The BRAVE Interview #31 February 2019: Carmen Shenk

Enjoy this month’s BRAVE Interview with Carmen Shenk!

I’m Carmen Shenk, and I’m a retired restaurant owner.

My Austrian and I were newlyweds, delighted to have finally found each other in our 40’s. He is a pipe organ builder and he was busy with restoration projects all over. While he was doing that, I was running our busy restaurant. In those days, we took a few trips to the ER for chest pains for him and I was showing signs of adrenal fatigue. In short, we were working too much and missing each other. We sat down and had one of those “come to Jesus” conversations and then we put our restaurant on the market. It sold quickly and we were free.

It was the fall of 2014, and Jay Shafer had written that famous title “The Small House Book” and it was packed with photos of the first iconic tiny house designs that would capture the imagination of the country. It wasn’t that different from Wally Byam and his iconic Airstream way back in 1934. And just like that, the internet was full of creative folks building these DIY homes on trailers and there were vivid conversations about quality vs quantity, simplifying life, and focusing on things that really matter. I was hooked!

We purchased a tiny house with cash and moved right in.

As tiny houses go – it was on the small side – 125 square feet. And it was so cute. And that began three years of living mortgage free in a tiny house.

Going tiny was our way of hitting the reset button on our lives. We were frazzled people with health issues that needed attention, and hearts that were ready to reconnect with each other and our purpose in life. Going tiny gave us the opportunity to step off the gerbil’s wheel. We needed very little income to keep our little home humming along nicely, and we found a storage unit for our Steinway Concert Grand and a pipe organ my husband built, along with some other interesting musical instruments. After all, we were going tiny to take a break from it all, but we planned to eventually build a home and move in our collection of instruments. That was the idea anyway, but that idea soon changed.

The transition from cooking in a 3,000 sq ft restaurant to cooking in a home of only 125 sq ft was not a smooth one for me. At first we ate out a lot, but that wasn’t helping to heal our stressed out bodies. Finally, it was time to learn how to cook all over again in my tiny haven home.

What I learned in that transition would eventually change my thinking and cooking so much that I wrote my first book, “Kitchen Simplicity”.

All the philosophical and practical lessons I learned the hard way went into that sweet little book and the response has been great!

My most recent “aha moment” was that our tiny house didn’t change us. Houses really don’t have that kind of power. It was embracing simplicity that changed us, that was the “magic” that changed everything. Minimizing the mundane things of life – like shelter – opened up space for something far more important: Purpose. Meaning. We get to volunteer more. We get to help out friends and strangers more. We are more choosy about the projects we take on. We are learning to say “No” and “Yes, absolutely!”

I’ve had a dream of being a published author for more than a decade. I am now living that dream.

I asked myself the question: is going tiny really a sacrifice if it makes it possible for me to live my best life? I now know my answer to that question and I would not trade this experience for the world.

We’ve since sold our first tiny house to a friend. I currently live with my handsome husband, Xaver Wilhelmy, and our little dog Ella, in a small house that we also use as a workshop for our pipe organ company. We are currently working on a “Skoolie” which is a bus turned into an RV. I travel and speak at tiny house festivals and have started a publishing company with three new books coming out in May of 2019. We will complete a ground breaking pipe organ project in Easter of 2019. I’m loving all the space that opened up in our lives!

Join me at TinyHouseFoodie.com to navigate the transition to a simpler life in a smaller space, or to live more comfortably in the home you already enjoy.

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