This article was originally published on WHerMoments
“Shorty” Robbins isn’t your average grandma. For one thing, her house isn’t filled with delicate china and plastic-covered couches. Actually, it has wheels! Robbins lives in a “tiny house” RV that looks straight out of the Victorian era, and she uses it to travel the country to pursue her preferred pastime: engaging in civil-war reenactments. Interestingly, though, her home doesn’t actually feel that tiny, and she also hasn’t totally given up modern conveniences. She just hides them well!
“Shorty” Robbins
First things first: how did Shorty get her unusual nickname? She told website Florida News Line, “My given name is Robin, and a family member gave me the nickname ‘Pigeon’ when I was young.
By the time I got to junior high school, some mean kids started calling me ‘Shorty’ since I wasn’t very tall. They intended it to be a tease, but I liked the name better than my previous nickname, so ‘Shorty’ stuck!”
Bitten by the reenactment bug
For nearly three decades Robbins has been a keen Civil-War reenactor. She revealed, “I was working at MOSH [the Museum of Science and History] in Jacksonville on its Maple Leaf exhibit. I met the divers from the expedition to salvage the ship and they got me into reenacting.
It was the summer of 1994, and I asked some questions about it; the next thing I knew I was in a hoop skirt and a corset and going to events!”
Shorty fully commits
When it comes to reenacting, Robbins has never been someone to do things by halves. She revealed, “Sometimes I do first-person reenactments, like as Mrs. Chadwick, who was the only female passenger onboard the Maple Leaf, or Lucy Wilson, from Lumpkin, Georgia.
I also do civilian reenactments; these represent the women who held it together when the men went out to fight.”
It’s often a family affair
“We research ahead of time and find out who the women are and why they are there,” continued Robbins. “We demonstrate things like sewing, cooking, and making bandages.
Generally, reenactors pick the thing that they’re good at: I did period games and cooking big, involved meals over the open fire. Sometimes I and my whole family will participate as reenactors in an event.”
No holding back
As you can tell, when Robbins and her family would show up for reenactments, she would go all out. It would take hours to painstakingly, meticulously construct the campsites they’d all stay in.
In fact, in 2017 she told the Homes section of TV show TODAY's website, “You’d set up your whole homestead: carpets, furniture, dishes, an outdoor kitchen. I even used to haul a brass bed with me in my big tent.”
The turning point
Naturally, this intense commitment to the hobby meant that it could sometimes be very tiring. In fact, it was one particularly exhausting reenactment that first led to Robbins thinking about the tiny-home movement.
You see, as she struggled to erect a series of tents in the middle of a torrential downpour, reenacting began to seem like more trouble than it was worth.
“I’m going to have to quit this hobby”
“I had set up five tents and carpeting everywhere,” explained Robbins. “The rain just kept coming and I put a big blue tarp over everything because it all was soaking wet.
I caved and said, ‘I can’t do this anymore, I’m going to have to quit this hobby.’” At her lowest point, though, Robbin’s daughter managed to save the day.
The lightbulb moment
As Robbins stared at the photo of a unique tiny house on her daughter’s phone, she began to get excited about the possibilities. She beamed, “It was cute, it was perfect, it was amazing and it’s on wheels.”
She began to realize that perhaps she didn’t need to constantly be building new living quarters at reenactments: she could bring a house to the campsites instead!
Making her custom design a reality
Robbins told Florida News Line, “I thought it was a great idea.”
Firstly, she teamed up with a trailer builder who helped her come up with a custom Recreational Vehicle design, and then she taught herself how to outfit her tiny house by “attending workshops and viewing YouTube videos.” Amazingly, this included learning how to install her own plumbing and structural panels.
The perfect name
In a video on the Tiny House, Giant Journey YouTube channel, Robbins reveals that she named the house “Nawaka” after the camp she attended as a girl to teach her “self-reliance and self-sufficiency.”
Initially, she’d only intended to construct the exterior of the house because “when we do re-enacting, it’s really the outside of our tents that matter.” But she had so much fun studying the period that the project simply kept growing!
Finding space for family heirlooms
Inside the 125-square-foot RV, Robbins sought creative solutions to maximize space and include a whole bunch of beloved heirlooms from her family’s history.
These items had huge sentimental value and were always going to be kept, but not everything from her old house survived the transition. She had to be ruthless in her downsizing, but it was something she was happy to do.
“Deciding what is important to you”
“When you decide to go tiny, you look around your big house and you decide what’s important to you and what are you going to take into it,” explained Robbins.
“I’ve inherited a lot of my grandparents’ furniture and I was looking at ways to utilize the furniture, to make it part of the tiny house.” In truth, you won’t believe what she has managed to fit into her small abode!
The piano-bed
“In the proper Victorian parlor, you always had a piano: that was a status symbol,” revealed Robbins. “It was usually small, and it would turn into a bed.”
So, Robbins did the only thing that made sense to her: she transformed her own piano, which she’d had for three decades, into a piano-bed! It now folds out into a full-size sleeping area, with a quilt homemade by her mother.
The dresser-stairs
With her piano-bed somehow fitting snugly into the tiny house, Robbins was able to turn her attention to another heirloom. She transformed a dresser owned by her grandparents into a staircase which leads up into the house’s attic!
She told TODAY, “I’ve been able to integrate family treasures and memories into my tiny house, and it’s so much more meaningful and worthwhile to me.”
The water pump
There is one aspect of the house which some take issue with, though, as it doesn’t seem to fit the Victorian theme: the water pump on the front porch. But these people should know better than to accuse Robbins of not knowing her stuff!
She revealed, “The water pump was the latest in modern technology.” In the late 1800s some New England houses did indeed have one.
Full of neat coincidences
Throughout the rest of the house, Robbins has used antique church windows and the flooring is from an old general store, its tongue-and-groove oak look lending the place a truly vintage feel.
She also fitted a potbelly stove in there, which she uses for making steaming-hot cups of tea on those long reenactment days! She smiled, “The whole house is full of neat coincidences.”
“This is home”
At the end of the 2017 interview with TODAY, Robbins revealed something big: her tiny home had become much more than something she simply brought to reenactments. She admitted, “After a point I started thinking, this is home. This is more home than home is.
This was just going to be a camping reenacting thing and a year into it, it became a lifestyle choice.”
Retiring to that tiny-house life
By the time Robbins spoke to Florida News Line two years later, the deed was done: she was living the tiny-home life.
She revealed, “I originally planned to just use it for attending the reenactments, but I loved it so much that two years ago I sold my home and downsized.” Now she’s enjoying her retirement driving from reenactment to reenactment with her pooches Tebow and Huck!
A reenactment celebrity
Being the woman who drives her own Victorian house to reenactments has had a fringe benefit for Robbins: she’s become a celebrity in those circles! She revealed, “Now at the reenactments, I give tours of my period-piece tiny house.
Sometimes I like to leave a couple of modern clues out for the children who tour my home to find, like the television remote.”
Hiding the modern flourishes
Now, we know what you’re asking: “Hey, did she say a television remote? That’s not very Victorian!” Well, yes, it’s not, but Robbins is living in the modern world and can therefore augment her tiny house with such conveniences!
Brilliantly, though, to maintain the illusion of the past, she’s found clever ways of hiding the more modern elements of the house.
Watching her painting
In the Tiny House, Giant Journey YouTube video, Robbins gives some insight into her secret modern touches. For instance, she points out a beautiful painting — featuring her putting laundry on the line with her granddaughter — which hangs on the wall.
She then lifts it up and reveals a flatscreen TV secreted behind it! She chuckles, “So, I lay in my piano, and I watch my painting!”
Clever little touches
When Robbins took the piano apart to transform it into a fold-out bed, she replaced the traditional keys with an electric keyboard. She smiles, “The beauty of that is I can turn it on and off at will.
So, it can play when I want it to, but when it’s kid-day here I turn it off and the kids come in and beat on it and nothing can happen!”
The kitchen
In the YouTube footage, Robbins continues her tour in her small kitchen. Once again, she admits, “They did not have kitchens back then, or if they did, they were separate from the house. That’s not real practical for me, but I do most of my big cooking outside.
However, I do have a good, usable little kitchen in here.” She then shows off her genuine 1903 ice box, which is totally authentic to the era.
Hiding the sink
“I have a sink,” she continues. “Generally — I have to say it again — they wouldn’t have had a sink in their house, and they certainly wouldn’t have had running water.”
Robbins was able to put a wooden cover over the sink, though, so it would be camouflaged to the casual observer. She chuckles, “When you’re a reenactor, you really get used to hiding the modern stuff!”
The housewarming gift
Pointing out an overhead oil lamp, Robbins confirms, “We do go off-grid for all of our reenactments.”
She adds, “We kind of joke that it’s the housewarming gift, because it actually does heat the house too!” In case you’re wondering how Robbins ever gets “on-grid,” though, enabling her to use her TV, ice box, and keyboard, the key is another item concealed under a nearby table.
The table which hides the key
“It’s a drop-leaf table, which is an antique, and it was true to the kind of tables they had back then,” explains Robbins.
She cut the table in half and bolted it to her tiny home wall, so that one of the drop leaves flips up and down. She reveals, “It’s [my] sewing, eating, working, everything table and then underneath it I have my solar panels.”
Solar power
That’s right: Robbins uses solar power to keep her tiny home electrified! In the YouTube clip, she explains, “I was really, really lucky. Humless, the solar people, actually gifted me my solar-power generator and I hide the generator itself right here.”.
At this point, she lifts the lid off what looks like a tin basin for keeping woodblocks, but it has a sizeable battery in it instead! Once again, modernity hidden in plain sight.
Florida + solar energy = constant power
“I can go three days off of a full charge on that,” continues Robbins. “And if I have [the] Sun — I live in Florida, I always have Sun — it can just go continuously. It’s awesome. I do have a wood-burning stove in here: I do not burn wood in it. It gets too hot!
A small space, we have maybe three cold days a year. I don’t need that kind of heat in here, but it goes with the house.”
Leaving the old life behind
Finally, in case you’ve been wondering how Robbins managed to pay for her jam-packed tiny house, she reveals in the video that she restores vintage sewing machines to sell on eBay. What a novel idea!
All in all, she doesn’t pine for her old lifestyle, saying, “I don’t miss having big spaces and big house payments or any of that at all!” Indeed, we certainly wouldn’t expect to see “Shorty” moving back into a standard home anytime soon.