As the tiny-house movement continues to grow people are getting more and more creative with the designs of their homes.
Today we've traveled to Edmonton in Alberta to meet a firefighter who has really taken the design of his tiny house to the next level
Hey Steve, hey, how's it going mate? -Good man, how are you? - Good, thank you
Pleasure to meet you you bet and awesome to see this great-looking tiny house here Thanks
It looks
especially interesting being here in this very
Urban sitting doesn't yeah for sure can you tell me a little bit about how you actually came to be here in this spot?
I own this house, I own this property and I-, I guess originally I started seeing tiny houses on the internet, and I thought oh
man, that's pretty cool and
Before I started building I picked a spot where I knew I wanted it to be so I designed it to fit here exactly so
Yeah, yeah, I actually like to say that this is an airship inspired tiny house
I just think it's such a smart design their ship design
So I wanted to try and incorporate as many of those principles in this and it was a couple years ago
I think was 2014
I took a year off work
and I traveled for that whole year and in that year I lived in a
camper van that I ended up driving all the way down to Panama and
When I was traveling I did a lot of volunteer on different tiny house bills airship builds different community building projects
And I really liked the vibe of that of getting a whole bunch of people together all
working together for a common goal
And so I wanted to try and somehow incorporate that vibe into this build and I worked with Ben Garrett out in
Vancouver who helped me organize a weekend workshop where a bunch people came and
We had about 20 people working on this project over a four-day weekend
And I really wanted to get that energy into this house
And so what's the relationship between the house and the tiny house why did you decide to move out of your home and into a?
Tiny house for me. It was
how the economics of it makes sense to me
So I rent the big house out and the tenants pay the mortgage so by me staying in the small house in the backyard
I'm living a mortgage free lifestyle right now immediately well
I'm still collecting equity in that house so that makes sense to me
And that's a good situation to be in so how large is this tiny house actually?
So the footprint of it is 10 by 17 and my interior square footage is 140 square feet
So it's a pretty small tiny house
But I think it feels bigger than it is and when you were designing this tiny house. What did you have in mind?
What did you want to accomplish in this space?
I knew it had to fit here
so it could only be this big and I wanted to make it as small as possible that I still felt comfortable in it and
I actually thought I was making it too small and I was designing it well not too small
But I thought this is this is as small as it could be and I could still get everything that I need to be comfortable
But now having lived here for a year. I actually there's stuff in here
I don't need and I found that I don't I have more than enough room here and for one person for me
I'm completely comfortable in this space. Are you connected to the grid here?
I wanted it to have options with it so it's a bit of a hybrid where I'm
set up to be off grid but currently I'm
Taking all the services off the house that I pay for so it's grid tied right now
But my idea is that in the future. I have like a nice little cabin
That's transportable that I can move to a some land that I haven't purchased yet and can be off-grid well
I'd love to have a look inside and say what you've done sure let's take a look come on
This is a
Seriously cool tiny house man. Good job on the design in this one nice
Yeah, the floor is so unusual can you tell me about what you've done here?
Yeah, sure
So it's actually a two inch thick
Brick with a dark color and the idea behind it was to get some thermal mats in the tiny house
So this brick is just like laid on the floor interlocking like a puzzle
So it can come out if and when I want to move the tiny house and the idea was that I could get some
Passive solar gain and some heat gain from this thermal mass so it was a bit of a design principle
that was an experiment that I wanted to try and in this design and
Has it worked some things work better in theory than in reality?
and this is one of them after being here for a bit of all four seasons in this full-time so one year and
Going through a winter it actually just was a cold floor and hard to keep clean
so I'm actually think I'm gonna move that out and put some nice hardwood in but it was an experiment that I tried and
Didn't quite work out not everything does
But yeah awesome that you tried it because it was actually a really good idea and in theory I can
Totally see why you would have thought that would have worked yeah here in Edmonton
It does get really cold so heating is a huge priority in this house right yeah
Definitely actually I was super cozy in here even minus 40 like in the coldest weather
So heating wasn't my main issue. I have three sources of heat here
I have a propane furnace heater, and I have an electric patio heater, and I also have a wood stove
So I have sort of three options and with the three I'm pretty covered so yeah, definitely nice to have all of those off
Yeah, yeah for sure so right now. We are in your living room. Yeah. This is my living room slash bedroom at the moment
It's in living room mode
but
This is my bed that acts like a couch when I'm not sleeping on it
The whole thing's on wheels so it just slides out into this whole area and when I'm not in ready to sleep
We just put it in it's like coaching
You got more space and that really is a huge
Benefit as well because this whole house does feel really spacious having all of this head height here
Yeah, I think it being like really tall like that
helps make it feel bigger like almost everybody that steps in immediately says how it feels bigger than it actually is and
I think that a big part of that is not having the loft in it
And it looks like you've got a lot of storage here
I see lots of baskets up there and additional storage underneath the bit as well. Yeah, so if you move the mattress
It's like a coffin and it opens up and there's storage under there, and I've also got a couple of baskets
Down here and a coffee table that pulls out like this, and then the whole bed
just kind of rolls on to it and the baskets I decided to put them up high and out of the way and
When the bed is pulled out, and I'm getting ready in the morning
I'm at like just the right height to kind of get in and out of them and that's sort of my closet really what else
Do I have for kind of hidden storage? I have a little shoe space here
You know that's not a little shoe space that's a lot of shoes
Yeah I guess so that that was kind of an opportunity that just presented itself when I was building the place
Underneath the kitchen as well. I have water tank storage so if and when I go off grid
That's where that's hidden away is underneath there, and I'll have some services under there as well
Can we take a look in the kitchen yeah you bet let's pop up here
It's actually a real luxury to be able to dedicate so much of the kitchen storage space to the plants isn't it yeah?
the idea was that I would grow herbs and things that I would use in the kitchen but
In reality due to lack of watering and my lack of a green thumb that all kind of died, so yeah
I said I still just have
Green stuff there because I like the look and feel of green stuff in the house
It definitely brings life into this yeah, that's what I think yeah. Yeah, I like that yeah, and so what about the kitchen?
What are you heaven here pretty basic stuff I cook off propane and that's here
I do actually have
Like a microwave and a toaster oven and then they're plugged in right there through the floor
And they have their own power in the back
and
It's my little mini fridge just a bar size fridge
but for one guy and being small it keeps me clean and organized and I
actually prefer a smaller fridge like the bigger fridges
They end up just being full of expired condiments, so this keeps me keeps me honest
I like it, and then you've got a larger storage space which is here behind the shallow storage
Yeah
So I have a small closet here and some shelves and stuff so I have some files and a few
Hanging up shirts that I keep here uniforms from work as well very important
I've got to keep those pressed and clean right so you're a firefighter aren't you I am yeah, that's main gig
Yeah was there any relationship between your job, and why you decided to live in a tiny house a little bit, yeah
I've traveled my whole life
And I've always lived out of a backpack and enjoyed going places and doing that kind of thing
then I got this awesome job that happened to be here in the City of Edmonton and
It kind of rooted me here a bit, right
But I wanted to keep that minimalistic lifestyle going
So I needed to find some way to make the two things work together and when I thought of a tiny house that made it
Fit for me great because I have to spend so much time in the city here for my work
but I also get a lot of time off and I can still travel and now I have the
Finances and I'm able to do it
But I needed it to work in this location so that's how those two things kind of fit together
this is actually a really cool opportunity for me to ask when you are designing a tiny house from the perspective of a
Firefighter mm-hmm is there anything that you've done in this home to make your home more safe
Yeah, so I that obviously is a concern
And I think some people are building tiny houses and don't have a good understanding of fire safety
so this has been built to the spec of a regular home building code, and I have
egress windows all over the place
I have fire extinguisher yeah
And I also have a smoke detector and a co2 detector and make sure that those are there in there
so I'm
Covered on all the same things that there would be in a normal sized house just on a smaller one and then behind you here
Is the bathroom yeah, that is a very?
unusual looking toilet yeah, so that's
Actually, it's called an incinolet. It's an incinerating toilet, so it basically burns your poop
It works like a self-cleaning oven you go into a small filter it drops into a chamber power vents
It's the outside and just takes care of it that way and it's clean. It's quiet
It doesn't stink it works pretty good
And what was your thinking behind choosing that particular unit yeah a lot of tiny houses choose to go with a composting toilet
Which is actually a lot cheaper? It was a pretty expensive unit and I just found with less open-minded people
There's a bit of a stigma with using composting toilets, so what wasn't even so much about me
But I'm already living in a shed in my back yard
I thought okay if I can have a good answer to how I'm managing my waste that that's gonna
Do good for me. You know you just didn't want to get any weirder. Yeah, exactly, I think I'm the weird envelope as it is
And then a great sized shower there as well
Yeah, it's it's like a full-sized stand-up shower and are you hitting your water here with propane yeah?
My water is on demand propane heater, and actually I found I had a different propane heater at first
I found it really finicky, and it didn't quite. It. Just didn't work that well, so I got a much more higher-end expensive
Propane on-demand hot-water heater, which was about five times the price worth every penny it works amazing
It is so much better
And it's made my life so much easier
So another sort of learning thing that I went through so you've been living in this space now for about a year
How's everything working out for you uh?
yeah, it's been pretty good like I said, I mean the financials of it has just been awesome and
Can I ask about the cost of this design?
What did this space actually cost to build I made an arrangement to work with a professional builder where I?
Would then be subcontracted back to work on this project so I had a really heavy hand in it
But I had a lot of help and the arrangement I made was for
$30,000 was the arrangement I made
but then on there was expenses on top of that so I provided the trailer the windows the doors and extra labor and
Finishing things when I came back to Edmonton and all said and done
Into it I'm about 50 grand. That's actually a really good price point for this level of finish in a home isn't it yeah?
I think at that price point it's kind of at
The high end of what makes sense for me to get my money back from the rental of the house
So if I were to live in this for about four years or so it's basically free for me absolutely well Steve
I think you've done a really good job with the design of this home. You've definitely added a lot of really clever features
Thank you so much for showing me this place. Yeah. Thanks for coming take a look appreciate it
This is a very cleverly designed tiny house filled with creative space-saving solutions like Steve
I'm also a really big fan of Earthship design and part of Earthship designer's innovation not being afraid to try something different
Steve has attempted things in this tiny house that I have never seen tried before things like this stone floor for passive sole again and
To that end I have a huge amount of respect for what he's accomplished here