When Vanessa and I tell people we are writing a blog about living off the grid in a big city usually we get laughed at. “Its impossible to live off the grid in a city!” they say. We usually then go on to explain that its not necessarily about being completely off the grid, its about reducing your dependence. We are challenging ourselves to to change the way we think about how we live our daily lives.
Well Gregory Kloehn has proved the naysayers wrong. Kloehn is an artist who converted a commercial dumpster into a tiny home in Redhook Brooklyn.
Gregory purchased the dumpster for about $2000 and spent $4000 to modify it with to include a sink, stove, toilet and sleeping area inside, and on the outside he added a shower, barbecue grill, mini bar, a deck and a retractable roof with windows. The whole thing took him six months to complete.
Kloehn’s trashy tiny home is just six feet by six feet, he says it feels like being in a camping tent.
“This thing went through Hurricane Sandy, there was four feet of water in here.” Kloehn told the NY Daily News in 2013.
Most recently Kloehn is working on a project called Homeless Homes Project. Kloehn is building tiny “dumpster” homes for those living on the streets of his home town Oakland California.
The materials he uses are pulled from illegally dumped garbage, commercial and residential waste. He collects and up-cycles the discarded materials into living spaces for people in need.
Hear Gregory talk about his process and work in his own words.
