Hook, Brooklyn, to be with Joseph
  
• October 2012 Hurricane Sandy swept through the East Coast, including our waterfront Brooklyn neighborhood, and shifted the foundation of our apartment building, making it unlivable.
• Staying with our extremely generous families and friends, and having no where to call home, we bumped up our (pipe) dream of building a tiny-house right to the top of the list.  But where…how…?
• …Enter serendipity, in an even more obvious way than usual –  An offer to care-take on a sheep ranch in Sonoma, CA landed in our inbox.  That same day some Tumbleweed Tiny House Company staffers invited us to join their group build.  How could we say no?

Having both spent many years living out of backpacks, on bicycles and in small city and country dwellings (Sarah is from San Francisco and Joseph from New York) it won’t be a stretch for us to live in a tiny home.  We’re both artists, of one sort or another, and are drawn to hand-building the space we’ll live in.  Creating/building a home is our “first step” towards living a self-aware, self-sustaining and time-responsible life together; but where “self” is replaced with “community.”

Endless thanks to our families, friends and the organizations that have made us who we are, especially: San Francisco Zen Center, Fellowship of Reconciliation, and Buddhist Peace Fellowship.

And to the local businesses that keep us healthy and happy, especially: Thacher Ranch, Green String Farm, Yoga One, Petaluma Community Acupuncture, and Tumbleweed Tiny House Company.