night

The courtyard (left) and the front of the house (below) at night. The transparency of the windows and doors (created by the lighting in the courtyard - including the hanging Foscarini Uto lamps - and in the interior) emphasizes the continuity of the roof structure between the inside and outside. Our next step is to furnish the courtyard, so we can take better advantage of the low humidity and moderate evening temperature of the dry season.

shop local

Yes, Small Business Saturday is a made-up holiday invented by a credit card company and promoted by a social media behemoth, but it's a good opportunity for us to praise the local businesses that helped us build tin box. Quality construction services are not a given in Miami - these businesses deserve credit for providing exceptional service. We recommend:

our first harvest

With the turkey brined, and slowly air drying under a coat of spices in our refrigerator, it's an opportune time to reflect on the slow progress of our garden. We harvested our first tomato last week, and have been using some of the herbs we've been growing, including basil, garlic, sage, rosemary, savory and dill. We have some cucumbers ripening on the vine, which might find their way into a salad tomorrow night, and we have a bumper crop of sweet potato vine that might end up as a Thanksgiving side dish.

view from the home office

Working at home, with breaks to plant more leafy greens and herbs in the garden, reveling in the beautiful "winter" weather.

the difference between community and adjacency

We celebrated our first Halloween at tin box last week. The house’s construction makes it easy to decorate: the ferromagnetic shell allowed us to hang spiders using magnets, the thin edges of the steel purlins were the perfect place to clip the blinking jack-o-lantern lights, and the steel exterior panels let us hang spooky plastic stuff with simple masking tape. The electrical outlet on the porch is perfectly placed to power the blinking lights, whose orange glow harmonizes well with the silver skin of the house. There was just one problem. Nobody showed up.