When Philip Spangler and I were trying to figure out how to fit a set of stairs onto a 20’ trailer, our original design required some accommodations. The shorter a set of stairs are, the higher the rise – and the harder to climb. With my bad knees thanks to…

One of the great things about living in a place like Denver for much of your life is that you wind up with friendships that span twenty or thirty years by the time you’re my age. And sometimes, those friends’ lives are parallel and you find yourself in similar places…

I had never been to a “Home Show” before. Although I was a homeowner for many years (in what seems like a lifetime ago), I never saw myself as someone who would stroll down aisles of vinyl-clad windows or gutter systems, even if I do enjoy perusing gardening stuff. But…

Mayor Federico Peña inspired me as a young Denverite with his call to “Imagine a Great City.” Though I often dreamed of moving to New York, my mother’s three bouts with cancer and other familial obligations kept me here, so I decided long ago that if I couldn’t be in…

There are days when you work all day at something and are no further by the end of the day than you were when you started. Sunday was one of those days. Victoria Salvador and I had both had late nights and were feeling a bit raggedy that morning, but…

The idea behind the Mayday Experiment has always been about gentle conversation, to both educate about and inspire sustainable living, but also to listen to people’s anxieties, fears or outright denial about climate change, and document this moment in time. I have always been aware that these conversations can only…

Things are always easier with a friend, but especially maneuvering 4’ x 8’ sheets of plywood through a table saw. Every weekend, Victoria Salvador and I have been getting together and cutting wood, piece by piece, crossing off our list and measuring twice. (And more than a few times, cutting twice…

Artists are natural hoarders. To us, everything has potential, everything has possibility. Add to that the word “free” and resistance is futile, I’m afraid. Though I’ve tried to be incredibly conscious about what I take into my life while building the tiny house, the general rule of stuff is that…

Scrolling through Facebook a few weeks ago, I happened upon a post that got me excited, a listing on Craigslist for a gutted mobile boutique in a 1997 Ford e350 bus. Clicking through the pictures of the well-cared-for bus, with a hardwood floor and integrated lights, I found a familiar…

Transplants, let me try to explain why it seems like the natives hate you. I’ve read any number of comments in Westword talking about how “mean” and “unwelcoming” the natives are, and how we’re all just haters who need to get over ourselves. I’ve also written a fair amount about the…

Focus. Squirrel! While I don’t “officially” have ADHD (I’ve been tested, and it was borderline), living inside my brain is a source of constant distraction. My friends have noticed this on hikes, where every bit of minutia — the way the light hits a stone, and “what kind of bug…

In October 2013 I had a pop-up show in New York, and I was there the week before hanging it with my friend Brittany Schall, who had curated the work. We spent late nights in the gallery hanging things from the ceiling (it was a borrowed space; we were not…

Every year we endlessly debate the “meaning of Christmas.” Fox News stages its traditional “War on Christmas” show, commentators lament the crass commercialization, and decorations inch up in store stocks until they compete with pumpkins for space. And on Christmas Eve, families everywhere gather around a traditional nativity, with baby…

Aesthetics have been primary in my life as an artist, central to all I do and think about — whether I want them to be or not. It has always seemed impossible to separate form from function. And in a very real sense, the two are inseparable: No matter whether…

While helping my mom move over Thanksgiving, I was looking everywhere for the handcart – when had I used it last? It wasn’t anywhere in the studio…and then I remembered, months ago, removing the half-built stairs from the tiny house when we went through the redesign of the interior, cutting…

There have been many things keeping me from working on the tiny house lately — from typical seasonal sickness to a gigantic commissioned project with an insane deadline that ate up all my time for six weeks, and now with the holidays approaching I despair of getting anything done. But…

Paris. Beirut. Kenya. Iraq. Syria. It’s hard to think about the tiny house and my life when the world is in chaos and so many are mourning losses. It’s hard to contemplate the future when the present is so urgent, so disrupted. The Mayday Experiment feels worlds apart from these…

In a city of flux, it seems that everyone in my life is moving right now. And one of the main tenets of both being a good friend and being a person who owns stuff is that you need to accumulate and dole out “moving karma” – in other words,…

This is my fiftieth post — after one year, two months and about seventeen days of building the tiny house. The structure is now finished, and the next step is the stairs and siding. To mark this milestone (and because I am working on a large-scale commission with an insane…

People have a lot of questions. Every other week or so, someone knocks on my door or slips a note through the window of the tiny house asking me to call because they have “so many questions.” I try to be friendly to the knockers, though often they are interrupting…

From the outside, things have been quiet with the tiny house, and it would appear nothing is happening. But appearances are misleading: There has been a flurry of plans drawn and redrawn, as Victoria Salvador and I figure out stairs from a Sketch-Up drawing on Imgur; more research done; budgets…