If there’s a word for people who act like terriers, wallowing in tight spaces that would send others into fits, it probably hasn’t been invented. But it would describe Liz Gilson.
Born in France to American parents, Ms. Gilson spent much of her childhood living in a stately home in England where she begged to move her bedroom into a tiny attic storage room. Later, she was a sailor and shipyard worker in Australia.
“In my 20s, I lived on a 26-foot sailboat for five years and loved it. it was just the warmest, happiest moment,” she recalls.
“And then in my 30s,” he continued, “I rigged up a furniture truck and road tripped up the east coast of Australia. And a friend of mine painted flowers outside. And I ran away from a town in the deep north because I was a hippie. But that was great too.”
In her 40s, Ms. Gilson bought a Dodge Ram truck that a previous owner had upholstered in red velvet and set off on a two-month trip to visit family members in the United States. The journey took two years. The vehicle was her primary home. when she had to work at her job as a proofreader, she stopped at public libraries.
Now, after a period of marriage during which she owned houses that sat firmly on their foundations and required many steps to cross, she is divorced and back to her old ways. Six years ago, he bought a tiny house in North Carolina that was once a barber shop. He paid $70,000. The only storage was a single six inch wide drawer that was probably where the mustache combs were kept.
Ms Gilson, who is 70 and works as a customer service manager for companies guiding companies, vows she will never leave.
Her forever home is in Glencoe Mill Village, a 105-acre community in Burlington, NC, that developed around a cotton mill in the early 1880s. After the mill closed in 1954, the brick mill buildings and three dozen or so working houses were all around. The property attracted enough respect as a relic of North Carolina’s once formidable textile industry that it was listed in 1978 on the National Register of Historic Places, but it was almost completely abandoned and in disrepair.
In 1997, Preservation North Carolina, a non-profit corporation, purchased the village and put the houses up for sale on the condition that, in restoring them, the new owners had to preserve their historic character. The original wood paneling and windows had to be preserved or replicated, for example. And any additions—very necessary, since most houses lacked bathrooms and kitchens—had to be at the back, to maintain a uniform appearance from the street side.
When Ms. Gilson acquired the village barbershop, the previous owner had already installed an addition to the one-room building, bringing the total floor area to about 345 square feet. Using funds from a maintenance grant, Ms. Gilson refreshed the blue exterior paint and after a disappointing flirtation with fire engine red as a trim color, switched to tomato.
In the interior, he went nautical in the efficient arrangement of the furniture. At a thrift store, she found a light blue cabinet with four drawers, quintupling her available storage space. And then, drunk with possibility, she enrolled in an advanced woodworking class at a local technical school and built an 11-drawer cabinet to go under the window next to her desk.
“And each drawer is a different size,” he said. “And I made a note to myself not to do something with 11 different sized drawers again.”
Eighteen months ago, Mrs. Gilson realized a long-held dream of owning a hot tub. After ordering one, he thought he needed a deck or patio to sit on.
“I finally decided on a patio and watched all the YouTubes. And I bought all the materials and just built the cooler patio,” he said, using a saltier adjective.
The backyard also has a fireplace and can accommodate large parties. As described by Ms. Gilson, the community is relentlessly social. When a 12-year-old neighbor got his first role in a school play last year, nine families from the village came out to see him perform.
Recently, it hosted a “silent book group,” for which visitors were encouraged to bring a book of their choice and read it with others, but not talk about it.
“Another thing that totally blew me away about this house,” she said—besides her $367-a-month mortgage—is that it adjoined a river, which had been used to power the mill and is now another place for party in the community.
None of her pride seems to have diminished in six years of ownership. When a pair of workers stopped by in February to install a small quartz countertop in the kitchen, he took them on a tour.
“Oh, oh, it’s so good,” said the men. “You have everything you need.”
To which she replied: “Of course I do.”
Now she enjoys showing off to a wider circle of fans. “I mean, the last time I was in print was almost 40 years ago,” he said, “when I was lost at sea.”
Living Small is a bi-weekly column that explores what it takes to live a simpler, more sustainable or more compact life.
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