SEARSPORT, Maine — Erica Buswell and Scott Giroux live miles away from busy Route 1, in a serene 2-acre clearing in the woods that is dotted with garden plots and small wooden buildings.
It’s not fancy — the married couple share a 240-square-foot house, an outhouse with a composting toilet and an open-air outdoors shower that they use from April to October. Their water comes from a spring, and solar panels on their tiny house provide just enough electricity to run a refrigerator, lights, their coffee grinder and a laptop computer.
But it is home, and it is exactly the way they want to live.
“We joke, but it’s true, that we have a very comfortable second world lifestyle,” Buswell, who works at the Maine Farmland Trust in Belfast, said recently while giving a tour of the homestead they call Co-Efficient Farm. “We just love it here, especially as it’s evolving.”
Giroux, a builder who runs Bog Hill Woodworking, his fine carpentry and green home construction business out of another building in the clearing, found the 37-acre property in 1997.
“He moved out here in a tent in May. It snowed the first night,” Buswell said. “He said, ‘I need a dwelling before winter.’”
That was the impetus for the first structure on the property, a house built with such miniature proportions because of financial necessity rather than as part of the growing tiny house movement. A few years later, when Giroux and Buswell met and fell in love, the small space was not a deterrent for her. They sleep in an upstairs loft, with the main downstairs room serving as kitchen, dining room and study. Buswell said that there’s enough room for their books and for them to make gourmet meals together, and a small, sunny addition that Giroux constructed years ago is home to the refrigerator and some window seat storage units.
“It’s like living in a boat,” she said, adding that they are planning to build a house about double the size of their current space on the property sometime in the future. “We’re not in any hurry. There’s nothing about our life that’s uncomfortable. And we do have the benefit of having all these outbuildings.”
Those include a sugarhouse, where they turn about 400 gallons of sap from their sugar bush into 10 gallons of maple syrup every spring, and turn apples and pears from their orchard into cider every fall. There also is Giroux’s woodshop, the spring house, a garden shed and another small house where his 19- and 23-year-old sons live.
Giroux is proud of having built all the buildings with his own two hands, and Buswell said that she is looking forward to planting more perennial vegetable crops and to make improvements that include a sauna and an outdoors hot tub.
“I’m having a hard time this summer, because I want to be here all the time,” she said.
Sometimes a house is just a place to sleep and eat. But Co-Efficient Farm is much more than that for Buswell and Giroux.
“It’s the physical manifestation of our working partnership and relationship,” she said. “When we got married, we vowed to work together to create a life of abundant food, abundant joy and abundant love. Our homestead is our vows in action, and a constant, wonderful reminder of what brought us together.”