Michael’s Two Cents

I made some good progress on the tiny free house this weekend (actually Friday and Saturday). It’s been a real struggle making time to go up to the farm to work on it. Here are some photos of Katie helping out her dad
More more about this project see the Tiny Free House Blog.
I [...]

You might have read in the New York Times article that Julia and I long to move back to Mendocino County, downsize, and simplify. Here’s what Steven Kurutz wrote in the article.
“Instead, he wants to be a living example encouraging people to downsize, even if it’s only to a moderately smaller home. The Janzens plan [...]

I should probably unsubscribe from the monthly house value report from Zillow.com, it’s just so depressing. As you can see I’m down another $5000 and almost back to where I started 5 years ago. Now maybe you’ll understand why I’m building a free house. Now imagine the people that bought at the top. Now imagine [...]

This is a pretty cool day for me; I’ve never been in the New York Times before. A few months ago I started a little project, actually a tiny free house project, in an attempt to better understand my own values. I had also been admiring the people behind the tiny house movement for the [...]

Right after I started my tiny house project, The Tiny Free House, a reporter named Steven Kurutz contacted me curious about the project. In the following weeks the Times sent out a couple photographers and Steven interviewed me by phone a couple of times.
Steven just called me to check some facts about the story and [...]

Today I took down emptum.com. It was a free classified site I coded in a weekend a couple years ago. I simply realized that it makes sence to focus om the things that interest me and dump the baggage. I also noticed that most of the traffic was spam from India, Africa, Asia. and Eastern [...]