WATERLOO, Iowa (AP) - Jared Hottle’s pioneering spirit is alive and well.
After the football team was dropped where he was coaching at University of Minnesota-Crookston, Hottle began polishing his resume and preparing for a job hunt. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It seemed like a good idea to return home and quarantine at his parents’ Waterloo farm.
At 29, he wasn’t enthused about living in his childhood bedroom. Looking around the farm, he thought a small, dilapidated red shed had potential. He imagined converting it into a very cool, very tiny house and living in it.
The “Red Shed Redemption” project was born.
“It was a little like being a pioneer. There were lots of horseflies and mosquitoes, and I had zero building experience. There wasn’t much to the shed, just a concrete floor, studs, lots of junk and 100 years of dirt,” Hottle told the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier.
“I’m a positive person, but there aren’t a lot of positives about being quarantined. I decided to look at it as learning some new skills and being constructive with my time. I figured I could do this. And I got to use power tools,” he said, smiling.
The project began in March and took about three months.
Now Hottle has all the small comforts of a tiny home, including a big, comfy lounge chair, a refrigerator and kitchen cabinet with a sink and running water, a shower big enough to turn around in and space for his desk and computer.
After cleaning out the shed, Hottle first tackled building a sleeping loft.
“I did some research online about how to build a loft. I used 2-by-6’s so it would be safe and sturdy and tested it to make sure it was solid. It’s 7 by 7 feet and fits a queen mattress.” A metal ladder was powder-coated to resemble wood and attached to the loft framework.
He also built a scale model from Popsicle sticks to help him visualize how to squeeze out every square inch of living space. A bargain hunter, Hottle stretched his budget by shopping for marked-down, scratched, dented, damaged and salvaged items.
The red shed’s new floor was constructed from pieces of an old gym floor, nailed on top of subflooring and insulation Hottle installed. He found a window in the family barn and cut out a hole in the side of the shed and installed it.
“Having natural light really helps. Everyone needs light, especially in a tiny space like this,” he said.
His dad helped him cut out a portion of the back wall and fit in a sliding glass door to the small deck Hottle built from new but warped boards he purchased at a big box store. The deck is big enough for a couple of chairs and has the best view on the property - “and it’s close to the firepit, so it’s a nice place to hang out. The boards warped, but not too bad, and I was able to get them straightened enough to hammer into place. They were a good price, and it looks nice. It’s expands the living space,” Hottle explained.
After more online research, he wired the shed for electricity. After admiring a roughhewn $400 lighting fixture on Etsy, Hottle built his own using an old barn beam, a router and lights and devised a rope-and-pulley system to hang it. He also made light pendants from Verve Kombucha bottles and inserting industrial-chic light bulbs.
Walls were insulated and drywalled, then painted. One wall is made from pallet boards painted in four colors for visual interest. The front door looks like real wood, but is actually steel painted with Zar stain using a wood-textured roller.
Hottle dug a trench and ran a water line to the shed. Now he has running water for his sink and to fill the six-gallon water heater tucked behind a cabinet door, which is also handy to the scratched-and-dented shower stall he built into a corner. Gray water from the sink and shower drains away from the shed. It was too costly to hook into the septic system, so Hottle still has “house privileges.”
His friend Matt Rafferty, a digital media specialist at Flight Spool in Iowa City, and Hottle had some fun videotaping a series of episodes featuring Hottle’s project for a YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrggB5R9atu9rowWpYlxh2A. The initial episode had 1.1 million viewers.
Now that he’s living in the red shed, Hottle said he’s enjoying his independence. The shed has “most of the comforts of home. It was a cool project to do, and I learned a lot. We’ll see how it goes when the weather starts getting cold.”
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