Calgary Family Trades in Spacious Home for Tiny House

More extreme downsizing stories hitting the main stream media. Be sure to cast your vote in the survey at the bottom of the linked article.

“A Calgary family is building a tiny new abode on wheels that holds roughly 300 square feet of living space.

Kirsten Shaw and Michael Hunt plan to pull up stakes in Calgary in the spring and drive with one son through the United States for a year.”

via Calgary family trades in spacious home for tiny house – Calgary – CBC News.

Off-Grid Float Cabin: Retirement Tiny Dream Home in BC Wilderness

Great off-grid retirement story.

“Margy and Wayne Lutz were camping in Coastal British Columbia when they discovered their dream home: the float cabins of Powell Lake. They’re not houseboats, but “float cabins”, that is, they’re permanently anchored to shore.

The Lutz’s bought their retirement home in 2001 for 35,000 Canadian dollars (about $25,000 USD, at the time), what they considered worth the risk if their experiment in off-grid living didn’t workout.”

See more at Off-grid float cabin: retirement tiny dream home in BC wilderness – YouTube.

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.

Visit YouTube to see the rest…

High School Students Design/Build Project

ben-tiny-house-front-600x433This 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.

High School Students Design/Build Project

These Bunkies Avoid Building Permits

bunkies lake ontarioI 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.

These Bunkies Avoid Building Permits