Indianapolis, Indiana

Saturday, May 11
A special outdoor “Popped-Up” Screening to celebrate next month’s Indianapolis Indy Film Fest

San Francisco, California

Wednesday, May 22
Outdoor Screening sponsored by the San Francisco Green Film Festival & SPUR Urban Center

Telluride, Colorado: Mountainfilm

May 24-27, 2013
(Featuring a special appearance of our Tiny House!)

Great Barrington, Massachusetts: Berkshire International Film Festival

Saturday, June 1, 11:45am
Sunday, June 2, 11:30am

Here are the upcoming screenings scheduled for the month of April, along with links to purchase tickets:

Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota:

Thursday, April 25, 7:30pm (click dates for more info and to purchase tickets)
Saturday, April 27, 4:10pm

Toronto, Canada:

Sunday, April 28, 9:15pm (click dates for more info and to purchase tickets)
Monday, April 29, 4:00pm
Sunday, May 5, 1:30pm

Boston, Massachusetts:

Sunday, April 28, 9:00pm at The Somerville Theatre (click for info and to purchase tickets)

We hope to see you there, and will be announcing other screenings in coming months soon! If you don’t live in any of these cities but know people who do, and who might be interested to see the film, feel free to share this link. A DIY, grassroots project through-and-through, we’re relying on word of mouth to let people know where and when they can see the film.

We are excited to announce that the worldwide premiere of “TINY: A Story About Living Small” will happen at SXSW in Austin, Texas this coming March 8-13, 2013.

Our screening times are as follows:

Saturday, March 9 at 5:00pm: The Rollins Theater at the Long Center for the Performing Arts

Monday, March 11 at 11:30am: The Alamo Village Theater

Wednesday, March 13 at 3:45pm: The Alamo Ritz Theater

For more information about screenings and tickets, visit our page the SXSW website here. And be sure to invite your friends!

If you’ve been following this project for a while, we’d like to take a moment to say thank you for your patience, encouragement, and excitement while this film was in production and post-production. We cannot wait to share the completed story with you.

And if you’re just visiting us for the first time, welcome! To learn more about the project, you might be interested in checking out some of our updates on making the film or our Step-by-step construction photo album on facebook.

For those of you in Austin or at SXSW 

Come to the screening! If you’ll be at SXSW or in Austin during the festival, don’t be shy! Come to a screening and stick around to say hello afterwards. If you don’t have a full festival pass, you can buy an individual ticket to one of our screenings 15 minutes ahead of time at the main SXSW box office. (We’re not sure what the turnout will be like, but it may be easier to buy a ticket to the screening on Monday 3/11 or Wednesday 3/13 if the premiere on 3/9 is sold out.)

Help us spread the word! Once the dates and times of screenings are announced, we’ll need help getting the word out and making sure that anyone who is interested in seeing the film knows exactly how they can do so. From the start, this has been a DIY endeavor, and we’ll be relying on word of mouth and grassroots excitement to help us get the film out there.

For those of you who pre-ordered a DVD or backed us on Kickstarter

Thank You!! We’ve updated our Release FAQ page with info about DVD pre-orders. And Kickstarter backers can read a personal update here.

For those of you unable to attend SXSW but looking forward to seeing the film

Premiering the film is just the first step towards releasing it to the wider world. Over the next few months, we’ll be showing the film at a host of other film festivals and venues.

We’ve added an “Upcoming Screenings” page to our website, and we’ll be announcing any upcoming events on our facebook page.

For those of you hoping to see the film in the privacy of your own homes on DVD, TV, or through an online download, stay tuned! We’re still working out the intricacies of distribution, but as soon as the film is available for personal consumption we’ll let you know.

If you haven’t already, the best way to make sure you don’t miss any local screenings of the film is to add yourself to our email list. We’ll be sending out an update once a month or so with a list of upcoming events and any other relevant information about how  you can see the film.

Last month, we were able to meet up with Derek “Deek” Diedricksen, tiny house blogger, author, architect and all-around “mad scientist.” We were in NYC working on post-production for the film and Deek was also in Brooklyn, to lead a Tumbleweed Tiny House Building Workshop.

We first met Deek last fall, when we interviewed him for the documentary and produced this short video on his micro sculpture-meets-shelter work. We launched our Kickstarter campaign for the film soon after, and Deek generously stepped up to offer two original sketches of any tiny house as a reward for new backers.

The first backer, Jim Wheeler, requested that Deek draw him a portrait of our very own tiny house in Colorado. Deek graciously complied and, based on a few photos that we sent to him, sent the sketch above. The next backer, Kendra Robinson, requested a portrait of her tiny dream home, which she hopes to one day build on a foundation up in the snowy mountains nearby:

Once again, HUGE thanks to Deek for his donations to our campaign, and to our Kickstarter backers for making this film possible!

For a taste of Deek’s current work, check out this Tiny House Shipping Container tour that Christopher shot and edited with Deek in Seattle last fall:

Below is a list of the various events where we’ll be speaking and/or showing bits and pieces of the film. If you are in the area for any of these events, we’d love for you to stop by and say hey!

From first grade classrooms to urban planning conferences to tiny house building workshops, we’re excited to hear from such diverse crowds. And, of course, stay tuned in the coming months for info on the official premier of the completed film! We’ll be posting updates here and also on the “TINY” facebook page.

Pierce Elementary School, Brookline, MA: Sept. 25

We’re back for our second year in a row to talk to the first and second grade students at Pierce Elementary School about the process of building a tiny house from scratch. After a tiny house slideshow and Q&A session, we’ll help the students of classroom 1H build their own classroom “quiet house” from cardboard boxes. Sure to be a fun time!

Crested Butte Film Festival: Sept. 27-29

At the Crested Butte Film Festival in Crested Butte, Colorado, we’ll be showing a short, 40-minute, Work-In-Progress version of the film, and participating in a few Q&A panels where we’ll talk about the process of making the documentary.

Annual Meeting of the Idaho Planning Association: October 11

We’re particularly excited to bring this film to the people who are most qualified to answer questions about building codes, and most equipped with the potential to update those codes to allow for more small-scale architecture in our cities and towns. At the Annual Meeting of the Idaho Planning Association in Boise, we’ll be screening a few excerpts from the film and participating in a Q&A panel on tiny houses, building small, and codes.

NYC Tumbleweed Tiny House Building Workshop: October 20-21

We’ll be guests at the NYC Tumbleweed Tiny House Building Workshop, led by our friend and fellow tiny house personality and video-blogger Derek Diedricksen. We’ll show a scene or two from the film and will answer questions about our own tiny house building experience.

Deek Diedricksen’s Tiny House Building Workshop Extravaganza: Nov 2-4

We’re always excited to join events that bring together so many other tiny house bloggers, builders, and how-to genuises. Judging by the line-up, Deek’s Tiny House Building Workshop in Stoughton, MA will be a fun one. We’ll share a scene or two from the film and maybe talk a bit about our DIY building and filmmaking experiences.

Do you live in a tiny house? Send us your portrait to be included in a documentary about the tiny house movement!

When this project first began, it was much smaller. Storytellers by trade, we thought we’d capture the process of building our own tiny house to make a short film. But, as we began to draw our plans and looked to the thriving online tiny house community for design inspiration and how-to help, we began to realize how far-reaching and incredible the tiny house movement really is. This is when we realized that we could use our own building story to tell a much larger story, of the thousands of people around the country who are finding satisfaction in living smaller and more simply.

Filming a portrait of John Wells at “The Field Lab.”

Over a year later, as we wrap up the editing process and get ready to release the film, we want to be sure that we can include as many other tiny housers as possible. We’ve already interviewed a handful of key characters (people like Tammy & Logan of RowdyKittens in Portland, and Deek Diedricksen of RelaxShacks in Massachusetts), but we know that the tiny house movement is a widespread phenomenon. We want our viewers to understand that there’s a huge demographic of people out there who are going small.

A portrait of Anne & Darren in “Protohaus.”

If you live in a tiny house (we don’t have a strict definition for “tiny house,” but are focusing mainly on homes that are less than 400 square feet), we would love to include you in our film.

To be included, please send us a photo portrait of you and your family with your tiny house.

Here are the specifics of what we’re looking for:

What the image should show: A clear view of your tiny house (front, side view, or interior—whichever angle you think is most interesting) and all of the people who live in the house, pets included!

Image size: In order for the image to show up clearly on the big screen, it needs to be a horizontal/landscape image, at least 1920 pixels wide. If you would like to send us a print photo, please make sure that it is at least 4×6 and we’ll scan it. (If you scan a photo yourself, please make sure that the setting is at 600dpi and that the file is saved as “Best” quality or as large as possible.) Feel free to email us at speakthunderfilms@gmail.com if you have questions or need help with the technical stuff.

Other info to include: Please also send us your names, the name of the town and state where the house is currently located, the number of people who live in your house, and the square footage of the house. If your house has a nickname, please include that too. And it’s not required, but if you’d like to tell us a bit about yourselves, how long you’ve been living small, and why you decided to downsize, we’d love to hear your stories!

How to send it to us: Please email images to us at submissions@speakthunder.com. (If the file is too large to email, we recommend sending it through this free website: wetransfer.com) You can also mail images to us at: 1320 Yellow Pine Ave, Boulder CO 80304

Permissions: When you send your photo, please include a line in the email or written on the back of the print, saying that you give us permission to use the image in our film and that we may also use it in any short video clips, blog posts and other materials related to the film.

Daniel Aragon in his 12-sided, 120-sq. ft “Ico”

To say thank you to all those who send images that we’re able to use in the film, we’ll send you a copy of our DVD once it has been released!

Huge thanks to the tiny house community for sharing your lives and stories with us,

Merete & Christopher

The table at the front end of our tiny house is a multi-purpose spot. Made for dining, writing, working, and those all-important moments of staring off into the distance with cups of tea. Placed right under the largest window in our house and framed by windows on either side, the view is wide and long; a gold-green valley and snow-capped Colorado peaks.

It was Christopher’s brilliant idea to use leftover reclaimed hardwood flooring to make the tabletop. We decided not to sand the hardwood down or refinish it, as we did with the floor, because we wanted to show the original stain and wear of the wood.

We used wood glue to attach the individual pieces of flooring to a piece of plywood, and then sanded the edges before screwing the tabletop to its frame and brushing the surface with polyurethane for longterm protection. We built the table directly into the corner, screwing the legs (oak 2×2 trim) into the wall and securing them to the floor with metal brackets.

As a writer, I quite like the idea of setting my notepad down on a tabletop filled with scratches and knicks from another time and place. I imagine all of the people who have walked across these pieces of flooring, and am reminded of how much history is contained in the reclaimed materials we’ve used in our house. A history that we can guess at, though we’ll never really know what kind of lives our hardwood flooring and barnwood walls have seen.

~ written by Merete Mueller, 5.23.12

Perhaps one my favorite things about our tiny house (other than falling asleep to the sound of rain on a steel roof) is that it is entirely off grid.

Christopher and I are both environmentalists of sorts, having spent chunks of our lives studying, researching, and telling stories about humans’ interactions with our natural resources and waste. Part of this tiny house experiment has always been about learning to lessen our own impact.

And there’s also the practical side of things: 40 miles from a major town, our tiny house doesn’t have access to a “grid” of any kind. No gas lines. No power lines. No water lines or sewage system. We’ve had to figure out our own solutions for each of these utilities.

Park County, Colorado gets an average of 246 sunny days each year, so solar power was an obvious choice for our electric needs.  Throughout the building stage, Christopher looked into rigging up a system of his own design, but when we heard about the SolMan portable solar generator, we decided it was be worth it to purchase a professional, pre-made solar unit than to build our own.

Our reasons for choosing the SolMan solar generator to power our home include:

• Portability: The unit is self-contained and on wheels, designed to be easily moved from one location to the next. This means that we can move it along with our house, should we ever choose a new spot on the land, or to move it to a new location. We’d just unscrew the two solar “wings” and lift the unit into the bed of a pick-up (which, we should warn you, requires the muscles of at least 6 grown men), and we’d be on our way! The unit’s portability also means that we can use it for other purposes—like powering our video equipment on a remote shoot. And—most importantly—that we can change the positioning of the unit to track the sun throughout the day to get maximum light exposure.

• Ease of use: When it came down to designing and rigging a solar system from scratch, we decided we’d rather leave it to the professionals. Not that we couldn’t have figured it out if we wanted to, but there’s no way we could have designed anything as cohesive and high-quality as the SolMan. We literally unpacked the unit the day it arrived, flipped the inverter to “On” and it immediately started charging. To power our house, which is wired to AC, we simply rolled the SolMan over to the outlet and…plugged it in. Tada! We had power. Seriously, it was as easy as that, which after a year of building a house and realizing that nothing is as simple as it seems, was quite refreshing.

• AC/DC Flexibility: Christopher wired the house himself for AC, so that we’d have the option of plugging the house into the grid if we ever move it to an urban area. The SolMan can easily be used as either AC or DC.

• Durability & Quality: The SolMan came equipped with 3,135 watt Kyocera panels, 3 gel cell deep-cycle batteries, and a Blue Sky Solar Boost charge controller. While I don’t actually understand what any of that means (which is exactly why we chose not to design the solar installation ourselves), what we do understand is that the unit is made from top-of-the-line materials. It can withstand temperatures of -70 F (important for us up in the mountains) and is weather resistant, so that we don’t have to worry about leaving it outside during Colorado thunderstorms or blizzards.

What exactly does the SolMan power?

Because of the long, cold winters in the Colorado mountains, we opted for a propane heater in our tiny house. The cooking stove is alcohol-burning (we chose not to purchase one with an oven, but propane and alcohol-fueled models with ovens for baking exist and are easy to come by). Until we decide to drill a well, there is no running water on the land. For the time being we are hauling our own water and heating it on the stove (if we do decide to install a water heater, propane-fueled models are available). So, our electricity needs are actually pretty low.

Our consistent electricity needs: 

• Lights: total of 265 watts
• Small (21″ x 20″ x 18″) high-efficiency electric fridge: 83 watts
• Charging two iPhones: 7 watts each
• Charging two MacBook Pro laptops: Merete’s 13″ laptop is 65 watts; Christopher’s 17″ laptop is 85 watts
• Small stereo hooked up to an iPhone or iPod: 50 watts

As you can see, the 1500 watt Classic SolMan system provides more than enough electricity for all of these needs (should we be running them all at once), and the 300 amp hours of battery—since it’s recommended that we only drain the batteries about halfway but no less than 60%, that leaves us with 150-200 usable amp hours—will keep us going overnight.

It also provides plenty of extra watts for our Every-So-Often electricity needs: 

- Hooking up power tools for small building or repair projects: About 300 watts for a circular saw, for example.
- Charging camera batteries or other electronics: About 60 watts to charge our Canon 7D, for example.

What doesn’t the SolMan power?

The SolMan is not well suited for any electric needs that involve heating things—including toaster ovens, hot plates, electric tea pots, electric-powered heaters or water heaters. According to the SolMan website, all of these activities would require a “solar system with a large battery bank, larger inverter, and 2000 to 3000 watts of PV panels on the roof, to make a reliable system that could handle a toaster oven, electric heater or water heater.” Again, because our house is heated with propane and our cooking stove is fueled with alcohol, this is not a problem for us. If we do install a water heater it will likely be propane-fueled, and we’re fine to grill our toast and heat our tea on the stovetop.

Visit the SolMan website for the technical specs of the unit.

So far, our experience with the SolMan has been extremely positive. At a little over 9,000 feet in elevation, the sun up here is bright and strong, and even stormy days quickly charge the unit’s batteries.

On one recent cloudy day, we arrived at the tiny house and uncovered the unit (we keep it wrapped in a tarp and chained up for security purposes—we’re still working out a better storage system when we’re away) around 5pm and the unit quickly charged to capacity before nightfall, serving all of our electric needs for the rest of the evening. Indeed, our only issue with the unit has been figuring out a way to keep it safe while we’re out of town. We’re eventually planning to build a small, simple shed that we can roll the unit into when we are gone for long periods of time.

In conclusion, I’d like to stop for just a moment to express my utter amazement that we, as human beings, can harness the energy of the sun.

Is anyone else out there as awed by this as I am? Seeing the SolMan work up close still feels a bit like watching a scene from Star Trek or Spaceship Earth. Huge gratitude to the folks at Sol-Solutions, and other solar companies far and wide, for doing this work to develop easy solutions for zero-emissions, renewable power. Huzzah!

~ Merete Mueller,  5.8.12

Back in March, when we interviewed Ann Holley and Darren Macca of Protohaus (pictured above), we asked them what advice they would give to someone just beginning to build their tiny house. Ann immediately had an answer, “It’s really important to have all of your utilities before you begin building,” she said, “so that you know the exact dimensions and what you’ll need to do to install them. It really helps to plan that out ahead of time.” Christopher and I looked at each other, the obvious truth of this statement dawning on us. Ohhhh. Yeah. That would have made our own construction process sooo much easier.

In case you’re new to this project, here’s some important background info:

1: Neither Christopher or I have any building experience whatsoever.

2: We did not use any plans in the building of this house. Christopher pretty much figured it out/ made it all up as he went along.

For us, this has been part of the adventure. But it has certainly come with its share of challenges. Such as that fateful summer day when we realized that all of the windows we’d bought were horizontal instead of vertical, and that yes, this matters when constructing a house.

This project has been about learning as we go, and part of that, inevitably, means making mistakes, having a sense of humor, and adjusting accordingly. Picking out a stove for our house has been no exception.

From the start, Christopher and I loved the idea of heating the tiny house with a tiny wood stove. One of the first tiny houses that we visited, near Telluride, Colorado, was arranged around an amazing reclaimed cast-iron stove called “The Magician,” that the owner had found in a junkyard. After scouring Craigslist and doing some research into new cast-iron wood stoves made for boats, we found an amazing company—full of friendly and helpful people—based out of the Northwest, called Shipmate.

Shipmate’s boat stoves are gorgeous, modeled after the antique stoves used on fishing vessels and ships at the turn of the century, crafted out of porcelain, iron, and steel. In addition to heating the house, we would also be able to cook on top of the unit, and even bake inside of it. (How cool is that?!) I had images of curling up and finally finishing my hardbacked copy of Moby Dick. Dreams of perfecting my recipe for wood-fired bread loaves. Perfect.

We also liked the idea of using wood as fuel, instead of propane. We have plenty of scrap wood from 10 months of building and using those remainders to heat our finished house seemed like a great way to dispose of the scraps. And since fracking and the politics of natural gas extraction is an issue that hits close to home in this region of Colorado, we liked the idea of avoiding propane as a fuel source.

Amazing! We high-fived and ordered our Shipmate stove. And then we started to do some research…

It turns out that because we didn’t plan to drill a huge hole in our ceiling to fit the stove pipe from the very beginning, drilling through our already-installed ceiling and corrugated roofing would be risky. On top of that, because our floor plan wasn’t designed with a wood-burning stove in mind, it would be hard to give it the amount of heat clearance that it needed without eating into our living space. In a larger house, a few inches wouldn’t have been a big deal, but in our tiny house, a few extra inches on either side meant having to jump over our couch to get from the door to the kitchen.

After much deliberation, we came to the conclusion that having a wood-burning stove in our tiny house would have been amazing, if we have planned for it correctly. Because we did not, we turned to another great tiny home heating option: the propane heating stoves made for boats by Dickinson Marine.

Dickinson’s propane stove is pretty cool piece of machinery—sleek and modern-looking, with the frames visible through a glass door (so I won’t have to completely give up my dreams of reading fireside), and a small fan that we can turn off and on, which will blows hot air through of the bottom of the unit onto the floor, keeping our feet toasty warm through those long mountain winters. We are super excited about this option, loved how easy it was to install, and will post more about it as we fire it up during the winter months up in the mountains.

When all is said and done, we have learned a lot during this process and whole-heartedly agree with Ann and Darren’s advice to research and purchase all of your utilities before beginning to build your tiny house. Now we have our Dickinson propane stove installed and ready to go, and our Shipmate wood stove sitting in its cardboard box in the garage. We are still deciding how we will use it—possibly in a future tiny building project, or as an outdoor fireplace, or something yet-to-be-dreamed.

What about you? How do you heat your tiny house, or how would you, in an ideal world?

~ Merete Mueller, 4/9/12

On April 28, to celebrate the completion of our tiny house, we hosted an open house at McGuckin Hardware in downtown Boulder, Colorado.

It was a gorgeous full day of excited visitors, and seeing everyone’s faces light up as they walked into the house instantly made our eleven months of labor worth it.

In addition to seeing our tiny house, visitors also had the chance to check out the Sol Man portable solar generator that will be powering our off-the-grid home.

More photos from the event are posted on our facebook page, here.