Month: July 2021

Besides putting most of my time in Solar Boat, I also helped my sister on some weekends with her ambitious project, building a tiny house on her own! With some support of my father, she was planning to build a house on wheels from scratch to move later on near Eindhoven. As a creative person, it is a dream come true to build a house that is exactly as how she sees best. I will update this single post with all tiny house updates of the year.

It is a lot of work and was estimated to be six months in production. Not everything has gone smoothly but this is the first time that either my sister or father have started such a big project and I am really proud of them, and very thankful that I could have part as well in building it.

A lot of progress was being made on the tiny house, at some point it even was ready to be moved to an outside location. I do notice that the amount of help I can be is shrinking as I’m getting more busy with Solar Boat.

It is really nice to see how my sister also wants this house to be more sustainable. She plans to have solar panels on the house and to have a compost separating toilet instead of the regular flush toilet. This way she could theoretically also live off-grid. Some of the building materials, such as the windows or the wooden planks of the floor, have been picked up for a pack of beers or even for free at Martplaats (marketplace).

It was very exciting to start with a project that I knew would take a whole year. The focus on the first weeks really was on getting to know the team and boats in general. All interaction that we had before was a Zoom speeddate of 2 minutes with each other team member. We were meeting at the ‘Ketelmeer’ to watch the 2020 team sail in their self-organized competition. Due to Covid the competition in Monaco was cancelled, and that is why they asked Twente, Sunflare and Clafis to race. It was a nice opportunity to see the upcoming team, but the boat was very for a long part of the race so that was unfortunate.

And of course it was also time to actually do some work! For us this meant becoming verhuis B.V. (meaning a moving company). Due to Covid, the Dreamhall had to be closed for a year for renovations to happen. This is the hall where all previous teams had their office and workplace, so this meant that a lot of stuff had to be moved to have an office at the Schiehallen. The Schiehallen was the place where we would temporarily have our office, and later even a workplace.

Here we could be found daily from 9AM till 5PM, talking about what would be our scope and our mission&vision. It was more orientation than actually building something, but that’s a good way to start a project. We had to sit in a certain way so that distance to each person could be kept which was a bit weird at first, but you get used to it.

Another thing that we did, was fun activities and expirements that were not necessarily related to building boats, this was to bring us closer as a team but also force you to think creatively.