Tiny House Blog

The following is not a tiny house, but it is creative use of a small space so I thought I would let Stew share it with you.

By Stew MacInnes

I thought that your readers might like to see the photos of a cool little project that we just completed. This is a little 780sq ft building in downtown Ogden Utah. The property is located in a rather run down part of town, which the city is really trying to improve. The area has all the trappings associated with urban blight, rampant drug use, gangs, crime…you name it, it has it! In fact, when a family member and I purchased the property, the front window had six bullet holes, the planter had hypodermic needles in the bed, the front door had been kicked in and the furnace was destroyed after vandals went in and ripped out the copper coils. – Interesting side bar, I still had to fight the city council on numerous fronts regarding my plans to renovate the property, much like most tiny home owners find when dealing with city hall!

I purchased the property with the intent of using it as my office, which I did for most of this past summer. Then when Maximus Extreme Living Solutions started to take off, I decided to sell the building since I had moved my office into our production warehouse.

The property once housed a small chiropractic office; the good Doc practiced there up and into his 80’s. After the project was just about complete, the former owner’s daughter and son-in-law stopped by and asked if they could come in and view the renovation. They were very complimentary and said that their dad would have loved what we had done to the place!

I would like to give credit to the commercial contractor that I hired on this project, his name is Mike Smith of Stature construction and he was fantastic to work with. I also used a gentleman by the name of Mic Allen to do the custom steel work that you see on the front of the building (I designed images that were consistent with Ogden’s past and used a 1930’s font for the street address of 868, that you see on the fascia of the building). Lastly, I’d like to credit my business partner on this project, my mom Sue, she is great to work with!

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I just wanted to update you as to what is going on with our Shelter 2.0 project. We are working towards a goal of sending ten (a twenty foot container full) of our new version of the shelters to Haiti and have a mission group that is willing to ship them for us for only a thousand dollars as well as make sure they get through customs using their in country agents and get them where we would like them to go with their trucks once they get to Haiti.

The new version has metal on it and is we think more fitting to the needs of helping those who need shelter. After being in Haiti this summer it seemed like a crime to give families living under tarps if they were lucky a shelter that relied on the lifespan of another tarp so we designed it to have corrugated metal go around it. The corrugations are cut in the framing so that the metal goes on very easily.

This link will send you to our new website with pictures from our recent fundraiser. We also were in Atlanta recently setting up one of our shelters for a homeless shelter group called the Mad Housers.

Happy Holidays  Robert Bridges

If you are interested in purchasing one for yourself please email Robert at info@shelter20.com.

Guest post by Gayle Lobdell Opie

I’ve been investigating little houses and got to thinking about the trailer my father built in 1937. He was an electrician working for a contracting company in Rapid City, SD, in the 1930s. His company was taking on new construction jobs assigning him as foreman. Some of them were government jobs as the country prepared in case the problems in Europe overflowed to the US. One job was for a Naval installation in the middle of South Dakota, if you can believe that.

The problem was that these jobs were going to take my dad away from home and into the surrounding states of North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska for extended periods of time. Continue Reading »

Stumbled upon your blog a couple of days ago and I really fell in love with it! What a great collection of tiny houses!

It reminded me of one of the smallest houses I’ve seen in my life. It was back in 1992 during one of my trips through Switzerland when I saw this barrel with a man living in it. He lived there the whole summer and it contained a bed, a table, storage space and even a tiny kitchen. Unfortunately I was young and didn’t have a great camera, so the attachment is the only picture I have of it. The barrel is located in Madulain, in the Engadin in Switzerland. It’s next to the train station.

Daan Vogel www.daanvogel.nl