The Sunday Read

Tiny home plans, Burning Man Festival builds it's own off-grid structure and more

Michael Bartz received a major grant to write and host a podcast about his tiny home experience.

This guy just got a lot of money to podcast his tiny home experience

“Overwhelmed.”

That’s what Lethbridge actor, environmentalist and would-be podcast adventurer Michael Bartz told the Lethbridge Herald after discovering he’d won a $10,000 grant to put together a six-part podcast about the construction of his off-grid, 200 square foot tiny home, along with conversations with people on mitigating the climate crisis.

When he found out he’d won the grant, Bartz told the paper that he broke down crying.

Bartz, who was one of hundreds of applicants for the grant from B.C. and Alberta, and only one of 16 to receive them, spent four years constructing his tiny home.

“I talk about building the tiny house on wheels and trying to live sustainably,” Bartz told the paper.

The In Over My Head podcast premieres this fall.

You like this tiny house? There’s a guide for that.

You want to build your own tiny home? Start here

So just how do you design, build, and get that tiny house just right to your satisfaction?

The web site Livingetc has some ideas on that.

Their guide walks you through everything from finding land for your tiny home to decluttering and preparing to live minimally.

The story includes such useful information as tiny home prices, floor plans, and more. It’s a big introduction to small, intimate places.

As a starting point I recommend it.

Burning Man Festival gains a new permanent building. A geodesic dome with a seed library was one proposal.

Burning Man Festival gets its own permanent building. It’s off-grid, of course

The top 10 designs for Fly Ranch, a permanent Burning Man Festival building, include such wild ideas as 15th Century fruit walls; a geodesic dome with a seed library; and a place with a solar chimney.

Proper thing.

Burning Man, after all, has been the festival where anything goes.

Dezeen has the full story on the wild designs, reporting that a jury selected the 10 finalists from 200 entries.

“Studios were invited to come up with designs that could sustainably offer shelter, produce energy, manage waste and water and provide food for the site.”

Those fruit walls? Dezeen says they are “a low-energy alternative to greenhouses that uses masonry to absorb heat over the day and release it at night. The rammed-earth walls could create a consistent microclimate in the desert, where temperatures plunge at night.”

The winning design came from Zhicheng Xu and Mengqi Moon and was titled Lodgers. Their proposal incorporated composting toilets, an education space made from reclaimed timber and thatch, and birdhouses and beehives, according to Dezeen’s story.