The house made of tires that we’re calling home for the summer is fully furnished.  It’s really great – we don’t have to worry about digging up some towels to get us through the summer or find enough cups to have our neighbor over for dinner.   Of course, it also means that the house is completely Not Us.

My grandmother must have sensed our struggles because when we drove out to visit the family over the week, Martin and I couldn’t stop pinching ourselves.  This little handmade dish was waiting for us.  He’s even got four little legs:

We cradled him and quickly rushed to our new digs (after a few goodbyes and hugs, of course).  It’s the first time I’ve ever been the recipient of a piece of my grandmother’s art, so you can bet it was going front and center in our house.  So here it is, posing next to the kitchen sink as our new, very own soap dish where everyone can see it (deer included).

The place is starting to feel a little more like a home already.  Stay tuned as we prepare more in depth peeks of life in a tire…

…you see a Dairy Queen that doesn’t use its billboard to advertise the Blizzard of the month.

I did a double take when I saw that sign.  Do you suppose a person might get an extra topping if she went in looking like this?  (She being me of course because I’d totally do it… and I’d want you to come along for a cool treat!)  

Yeah, we could go together if you’d like.  Sort of like a date.  I hope it’s okay if we shared share an ice cream instead of getting our own because the whole stealing thing is a pretty hot topic at the Dairy Queen, I suspect, and I wouldn’t want you stealing a bite of mine.

After gobs of requests for the perfect gift to send to Americans and Canadians heading off to start a life in Europe, I’m here to dish out the goods… err make it easier for all of you hunting for the perfect goods to send to your expat buds and overseas friends.  My good pal, Katie (an American expat holding down the fort in Berlin), helped me brainstorm the items we’d love, love, love to find in our mailboxes in Germany.  Please feel free to chime in on anything we’ve forgotten.

For the kitchen

1. Measuring cups – Most Europeans measure ingredients by weight.
2. Peanut butter cups – I think I mentioned these treats at least a hundred times on Making This Home before Martin and I got back to the US.
3. Beef jerky for the guys
4. Dried ranch dressing packs
5. Poptarts or other packaged food - while an orange is an orange anywhere, packaged food just ain’t the same.  If Poptarts or another packaged food is your pal’s cherry in his fruit cocktail, you’re pretty much sending edible gold.  It’s the perfect way to guarantee that you’ll be The Most-Loved Pal for all times.
6. Sugary maple syrup like Log Cabin and Mrs. Butterworth – Only pure maple syrup is available with a friendly little Canadian flag on it.
7. Vanilla
8. Chocolate chips – I prefer to chop my own for this chocolate chip recipe for Germany, though it could be another one of those edible bits of gold for some people.
9. Energy bars, soy shakes, & Emergen-C
10. Macaroni and cheese – Annie’s is the edible gold at our house in Germany.
11. Candy corn – Send this at Halloween, then tell them you want an amazing bar of European chocolate or something from the Christmas markets.
12. Mustard and mayo – Okay, we know how weird that sounds.  But if your expat craves the classics she grew up with, mustard will seem spicy (at least in Germany), and the mayonnaise will taste super sweet.
13. Pie pans – Trying to recreate Thanksgiving with all those new expat friends gets tough without pie, you know.  Thank goodness Katie’s grandma saved us last year.
14. Salsa and chips – But only if you’re a master packer!
15. Peanut butter cups - Yes I know I said that already.  They’re just that good.

Note: As far as I know, peanut butter is available at the grocery stores located at the bottom of department stores and at organic grocers throughout most European countries.

For pampering

1. Clothes – Good quality clothes cost a fortune, and sometimes some fuzzy Old Navy pjs just really hit the spot.
2. Lotions and soaps – The brands are mostly different of course.  Sadly, so are the prices – by a lot.
3. Yankee candles
4. Favorite makeup and cosmetics
5. Preferred pain relievers – They’re 10-100 times more expensive in Germany.  Talk about a pain!
6. Tom’s of Maine toothpaste – We’re junkies.  If your friend also is obsessed to the point where the term “toothpaste junkie” doesn’t feel incredibly awkward, send him more Tom’s.  Or one of those other brands.

For the family

1. Baby stuff - Clothes are especially expensive, though the wooden toys in Europe are amazing.  Do a baby swap… for baby stuff, not babies, silly.
2. Craft supplies - Art supplies abound, but craft items just aren’t so abundant.  Fill a box with pretty papers, punches, glitter, and stamps.  Katie and I agree: this gift would probably score more points for a girl than even peanut butter cups.
3. Electronics for the guys
4. iTunes gift cards - Can you guess how expensive it is to go see a film in English or buy a cd?  eeeh  And you know we love keeping movies and music digital at our house.  Plus mailing a gift card costs less than a buck.
5. Books, books, books
6. Sunday comics
7. Hometown newspaper or favorite magazines – I was drooling over Martin’s science magazine and a Business Week that was a month or two old just because they were in English.  Just reading a cereal box in the morning is a challenge when you aren’t fluent.  Throw a few things to read in the mail or give gift subscriptions, which have varying international shipping rates.  (You’ll have to hunt if you really want a good deal.)
8. Pictures from back in the day
9. Frames for those pictures in #8

Hope that helps!  Now you just need to set the date when you go visit.

Okay all you lovely expats and former expats.  Help us out.  What did Katie and I forget?

Our home for the summer is called an Earthship.  It’s a type of home that is passive solar, made of recycled and natural materials, and tends to be off-the-grid.  A man named Mike Reynolds began developing the Earthship idea in the 1970s.  Since then, the idea has been taking off around the world.

Now for me, the idea of saying “I live in an Earthship” sounds kind of freaky.  It reminds me of something like Y2K all over again.  So Martin and I have adopted an entirely different name for our earth-loving home this summer:  The Tire House.  I’m sure you can see why…

As you can see from our front door, the house is made of gobs of old tires – some that are visible like in this retaining wall, and most that are not.  To keep things simple, I’m going to grit my teeth and try to refer to this house as “the Earthship” throughout this entire tour.  But if you hear me talking about living in a Tire House down the road, don’t think we’ve upped and moved yet again.

Tires make a wonderfully clever building tool because there’s not much else people can do with worn tires.  Around 70% of the scrap tires created each year can be salvaged by the scrap tire industry.  But the other 30% (or roughly 75 million tires in the US alone) wind up in our landfills.  That 30% are perfect for homes like this one, and I couldn’t even guess how many hundreds of tires went into this house.  Some architects argue that tires actually create a more solid construction method than traditional techniques in the United States.  The house is so solid that we can’t even pick up a wireless signal from one room to the next.

The retaining walls and three exterior walls (the back and two side walls) of the house are all made of stacks of tires filled with dirt.  Having our house built into a hill makes a wonderful year-round insulator, too.  Some people who build tire houses can actually be paid to take the tires off the hands of others.  How many folks can say that about their building materials?

Some people find these Earthships so fascinating that one woman even charges $15 for a tour of her home.  As you can guess from this picture of the front of the house, though, you can pretty much see everything in the place thanks to all the windows.  The entire south side of the house is lined with enormous windows to let in the sun all winter long.  It’s a heating bill miracle.

If you’re like me, the next thing you immediately think is, “Ha!  What about getting all that sun heating your house in the summer, smarty?”  Well these guys didn’t miss a beat on that one.  After all, Mike Reynolds, the inventor of earthships lives in New Mexico.  Look at the pitch of the roof above the windows.  It’s specially designed to work with the angle of the sun.  The sun is much lower in the winter.  In the summer when the sun is high in the sky, the long, angled roof acts as a shade to limit midday sun.

Each room of the house is lined up like one domino after another so they all get that southern exposure. It’s a little weird having no bedroom door in this particular Earthship.  The bedroom does have a canvas curtain to keep the heat out and offer a little privacy when someone on horseback goes riding by at sunrise.  Put your bed up next to those tire walls and it’s wonderfully cool, almost as if you had a little air conditioner blowing back there.

The interior walls are also made of tires filled with dirt. They’re then covered in concrete and stucco.  These walls always feel nice and cool in the summer.  In the winter, they absorb the heat from the sun, making your nights a little cozier.  Isn’t the trim on this wall a hoot?

Are you ever faced with those love/hate aspects of a home?  This next Earthship feature would be mine.  Along the windows in the front of the house, we have this beautiful opportunity for planting an indoor garden. (Remember how these houses are all about sustainability?  It’s even down to the food!)  Of course it also means we have a few more bugs in the house.  Earthships don’t exactly fit into suburbs.  I think the tire retaining wall might crush the whole “welcome to the neighborhood” deal, don’t you?  Earthships tend to be in the country like ours… which means a higher probability of big ol’ beetles and spiders popping out of your indoor garden and running across the house while you scream.

The wall of this garden bed (and the wall of the front door you saw in the first picture) is made of stones gathered from around the county.  The wood framing is supposedly dead wood that had been killed by a local disease, making it unusable in traditional construction.

The kitchen is primarily a collection of used odds and ends. Some of the appliances don’t really work that well.  One of the huge dilemmas of Earthships is incorporating modern conveniences like dishwashers into the homes.  Older, used appliances tend to suck up a lot more energy than new ones, but buying new requires the creation of new stuff that requires more of earth’s resources.  There’s no clear-cut answer.

Many Earthships use water repurposing systems for gray and black water (gray typically comes from the kitchen, and black from the bathroom).  They collect water from the roof.  And utilities are self-generated by the home (with the occasional exception of a natural gas tank).

So the name Earthship might sound a little weird, and telling people we live in a house made of tires definitely causes a few raised eyebrows.  But with all the push for green-home-this and green-life-that, I’d like to say that just as much as it’s important to live a green life for your health, it’s also important to make choices that are greener for the entire earth.  Besides, living in a tire house is pretty fun.  Just think of all the miles this place has covered.

If you’d like to see more unique home tours on Making This Home, check out this 350 square foot home in Prague or our 36 square foot kitchen in our usual home of Berlin.

Our homes don’t need to be places that burden us.  If we love our homes and the people that we are when we call these places home, they are a joy.

So when Martin and I were out hiking over the weekend and stopped to chat with some other hikers, our conversation naturally flowed to the question, “Where are you from?”  Martin and I have a bank of stored answers.  We do not have to pause, despite the fact that our answers vary so often.  We’re not lying when we answer.  It’s just not easy to explain that in the last year, we’ve called three drastically different places home (here, here, and now here).

It isn’t just my surroundings that keep changing, though.  I imagine your life, your community, and certainly our economy are frequently changing, too.  How can we create a simpler life and appreciate our world when it’s always changing?  One way or another, we must learn to lower the standards we create for ourselves.  Life can be fabulous without everything being perfect.

Stop apologizing for who you are.  I always hear people apologizing for everything in the United States.  We don’t even realize we’re doing it.  We apologize that the dinners we make aren’t perfect; we apologize for dirt and clutter in our houses.  Then we apologize for walking past someone in the store when they’re looking at the merchandise.  Sometimes we’ll apologize just for walking by or not being completely perfect around other people.  All of our apologies draw attention to our faults when the truth is that most people don’t even notice our imperfections until we bring them up.

Try for a day or two to notice every time you say you’re sorry.  I started noticing how much I had the habit of apologizing when I would shop in Germany.  Every time I said excuse me or apologized in German for things like paying with a card instead of cash, people started speaking English to me.  It was a dead giveaway as to how often I apologized when truly, I didn’t do anything at all.  I  know that some apologies are important.  But you shouldn’t apologize for who you are or the minor imperfections you might have.  

The same goes for our homes.  I would love to stay in one place for more than six months.  But since I can’t change the situation that I need to be in, and if you can’t either, the least we can do is enjoy what we have.  Finding pleasure in simple moments (such as with this photo-a-day project) focuses your energy on the positive things you have in your life.  We have the power to create so much in our lives.  Hobbies and simple pleasures you enjoy (like making homemade chocolate chip cookies perhaps) can establish that joy.  Focusing on our faults cannot.

How have you come to recognize your imperfections?

(Image from bhg)

You know, we’d probably be unpacked and ready to give you a tour of this Tire House if I weren’t spending so much time hanging out with the neighbors.

In fact, we’re spending the American holiday weekend back in the United States by getting to know all the neighbors – some of them panic and run away when we stop to say hello (like this guy).  Others stay for a bite to eat (pizza and green weeds both abound!).

How did you celebrate – or if you’re in the US, how are you still celebrating – the weekend?  Hope it included everything you wanted to do and enjoy.  Those are the best weekends, no matter how long.  Wouldn’t you agree?  We’ll see you tomorrow.  Yes, that includes you little deer friend.