Off The Grid with Les Stroud
Les Stroud, a.k.a Survivor Man, produced this documentary several years ago that records his personal adventure into setting up an off-the-grid homestead in Canada.
The property he buys is 150 acres and has some old farm buildings, one of which he trys to convert into a small 20′ by 20′ cabin before winter. He also sets up a tent cabin that he and his family use as a temporary shelter and also has some help building a small prefab cabin.
It seems that the main lesson learned from this experience is that proper planning and good timing can make a project like this much easier. Although I suspect there was just no avoiding some of the challenges they endured.
All of the segments are currently on YouTube but you can also buy the DVD form his website. Here’s the first part.
Extreme Tiny House Boat Living
This tiny house is located on Powell Lake in coastal British Columbia. It’s just 400 square feet (20′x20′) and sits on a floating platform made up of giant logs.
Twelve Cubed
Here’s a great little 12x12x12 cube tiny house from British Columbia, Canada. The creator has packed a lot of function and sophistication into this tiny space and is now offering to build tiny houses just like it for clients.
High School Students Design/Build Project
This is a great story about a class of high school students in Canada designing and building tiny houses. Each student is coming up with a design. Three houses will be built. In the end two will be dismantled and recycled into future projects and one will be sold to raise money for the school. I’m certain this will be just the first of a series of articles on this wonderful school project.
These Bunkies Avoid Building Permits
I always like to hear about folks finding creative ways of solving housing needs. It’s not the beating the system part that interests me, although too often it seems like that is a requirement, which is really sad. Shouldn’t building codes be designed to protect folks… not limit or exclude folks? This article on Tiny House Blog describes one such work-around situation at Lake Ontario, Canada.
French Cube is coming to North America
This is a great little vacation rental concept out of France that will soon be available in the US and Canada. It’s a self contained tiny house that can be transported to it’s final site in one piece and setup with just a little effort.
PreForm Prefab
This is a 500 square foot modern prefab home built by PreForm in Canada. The builder takes extra care to use reclaimed, recycled, and FSC lumber to keep the homes green.
aerieLOFT – A Prefab Sanctuary
This tiny house has been all over the green blogs this week. The aerieLOFT is a little transparent prefab tiny house that measures 10′ by 11′ and is 17′ tall. They describe it as a fancy tent that will cost about $20,000 in kit form. They will also be making plans available for those who want to built it but don’t want to pay the kit price. You can also read about it on TreeHugger, RowdyKittens, and Shedworking.
Canadian Bunkies
These are some great little houses that can be built from a kit or plans from a company in Canada called Rangercabins. They are authentic square log timber framed buildings that come in four standard sizes and accomodate a lot of design flexibility so you can tailor the cabin to fit your needs. For more read the article at Tiny House Blog.
