It is easy, especially as an American, to have a default assumption that bigger is always better. Why settle for a V6, when you can get a v8? Why get the 2-pack at Shoprite, when you can get the 8-pack at Costco? If you don’t have the 20-foot-tall skeleton out front for Halloween, do you even decorate, bro? For me, living in a proverbial shoebox for over a decade certainly helped sell that narrative. For years I dreamed of the day I could do laundry in the comfort of my own apartment.

When Britt and I moved from our modest Brooklyn apartment into a freestanding house in the middle of the woods, my eyes were opened. Bigger meant more stuff that could go wrong. And indeed, much had gone wrong with our new purchase during many years of wear and tear with minimal upkeep under prior ownership. While lacking the palatial sprawling abundance of square footage that I always thought I wanted, the shoebox was a very manageable finite universe of maintenance. One or two people have no problem keeping a shoebox in good working order. A freestanding house is a different game with different set of variables.

For a freestanding house, the to-do list becomes a perpetual document of “what’s wrong with the place” prioritized from most to least severe. If one can answer “no” to the question “will the house potentially light on fire, fall over, or flood if I don’t fix this fast?”, it goes down the list to the next set of questions “will critters get in, will I potentially fall next time I trip on this?” and so on. Once you get down to the items that are responsive to “...not necessarily dangerous, but do I find this annoying?” You have reached the bottom of the list.

The original kitchen at our Catskills house fell somewhere in the middle of our to-do list. There were no obvious life safety issues, aside from potentially being crushed by one of the old cabinets falling off the wall. We discovered this when the time came to remove them and they relented easily with a firm tug. But otherwise, it functioned. The stovetop and oven worked. The fridge mostly worked. The sink leaked a little, but not enough to cause any real short-term concern. Based on all of this, we made the old kitchen work for about a year before its number came up on the list.

One aspect of the kitchen that was very much less than ideal, was the ventilation situation. Despite being located against a perimeter wall, The stove did not have a hood that vented externally. Further, the stove did not have any sort of hood at all. There was a hanging pot/pan rack over the stove. We didn’t ask. To make matters worse, the smoke detector is located at the top of a ~20 foot vaulted ceiling. We discovered this the first time that Britt tried cooking something on the range that generated a bit of smoke. The alarm went off, and Lola started running laps around the living room barking at the top of her lungs like she was possessed by a demon, while we frantically opened every door and window in the place. We didn’t yet own a ladder, so there was no other way to silence the alarm.

For the warmer months, keeping the windows open during dinner time would not be an issue. During colder times, it was a different story. At some point during April or May of 2020, I was standing in the checkout line at Wadler Brothers, our local hardware store. At this juncture in time, I was making almost daily runs here to pick up supplies for the renovation. I noticed on this particular day that the main display had recently been switched over to summer items, including some handsome barbecue grilling rigs adjacent to neatly stacked bags of charcoal, rows of tiki torches, deck chairs and other accouterments for enjoying a warm evening in the yard. A lightbulb went off in my head. When I got to the register, I panic-purchased the smallest model of Weber grill from the display along with a bag of charcoal and some lighter fluid.

Mighty things can come in small packages. I learned this when I met Britt. While I was tempted to get a massive stainless steel propane fueled outdoor range, I knew that this would be gross overkill for two people in our current situation (even though I admittedly eat an amount of food that two or three people would normally consume). Separately it was hard to justify something when we didn’t really have a permanent place to store something like that yet, given the torn-up state of our house at that time. I figured that once we actually had the place in ship shape, COVID subsided, and we could consider entertaining guests, we would consider an upsize.

The official name of this little kettle grill is the Weber “Smokey Joe”. We just call the mini Weber, or the “mini” for short. This mini Weber of ours was a game changer right out of the gates. For the next year and change, we used it multiple times per week. It is super portable, easy to setup/clean up, and goes a long way on a single bag of charcoal. Oftentimes, we would just plop it in the middle of the driveway in order to catch the evening light while we grilled. But most often we set it up on the back deck propped up on a pair of cinder blocks, super fancy-like. While documenting the house renovation, our petite, yet stalwart grill made it into the IG story on a regular basis. At a certain juncture a good friend of ours offered to launch a GoFundMe in order to raise money for us to purchase a “normal” grill. I’m not actually sure if this was prompted by the less than standard size of our bbq, or the fact that it was propped up on cinder blocks. Either way, it was a nice gesture, but in reality this thing is the perfect grill for two people who are living in a construction zone. To us there was no other grill that would have been more “normal” in that situation.

About a year after purchasing our mini Weber, we worked our way far enough down the to-list to start tearing out the old kitchen. For those several weeks where we were completely devoid of an indoor kitchen the mini proved to be the MVP. We eventually finished the kitchen, including an externally venting hood over the range. We also eventually invested in what is, by American standards, a more adequately sized outdoor propane bbq. Despite all of the foregoing, our favorite way to grill almost anything continues to be on the ultra basic little guy that I first spotted from the checkout line over three years ago. Regardless of the American trope, bigger does not always equal better. We love our mini and I suspect that it will continue to be our go-to for several years to come, as it currently shows no signs of wearing out anytime soon.

Growing up in the Rocky Mountains, Jake Breinholt has been an avid outdoorsman and photographer for as long as he can remember. He moved to New York for school in the early aughts. After about 15 years of the desk jockey grind, he and his wife made good on their years-long dream of owning a home in the Catskills. As he’s spent the past few years fixing up the place, he’s also getting back in touch with his roots through time in the great outdoors. Check out his Personal Blog + Photography.