SNOWBOARD PRO Built a Sublime OFF-GRID TINY HOME

Mike Basich is a professional snowboarder that decided that he wanted to build a home for himself up in the mountains on Donner Summit, not far from Lake Tahoe. The goal? To disconnect from the crazy pace of day to day life and align himself more with the rhythm of nature. He wanted to have a more tangible grasp of the necessities of life, not simply make them disappear with money. “We live in a society where it's so easy to have something and toss it when you run out… and I'm still doing that, you know, it's hard just to avoid it. But life balanced with nature, that's really what I'm after by living off the grid.” The result of this goal is this magnificent stone cabin that he built entirely by hand.

“Since I was a kid, I always wanted to live off the grid. Around when I was 33, I decided to tackle that idea. I found 40 acres up here on Donner Summit. I bought it with snow, I didn't know what the property looked like.” It was on this plot of raw land that he set to work building his off grid paradise. He started off living there in a Teepee, which gave him some protection from the elements, but also didn’t shield him too much from his surroundings. “Donner Summit's pretty harsh weather pattern so I got to know where the wind blew and how the snow built up here.” It allowed him to build an intimate relationship with the property, learning it’s strengths while deciding exactly what he wanted to build up. 

“80% of the property is granite, so I had a lot of rocks. I decided to build out of that... I'd never built out of rock before... I just made a floor plan based on my own measurements of my own golden ratio... Everything else kind of just came as I started building it, which was a really fun process and that's how I usually tackle a lot of things. Get enough to start and then let everything else kinda just naturally happen as you go. It tests your instincts a little bit, your trust, bravery, just going out and failing or succeeding.”

It definitely wasn’t an easy process. Being up in the snow and rock mixing cement was a particularly hard challenge for Mike. It ended up taking Mike over 5 years to build the cabin with its modest footprint of 225 square feet. While it might not seem like a lot of space for most people, it’s perfect for Mike. 

From the outside, the structure looks like it’s made out of solid stone, but the wall you see on the outside doesn’t actually reach all the way to the interior. Mike ended up using two layers of stone for the walls, with bubble wrap in between that he placed between. The walls are held together with rebar hooks.

The wood work is definitely one of the most eye catching aspects of Mike’s cabin. The door, for example, he hand milled the year he started construction on the cabin. It ended up taking a few years to dry out enough to install, so even though he started working on it early on, it’s only been in place for about three years.

Other examples of Mike’s fantastic woodwork include the cabinets in the kitchen, as well as the live edge countertop and a bench that stores all of his firewood. He ended up using sand blasted glass planes in the doors on his cabinets, and polished granite in soapstone surfaces that makes up part of his counter space leading up to the woodstove.

The woodstove is completely surrounded by granite which serves as thermal mass to regulate the temperature within the space. Whenever he lights a fire, the heat is stored in the dense rock which then radiates out slowly once the fire is out. Above the stove in the rockface is a woodfired oven that uses the stove’s heat to bake.

Beside the woodstove is an indoor shower that Mike is able to use when it isn’t being used as additional wood storage. Since it’s usually full of wood during the winter, Mike usually uses his outdoor shower as well as a wood fired bathtub.

For electricity, the entire cabin is wired with 12 volt sockets. Since it’s an offgrid system that gets its power from solar panels, keeping the electrical in DC ensures that there is minimal power loss through unneeded conversion through something like an inverter. While he does have a few inverters to run conventional wall sockets, the DC car-style plugs work great for most of his applications.

The south facing front wall of the cabin is almost entirely glass. This imitates the design of a lot of Earthships that are popular in desert regions. When the sun shines in on the south side of the house, it makes the whole space act like a giant greenhouse, capturing the sun’s energy in the form of heat, which passively warms the space during the way when the woodstove isn’t being used. With all the stonework on the inside of the house acting as thermal mass, the solar gain is retained long after the sun goes down. The windows are framed with angle iron, which Mike welded himself using a 3000w generator.

For his bedroom, Mike opted to build a loft. One of the benefits of doing this is that it’s usually the warmest space in the cabin. When the air gets warm, it rises and collects in the loft, meaning that while the main floor might get cool during the night, the loft retains the heat a little bit better.

“One thing I've learned living off the grid is you are so much more in tune with the weather. When the sun comes up, it's time to get up. When it goes down, time to go to bed... means less work, less investment. If I go to bed when the sun goes down I don't need to run my lights, meaning my battery bank, (and) my whole solar panel setup is down to 500 bucks… instead of 10 grand. That's kind of what this place is about being in tune with nature. It's a harsh environment up here, which I think, you know, life is not exactly designed to be easy and I hope everyone understands that in some form. That hardship can actually be a really fun and rewarding thing to feel.”

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