The Reveal – It's Not a Tiny House Podcast

Wyatt: [00:00:23] What we need our safe, secure places that someone can actually afford to live inside of.

Barna: [00:00:29] And this is a recurring theme of we're not going to let you do it.

Wyatt: [00:00:33] And you want a different lifestyle. It's not a tiny House podcast.

Wyatt: [00:00:37] Boom, the water ripples. That's what it's like when you hire a professional who knows more than your city staff. That's what it's fucking like. It's like you hired T-Rex, you hired T Rex. And that's and they're Jeff Goldblum. That's what that's shit feels like. He's like, well, you know what we did? We sat there, you and I sat there and did this. We were like two schoolchildren because because our consultant was on the other side of the table with, like, straight face. Yeah. And we were like, we we put a collar on T rex and and all they felt was the fucking boom, boom,

Barna: [00:01:14] Waters rippling on the desk,

Wyatt: [00:01:15] But we are immune. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The water in the glass ripples and the guys on the other side of the table were like, fuck. She rolls in and we're, we're literally sitting across the table fucking around. We are no longer adults. She's handling it. Children are in the room. Right. And she's like. What's the problem, right? She rolls in. What's the problem? "And, well uh." This is the city, I'm doing two different voices, City staff on one side was like, well, that land is zoned, you know, commercial,

Barna: [00:01:51] Industrial.

Wyatt: [00:01:51] Industrial.

Barna: [00:01:52] Industrial 2.

Wyatt: [00:01:52] Right.

Barna: [00:01:54] Light industrial.

Wyatt: [00:01:55] Heavy industrial.

Barna: [00:01:56] Oh, sorry. That one was light or heavy industrial. Right. So heavy industrial. This is where we have to start with stuff.

Wyatt: [00:02:03] She asks the question. T. Rex just goes, what's the land used for? I'm dealing with it. I love it. Like it. She goes, she goes, what's the land? And they say it's industrial two. She she goes, well, industrial to inside of this municipality can be used for anything. And it literally says fucking anything. And we've joked.

Barna: [00:02:23] I am laughing at the punch line I will try to deliver later.

Wyatt: [00:02:27] Yeah she's so but but inside of the inside of many industrial zonings. Right. Like you it's made so that you have a clean slate. You can be you can do whatever the hell you want. Heavy equipment is, all fair game. I said we would have had less of an issue doing what we were doing here than if we were doing a nuclear power plant. They had been like cool, use by right. Send it. Get it done. So she goes, well, you can do you can do anything in there. Like you can do anything except residential.

Barna: [00:02:55] And that's what we wanted to do.

Wyatt: [00:02:56] Right, because we wanted to live there. Well, so if you remember, we went in for our special use permit because inside of industrial 2 you can have a night watchman quarters, which is one small living pod per I-2 lot, so that you can have somebody who is maybe the guardian of said heavy equipment or valuable shit.

Barna: [00:03:18] And this is where it goes back to the letter of the law. Spirit of the law we were discussing earlier is that technically, under, I had two lots, but there were underlying lots that were ten. Right. So if we subdivide all of them right, they are all industrial they can all have a special use permit. And for a watchman's quarters, you're not watching anything because at that point it's like a tenth of an acre, if that. But that is a way to follow the rules.

Wyatt: [00:03:47] Right.

Barna: [00:03:48] But it was a special use permit,

Wyatt: [00:03:49] And the only way to actually accomplish that would be with a tiny house on those small of lots because you're set back, hahaha.

Barna: [00:03:55] That's what they were designed for anyway. But whatever.

Wyatt: [00:03:57] That's neither here nor there. But like, if you're like, well, what about fucking setbacks? If you're smarty pants on the other side of this there you have to have a small structure now because the lots of that small. Not what happened. Right. What you decided to do or what we were going to do was a lot like a vacation, which was basically you throw everything into the pot and boil it down. Right. You delete the internal lines of those of your adjoining lots. It's a lot like a vacation, like it goes on vacation. It fucking goes away from here. And now it's one parcel. Yeah. So you got one parcel across the street, somebody you must have done a special use permit because they have a night watchman, they go no to us and then t rex gets brought in.

Barna: [00:04:37] Yeah we get pissed off and I am like wait wait. I know somebody make a phone call, call Angela and she used to be the planning commissioner in Canyon City and she is a consulting business.

Wyatt: [00:04:55] Can't say enough good things about what she knows. Yeah. Fuck pay the pros. Like when it comes down to it,

Barna: [00:05:01] She's the expert. So, like, we're bringing in an expert because obviously what we say doesn't matter,

Wyatt: [00:05:07] Even though we like we'd read pretty good. We were getting our our feet were wet at this point, like we're in it now because we've already built a structure, if you remember, and now they're like, no, you can't do that. And it's like, fuck.

Barna: [00:05:19] We're reading the code for special use and what each zoning allows. Can we do can we change the zoning and what what does that entail what paperwork. I already handed in paperwork for a lot litigation like two years before this or a year before we actually did it. And then it was just kind of dropped for some reason. I don't know.

Wyatt: [00:05:37] And we were advised not to go through the rezoning process because it was more than likely not going to go through. Yeah, we were told that point blank, like, yeah, you could try that, but it's not probably a good idea.

Barna: [00:05:47] So this is all the things we're discussing. And then our expert.

Wyatt: [00:05:52] Yeah, T Rex.

Barna: [00:05:53] She goes

Wyatt: [00:05:53] That's what I'm calling her. She's so good. And she hungry.

Barna: [00:05:59] Yeah. She goes, OK what the hell do we need to do.

Wyatt: [00:06:04] Yeah.

Barna: [00:06:04] What can we do without changing zoning at all. So that's where my wheels start cranking. Right. OK, well hold on. The problem with an Airbnb because I have several Airbnb vacation rentals.

Wyatt: [00:06:20] Right.

Barna: [00:06:20] The problem with an Airbnb, the reason people can ban them is because you're doing commercial use.

Wyatt: [00:06:27] Because it's a business now.

Barna: [00:06:29] Inside a residence.

Wyatt: [00:06:31] Right. So it's kind of a sidestep of residents going to commercial use.

Barna: [00:06:36] Yeah. That's why you're doing. So, that's why the county does go after these people that do waves anyway, Fremont County did. They actually just went on Airbnb, found everybody in the area, started seeing them on letters like, hey, here's all the paperwork you have to fill out. Here's how your taxes are going up,

Wyatt: [00:06:52] Because now your hospitality rate.

Barna: [00:06:54] Now you are hospitality. Now that percentage of your land or that percentage of your building is commercial use.

Wyatt: [00:07:00] Right. And so that's taxed differently. And they want all they want other their cookies to go in the cookie jar. So now you're looking at more like a 20 percent hospitality tax or higher.

Barna: [00:07:09] 28,30.

Wyatt: [00:07:09] Yeah, 20 to 30, depending on where you are.

Barna: [00:07:11] And that's just your property tax.

Wyatt: [00:07:13] Yeah. So but like hotels, part of the reason you guys have to know hotel rooms are as expensive as they are because their tax rate.

Barna: [00:07:20] Yeah. Tax rare is way more. Construction cost as we talked about are more. Rules are different. Typically.

Wyatt: [00:07:28] More shit to jump through hoops and more professionals to hire. Professionals. Aren't day laborers, not at that rate.

Barna: [00:07:34] Sprinkler systems, safety systems. You know, all the things you need to have a hotel. So Airbnb allow people to kind of sidestep all this. And hey, look, all of a sudden I have a vacation rental otherwise known as a hotel. So my brain goes, wait, if you can have a hotel in a hotels commercial and I-2 to the zoning on it is.

Barna: [00:07:53] Commercial is use by righ.

Wyatt: [00:07:54] Is everything except residential unless it's listed under special use.

Barna: [00:08:01] Right. A hotel is not listed on special use. A hotel is commercial.

Wyatt: [00:08:06] Yes. So commercial is used inside.

Barna: [00:08:08] So we go OK, can we...

Wyatt: [00:08:10] Angela looks across the table with her hands kind of like, you know, she's dressed in her hands on the table and she kind of like puts them up in the air, kind of like what the fuck? It kind of looks over and goes you guys mind having in a hotel. And we're, again, children on this side. We had, we were a ball short of rolling it back and forth to playing with one another. I'm not even fucking exaggerating when I say they were like, we got TRex. Yeah. She rolls with you guys, I don't even know how we can understand what she was, you guys OK with the hotel? And we look at each other, we're like, fuck, yeah. By the end of the meeting, all I could think about was having a business card on it. That said hotelier. Yeah, that's like that was my new priority

Barna: [00:08:47] And, and this is when city staff goes, starts looking through the code.

Wyatt: [00:08:53] Yep.

Barna: [00:08:53] And we're like, no, no, no. I have this shit memorized. Yeah. Hotels are not under special use. We can do a hotel here because I read through all special uses when we try to apply for one and I was already looking for a loophole. I was like, no. And this is the point in the movie.

Wyatt: [00:09:09] You weren't you weren't looking for a loophole. You were looking for the letter of the law to have a void in.

Barna: [00:09:16] Yeah. Or to back up what what we want to do. Right. So this is the point in the movie where the guy is sitting on the pooper and T Rex just bites it right. It's gone. That's it. We win, everybody else wins too. That's the thing.

Wyatt: [00:09:35] Hell yeah they did. It's like how did you lose, you got a new business that's at a higher tax rate than any residential.

Barna: [00:09:41] That has a business license right there on the wall.

Wyatt: [00:09:43] There it is. So and that's the thing. Right. So the the city likes the idea. Not that all cities are it's not always about money, but most of the time it actually is. And then they go, we're going to have, you know, four units that that we know that we are building. Right. You get they get four units in their hotel inventory, which is currently exhausted. And it's at a higher tax rate and it's in an area of town that would have otherwise not really been used because it wasn't built on for fifty or sixty years.

Barna: [00:10:09] And yeah. And they sold a water tap for four units.

Wyatt: [00:10:11] Yeah. For units sold an eleven thousand dollar water tap.

Barna: [00:10:15] How many local contractors are employed?

Wyatt: [00:10:17] You know you got electric in there.

Barna: [00:10:20] All of them.

Wyatt: [00:10:20] Plumbers in there. I mean I'm in there so. And that's the other thing about commercial in the last podcast, you know, homeowners can do there much of their own plumbing and electrical work in a commercial property. They cannot. So we can't do the electrical in the plumbing. We have to hire that. And so lucky for us, if you will, if it's luck, I'm a general contractor here. And so we have access to plumbers, electricians and other tradesmen and they actually answer their phone calls because we've thrown them enough work at this point to where, like they deal with us. You guys might be like contractors are really hard to get on the job. They're really hard. If you don't have somebody that knows how to and get a hold of them and help them with their work by lining them out and not making their life difficult, we just line out our electrician in thirty minutes on three units and he can just work and make his money and get cool shit done. And then we have that. So that's that's the other part of the equation that. Right. But so the fun part for us was. Oh it's a hotel. OK, so we get to move forward. Now the foundations are going to get real. Now we're going to do X, Y and Z, but also hotel rooms, and you guys are like, I like tiny houses, you could maybe consider calling him a hotel room. I like cabins. Consider the idea of a hotel room, because you read the hotel code outs no minimum square footage requirement for hotel rooms was listed.

Barna: [00:11:44] So the code for a hotel or motel is like one line.

Wyatt: [00:11:48] So fucking vague.

Barna: [00:11:50] One line. So anyway, it's one line. It says.

Wyatt: [00:11:55] It's for temporary lodging and you can't have a food preparatory area in it, so you can't have a kitchen in it. Well, a plug in hotplates, not a hard appliance. And that doesn't count as a kitchen appliance anyway. So consider the idea that if you get a little bit more creative in how you want to, you know, what are you going to heat up water and pour it into your cup of ramen or a crockpot? There are ways of getting through that, like so don't get stuck on. I don't want to live in a hotel.

Barna: [00:12:24] Yeah, and a lot of people do, though. So that's the other end of the issue is there were, Florence had 17 hotels at one point. Now we have one next to a prison and one that just recently got turned into apartments and a antique store. Right. OK, so we have one hotel with one hotel next to prison. Right. It's newer, newish.

Wyatt: [00:12:47] It's like a big box hotel.

Barna: [00:12:49] Old buildings that used to be hotels. Most of those are being remodeled and they're going to be apartments. But because they're being remodeled and old buildings cost.

Wyatt: [00:12:57] Money, money, money, money, money.

Barna: [00:12:58] Yeah, it's just expensive to remodel those. So they're not going to be cheap.

Wyatt: [00:13:03] So what we did was.

Barna: [00:13:04] We have to build new.

Wyatt: [00:13:05] Yeah, we took our we took our designs concepts for four shipping container homes. And what you've you've heard.

Barna: [00:13:11] For years we've been sketching these.

Wyatt: [00:13:13] Oh, my fucking God. Yeah. Yeah. They've been in the vault. Right. And the Off-grid Academy original version turned into one of the hotel rooms, which is great because out of that produced a small home with storage. So think of a tiny house, obviously, like you've heard us talk about where it's a structure on top of a shipping container. You get storage. Now, that's up to the commercial code and standard as a hotel room so people can come and try it before they buy it. Right now, we're working on figuring out a way so that you can actually buy one and we can build it for you right here and you can have an affordable house here or, you know, wherever. And that's that's part of what we're working on now is how do we, you know, branch out and kind of bless the rest of the people with this, because this is the less, least, expensive way I know how to build something that's twice as strong as anything I've ever seen or more from a residential home standpoint. It's more durable. It's fucking way more durable. Like this thing's been across the Pacific Ocean on a boat like dozens of times.

Barna: [00:14:13] We've talked about this several times. OK, so we got lightning proof, flood proof,

Wyatt: [00:14:17] Waterproof.

Barna: [00:14:18] Fireproof

Wyatt: [00:14:18] Fucking windproof.

Barna: [00:14:19] And then you go down the street and there's a collapsing shack. That's that's OK. We are going to let that fly. But so we had to follow the letter of the law. We had to know it, learn it. Still bring in an expert who carries more weight than we do.

Wyatt: [00:14:34] More letters after her name. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's part of it. Right. And so as a as a lifetime builder and I'm not that old so I don't probably count yet, but half.

Barna: [00:14:42] Quarter lifetime builder.

Wyatt: [00:14:42] No more than my more than half my life. I've yeah. I've been building houses and shit and mostly remodeling them. Let me tell you something. If, if you, if you listen at all, don't buy a fucking 100 year old house for more money than you can buy a brand new one. Not even my house. Not even our houses. Just don't do that to yourself because like we've talked.

Barna: [00:15:03] Do it. I love old houses. Buy the old, the older the better. The junkier.

Wyatt: [00:15:09] You know that I love remodeling homes.

Barna: [00:15:10] You gotta have the bankroll.

Wyatt: [00:15:14] You've got to have the bankroll for it.

Barna: [00:15:15] And the skills.

Wyatt: [00:15:16] And you've got to have some fucked up skills, actually. And a lot of it is on that border of art and carpentry at some point. And I joke with somebody else, I was like, yeah, I'll go do some artpentry for you. Right. Like because, yeah, you're using carpentry skills and tools and shit, but I'm bending your eye, which is back to art. Like, there's no way to make this level. And my brother always used to joke about that. He'd be like leave the fucking levels at home and this isn't the place for them unless you're using them for a straight edge because like these houses are old and they're crooked. And there are reasons beyond our understanding. Many or most are the materials and the tooling weren't there when they built them and the engineering wasn't quite understood and they weren't doing soil tests and they didn't have the quality of inputs. Sheathing didn't exist for your sheer strength on your home. It was fucking just, you know, one inch thick by twelve wide planks. A lot of them have knots in them and holes in them and weak spots in them and shit like that, like there's subpar versus today's standard. And now we're talking about corrugated steel siding, 14 gauge. Do me a favor. Go up to Home Depot and see if you can find siding that you can't dent with a hammer like you can one of our houses.

Barna: [00:16:25] Hammer. You can bend in half with your hands. You don't need anything.

Wyatt: [00:16:29] See if you can find some you can't dent with a hammer. You can't get our houses with a hammer. OK, so, I mean, this shell is good, right? Yeah, you can stack. Shipping containers, eight, nine high. OK, can you stack more, can you stack eight of your houses on top of each other? No, you can't. OK, again, next. Right. And so as we continue to kind of go through this stuff, you have to understand what it is that you're getting. The lifetime cost of what we're building is fucking peanuts compared to what our house is.

Barna: [00:16:56] Did we already go over cost per square foot.

Wyatt: [00:16:59] I already dropped the mic. Sorry, sorry I walked away,

Barna: [00:17:01] OK? Oh, we haven't got you. OK, well let's just. I just want to just go over one more thing that in our case in Florence, Colorado is where this worked. OK, so we can repeat this year until the code changes if it ever does. But don't worry, we're there every meeting to fight it. Or to make sure things to go the way they should, because back to the spirit is like we just want people to have a roof over their heads.

Wyatt: [00:17:30] Guys, we can build them for cheaper.

Barna: [00:17:31] And some people who don't. But we had the, anyway initial conversations of the possibility of building in Canyon City. So eight miles away, this is where I live, pretty close to my house. Looked at it, look at the property, similar industrial. Read through all the code for industrial. Can't do it. No, it does not allow for hotels and industrial could only be in commercial, doesn't allow for commercial inside industrial.

Wyatt: [00:17:55] So what we say is true here.

Barna: [00:17:57] Yeah, it is true here. And this is why you have to learn the code or hire somebody that knows it. And since we've been working on all this stuff, we've been approached by several people. Actually we have a meeting in several hours today with a developer who's coming down? Right. And we have expertise in everything they're doing.

Wyatt: [00:18:16] And that's the fun part, right? Because two weeks ago, a week and a half ago, we met another individual that had seen kind of what we're doing stops by. Two weeks later, two days later, we're going to grab lunch. Two days after that, he's like, yeah, I want to do this because he understands the weight that this amount of research carries, because it's like, holy shit, I want to get in on this. I want to do this. And that's that brings credibility to the amount of work that's gone into it on our behalf. Like, yeah, I'll blow our own fucking horn. That's not bragging. That's just being real with it. Like we know how to find this stuff and we're working on figuring out a way so people can actually go to the website, pick their floor plan, put in their deposit, half of which won't be refundable because that's the feasibility of me and Barna. Barna and I looking through your areas code and shit and going, this is how you could accomplish it, or it's impossible right now unless you get X, Y and Z to change.

Barna: [00:19:10] And, and that's kind of how we roll now. It's Yeah. Dude where if you want, if you wanna play. Yes. A thousand bucks to get on the list.

Wyatt: [00:19:17] Yeah. But I'll, I'll put it to you like this. We decided to go with the hotel after we had had plenty of help, a lot of reading, a ton of fucking hard work.

Barna: [00:19:26] And costs.

Wyatt: [00:19:27] But if you can do that with that tip, good on you. I'm fucking pumped to know you and I want you to have the confidence that, yeah, you can do it. But if you don't come from an experience background of building or developing or whatever, you're going to have a fucking hard time. Real life, right, like, I mean, if you had to do this all over again.

Barna: [00:19:47] What do I have to?

Wyatt: [00:19:49] We might somebody hires us for another city. Yeah.

Barna: [00:19:51] Oh, yeah, well, we'll do it, but we already know. OK, so just that tidbit of information from our expert. Experts costs money for a reason.

Wyatt: [00:20:00] Fuck, yeah.

Barna: [00:20:01] In a in a 30 minute meeting, we solved it. Right. She solved it.

Wyatt: [00:20:06] And we learned how to learn.

Barna: [00:20:08] And we gave you that information for free.

Wyatt: [00:20:12] If you're one of the seven...

Barna: [00:20:13] If you are the three people listening right now. And you have any ideas listen to every single podcast, because so far.

Wyatt: [00:20:23] It's pretty much there.

Barna: [00:20:24] So far forty thousand dollars worth of information in the last seven, six podcasts.

Wyatt: [00:20:31] There are. And there's more coming. And the best part is, is that and this isn't something that we did mentioned yet. If you're not real confident just yet, you can come here and build more with us and I'll show you how to do that, end of it too. Like that's a real product in class offering that this actually started with, like when we started with the Off-grid Academy or like, fuck, yeah, we're going to do this container house thing. It's going to be... No, no fucking layups, right. The original pitch was you can come here. Yeah. You're going to pay me. You're also going to have a house when you're done with it and you're going to have a portfolio because you'll have that house and the experience on how to work with other trades, figure out which trade you like, figure out like where you want to hire, where you want to, where you want to build and do your own thing, how you want to design stuff, where to get materials. All of that shit's included in that course. And I'm still willing to do that. But you better fucking get a hold of me quick, because as Barna just alluded to, we got another meeting and we've been in meetings for the last several weeks at this point.

Barna: [00:21:31] And we got more coming up.

Wyatt: [00:21:33] It's fucked and it's great. It's unbelievably like we're blessed, but also we are offering affordable housing that, again, is more durable than standard housing. So you products that good, not backing it up. Our products that fucking good. It's that strong. And we're you know what we're that fun to work with. That's that for the first time maybe in my entire life, it's like this is the this is this is my life's work and my life's mission all getting poured onto the table like I fucking love this. And if I get to break rules and build cool shit, not break rules, but but we all do,

Barna: [00:22:10] We know we get to follow the rules and build cool shit.

Wyatt: [00:22:13] And that's the fun part. Like you get to look at it, you've got to do it this way. And it's like a you know, I don't because that's what you want. The letter of the law wants this and this is what I did. Oh, therefore, it passes. Thank you. Continue to move forward. Right. And that's not being a deviant. That's actually knowing the law that fucking good and well, so that we know how to navigate it. So instead of loopholes that sidesteps and skirting and negative connotation, find me find me the other guy who knows it better.

Barna: [00:22:48] Yeah.

Wyatt: [00:22:48] Besides these besides us. Yeah, I'm, I'm fucking bragging about it.

Barna: [00:22:52] And we know those guys do. Don't worry. Yeah. We know the four other people who know the code and the rules as well as us.

Wyatt: [00:23:00] And one of them yesterday, Justin, just hands me the fucking plumbing book because we were asking questions now at this point where he's like zero times asked this question or these questions. Look it up. He just has the book over because now the master plumber doesn't know exactly verbatim what we're talking about. He knows like 80 percent. Right? He knows all the basic stuff. Whatever. What's a qualified wall coating inside of a shower? What do you mean? Nobody asked that question because buy it off the shelf.

Barna: [00:23:23] Because they just buy it. Yeah, they just go to a store and buy it.

Wyatt: [00:23:26] We're going to the machine shop because we want fucking cool shit, which is what boxes have to fit inside of.

Barna: [00:23:30] Like I'm building my siding. That's it. I'm building my floor. I'm creating all of it. We're making our own tile.

Wyatt: [00:23:37] And that's before we get into the recycled plastic that we're working on. I did see somebody else today is doing these really cool things with insulated like cotton shredded T shirts into bricks for insulation. Yeah. Like that's really, really great. Unless you live in a place without IBC, which Custer County is right. Here is our next door neighbor from a county. You can't use that material because it doesn't have the placarding on it. It says it's ASMI, whatever the fuck certified. Yeah, right. You can use that. Like I said, if you're listening and you're in Custer County and you're like, that's what I want to use, you can because you only have to listen to the plumbing code and the electrical code there and the mechanical, I should say. And that's that's going to be like HVAC piping and shit for natural gas or LP or whatever you got. But from a structural standpoint or an installation standpoint, you don't have to do shit. So have fun with that bit of information. I mean, if it were me, I'd be at Goodwill getting all the free cotton I could fucking get my hands on, glue it together, put it on the walls and have it like a purely recycled home. So Code says you can't do that, even though Planet says we need to and we will get there. And like I said earlier,

Barna: [00:24:44] And this is where we go back to where code needs to change. And it's not going to change till you show up and start making that change.

Wyatt: [00:24:50] And I like like I said to Brianna, I will spend the better part of the rest of my life undoing what other people have done. And that is why, because this is right and we're doing plastic and all this other shit that we are putting into a landfill and torching the planet with fuck that, put it back into your house and put it to good use. That's what I'm you know what? And I'm going to go back with my original sign-off. I said what I said. And I'm going to drop, I'm going to set the mike down nicely, I'm not going to drop it because not mine.

Barna: [00:25:17] Yeah, it's expensive. We can't afford this.

Wyatt: [00:25:22] Set it down nicely. We'll see you on the next one.

Barna: [00:25:25] Follow us, like us, share, subscribe. Follow us on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook or wherever you consume your podcasts.

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