Colorado Tiny Home: No Heating Bill, No Power Bill
Updated: 3 days ago
James and Doreen built their Colorado tiny home for about $39,000 and they do not pay to heat it or to light it. The house is off grid and passive solar, so the sun warms a dark concrete floor through the day and the floor gives that heat back at night. Their entire running cost is a gas bill of around $85 a month and property tax of about $1,500 a year.
It is 32 feet square on the outside. That leaves about 900 square feet of living space inside walls more than a foot thick. Doreen walks through every room of it, and most of what she points out is a decision rather than a feature. If you want the construction itself, stage by stage with what each stage cost, that is in our write-up of the build.
At a glance
Home: 32 feet square outside, about 900 square feet of living space
Land: 35 acres in Colorado, bought for right around $100,000
Build cost: about $39,000, eight to nine months, 90 percent of the work their own
Heating and power: none bought. Passive solar, off grid, with a masonry heater for the cold
Running costs: about $85 a month gas, about $1,500 a year property tax
Well: about $17,000 to drill
Builders: James and Doreen, married 46 years, their fourth house together
The Kitchen Is on the North Wall for a Reason
Doreen spends most of her time in this room and she put it on the north side deliberately, because of what she learned from the house they built before.
"I had my kitchen on the south side of the house and it was so bright and so hot. So I wanted to do it in the shade so we did it on the north wall."
Her point generalises. When you are planning a house, think about where your main workspace sits and whether it will be a decent place to be at any hour of the day.
The kitchen is small. She is unbothered by that, because small is what makes it quick.
"It is small, but it is very efficient. And to me, that is very important in a kitchen that you don't have to be moving from one corner to the other while you're working."
The counters are walnut from a friend up the road. James cut them down and finished them. Beside the stove there is a small piece of soapstone, there purely so a kettle coming off the heat has somewhere to land without needing a hot pad. The cabinets are a blue green she chose to sit inside the southwestern palette rather than the brighter aqua she first considered.
There are no doors on the uppers. That is the one people ask her about most.
"I don't have any doors on my cabinets because doors are in the way."
The lowers are all drawers rather than doors with shelves behind them, eleven of them, on the grounds that you can see what is in a drawer. And the corner is a walk-in pantry. In most kitchens that space is wasted on a lazy susan.
"If you have your cabinets come clear to the corner, it is a very inefficient use of your space. You have these lazy susans and they're just hard to get to and you lose a lot of space. But when you make a pantry in the corner, you lose no space."
Six shelves in there hold the baking equipment and whatever else she would rather not have on display, and she is cheerfully honest about why that matters.
"It can be messy in there and nobody knows the difference."
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The Island, the Sink and the Angle
The island holds a commercial sink, which she first had in the bus they lived in before this and has never wanted to be without since. The bus version had three basins. This one has two, because she has a dishwasher now.
What she actually loves about it is the cutting board that sits down inside the sink. All the prep and all the mess happen over the drain instead of on the counter. The concrete surfaces either side were shaped by James so water runs back toward the basin instead of off the edge.
The island itself sits on an angle, not square to the room.
"A triangular kitchen with this island on an angle makes the most efficient use of your space. Everything is closed. My fridge is closed, my stove is closed, and so it makes it a very easy kitchen to work in."
It faces the windows, which she rates as the real reward of the arrangement.
"Another thing I love about this island is when I'm working here, I have these most amazing views. And that is very uplifting when you're doing the dirty work of doing your dishes."
On the far side there is a bar. She put it there so her grandchildren can sit and keep her company while she cooks, and so James has somewhere to sit and talk to her. Next along is the coffee bar cabinet, which earns its own mention for what happens there in the mornings.
"When I stumble in here in the mornings, my coffee is made already by my barista husband."
The Living Room
The windows on the east and south decided how this room is laid out, and the views through them are the reason the room exists where it does.
The coffee table came out of the house they built before this one. It is the largest log James milled for that build, kept back because he thought it was worth saving, standing on beer kegs cut in half and polished.
He is careful about the word cheap when he describes what doing all this yourself buys you.
"It's also very economical. So, it's a cheap way to build. I'll say economical. It's not cheap because if you would hire this done, it would be very expensive, but when you do it yourself, it's very inexpensive, but it does cost you labor."
The Pizza Oven That Heats the House for Days
This is the third or fourth pizza oven James has built. It is also why there is no heating bill. The oven is the firebox of a masonry heater.
A pizza oven burns unusually cleanly once it is properly hot. Around 600 degrees the dome flashes, burning the soot off itself, and from then on the smoke hitting that dome ignites rather than leaving up the flue. Because the only exhaust is at the front of the oven, the fire burns back across the dome and takes its own smoke with it.
Above the oven sits a 150 gallon stainless steel tank acting as a heat exchanger. The plumbing of it is deliberate. The pipe enters the tank halfway up and the exhaust leaves from the bottom. So the hottest air collects at the top and stays there, and only the coolest air escapes. That matters most overnight, after the fire is out and air is still moving through the system.
"Your hottest air is going to stay at the top of that dome. And in masonry stove jargon, that's called a bell. So, these bells are placed to hold the hottest air. And that way, you're not exhausting the hottest air out of your space constantly."
Then there is the mass. Before he closed up the brickwork he filled the whole structure with sand through a gap at the top.
"There's about 12,000 lbs worth of sand inside of this. The whole thing has about 12,000 lbs of mass. So, when you burn this, it burns really efficient because you burn it wide open. You never choke it back. You never have creosote. It burns up in there, but your heat is stored in that sand. So, this heat will last for days."
None of it is his invention and he says so, pointing anyone interested toward masonry stoves, heat storage and Russian fireplaces. The seating around the front is Saltillo tile, grouted dark.
Finding the Land, Which Cost More Than the House
They had been living in a bus for three or four years and expected to travel. The closer it got, the less they wanted to.
"We thought we would be traveling. And the closer it got to traveling, the more we realized that we didn't want to travel. We are not rolling stones and that's fine for anybody that wants to do that, but we decided we wanted to stay here."
They moved to Colorado because their daughter was in the area. Then they did the thing James recommends most strongly to anybody else.
"This is one thing I do recommend when you are looking for a piece of property. It's best to move into the area and live there, which is what we did. We moved here and rented a place for a year. And we shopped for property. We did not buy the first place that we saw."
The first property they bought was the lot immediately to the south of this one. It did not look like much from the road. James found out otherwise by walking it.
"When I hit the rocks kind of at the back of the place, I called Doreen and I told her, this is the place. This is the perfect place to build a house."
They built there and stayed about thirteen years. This parcel came up next door just as the owner needed to sell and they were ready to buy. That is the only part of the story that was luck.
The numbers matter here, because they are larger than the house. The 35 acres cost right around $100,000 and the well took about $17,000 to drill. That is roughly $117,000 of land and water underneath a $39,000 house. The acreage was not a preference.
James describes the rule that set it, as it applied to him:
"Here in Colorado, you have to have at least 35 acres to have what they call a domestic well. If it's smaller than 35 acres, you can only get a permit for what they call an in-house well. And that's exactly what that means. You cannot water your lawn. You can't have animals outside. You can't have anything outside of your house. It's only in the house."
Chris adds one clarification worth having. Below 35 acres Colorado usually still allows a well, but a household use only well, which means water for inside the house and nothing else. No lawn, no garden, no livestock. So the choice is not between a well and no well, it is between a well you can live off and a well you can only drink from.
The 35 acre threshold and the household use only limit are the position as of October 2026. Water rules differ by state and county and they change, so confirm the current rules with your own county and the state before buying anything on the strength of it.
What the House Cost, and the Mistake
About $39,000, over eight or nine months, with the two of them doing roughly ninety percent of the work themselves and friends coming in for the jobs that needed more hands.
Three thousand dollars of that was one avoidable line. They had the concrete company mix the colorant into the floor pour rather than buying colorant and adding it themselves.
"We had the concrete company put colorant in the concrete brown. We had them do it and we found out later that James could have bought it off of Amazon for like 300 bucks and they charged us 3,000 for it."
The floor being dark was never the mistake. They colored it deliberately, because a dark slab absorbs more of the sun that falls on it, and the whole heating strategy rests on that. The mistake was buying the color the expensive way. They did it because of a much smaller job they had done before.
"We built a small cabin. When we had the concrete delivered on that, it was a very, very small amount. I never realized how much it was costing me."
The general lesson he draws from it is worth more than the specific one.
"This is done all the time in sales and that is they make their money on add-ons. So, the basic product concrete is really quite economical. Anytime you add on just like colorant in your concrete, that's where they make their money."
Without it the house would have come in at $36,000. Doreen is clear about the price of building this way, and it is not money.
"It is more labor intensive when you collect your stuff like that than when you just go to the Home Depot and buy everything nice and new and ready to use and puts together easily. This was definitely more work."
What a Colorado Tiny Home Costs to Run
Asked what the house costs to live in, James answers in two lines.
"As far as what this house costs to live in, this is a passive solar, so we have no heating expense at all. No electricity. The sun provides all our energy. The really the only expense we have is our gas bill, which is around $85 a month. The property tax here is around $1,500 a year. So, that's really the only expense we have."
No heating bill, no power bill, $85 a month and $1,500 a year. The house is off grid, the sun does the heating, the masonry heater covers the cold stretches, and the dark concrete slab is what makes the arithmetic work.
A Room That Does Four Jobs
The back of the house is dressing room, utility room, laundry and the way through to the bathroom, and Doreen treats that as ordinary rather than a compromise.
"When you build small, of course, everybody that has done this knows this. You have to use your spaces for more than one thing."
The washer and dryer sit out in the open. That was a decision with a trade-off attached, and she names both sides of it.
"Whenever you separate your spaces out, just like the washer and dryer here, if you would enclose this, it makes your space feel smaller. And by leaving it open, it makes your space feel bigger. And there's tradeoffs. You will see the washer and dryer in here and some people don't like that. You have to decide what's the most important to you and then just roll with that."
The clothes live in open compartments rather than on hanging rails, an idea that came out of the bus, where the space left no room for anything inefficient. Everything is visible, which means no guessing and no digging. James built them out of plywood with strips nailed to the sides, and a friend with a cabinet shop faced them in half inch melamine.
The Vanity Finished With Homemade Soap
The bathroom holds the most unusual finish in the house. The vanity top and sink are Tadelakt, a Moroccan lime plaster technique. James did all of it with off-the-shelf materials.
He built the sink out of plywood and lined it with the Schluter membrane that goes behind a shower. Then he troweled on several coats of hydrated lime and sand. The finishing step is the part that sounds invented and is not.
"To finish it is really unique. You actually use soap. I made my own soap. I made olive oil soap and then you emulsify that in water and then you just brush it on."
Homemade soap carries a proportion of wax, which soaks into the lime plaster and reacts with it. The result is waterproof.
The shower is slate, and it is slate because he had been looking at a pallet of it in a friend's back yard for years.
"When I got ready to build this, I contacted him to see if I could get some off him and he was glad to get rid of it. So bought it for a hundred bucks and installed it."
The conclusion he draws from it applies to most of the house.
"When you're going to build inexpensive, you have to be looking for those kind of bargains. So keep your eyes peeled when you get in your friend's backyard."
They have used composting toilets for years. This house has a standard flush one, and that was not entirely their choice.
"Our house is off-grid. We have used composting toilets through the years for different applications. But in the county we live in, you must have a septic tank installed before you can get a building permit. So, we have a septic tank and this is a regular flush toilet."
That is his description of the requirement in his own county, as of October 2026. Permit and septic requirements vary by county and change over time, so check the current position with your own county before planning around it.
The Bedroom
Doreen painted this room dark against the light colors everywhere else. It is nearly empty by choice. There is a bed, currently on the floor, with a platform about sixteen inches up and storage underneath still to come. The wall sconces are James's work.
The windows are what she talks about, and both directions of them.
"It is amazing when you're laying in bed and look out at the stars at night. It is really, really beautiful. And to wake up to the sunrise is really gorgeous."
The Floor Is the Heating System
The floor is about five inches of concrete over two inches of insulation. The insulation is the part people leave out. It is also the part that makes the rest work.
"The sun shines in on the floor, heats the floor up during the day, and the floor gets to around 95 degrees during the day, and then it radiates that heat out at night. But under the floor, this floor is about 5 in thick. And under the floor, we have 2 in of insulation. And that's critical for a passive solar house because if you don't do that, you'll lose all your heat into the ground."
The block walls do the same thing on a smaller scale, soaking up sun through the day and letting it go later. The windows are plain double pane glass. He is emphatic about that.
"You do not want the low E glass that they put in most houses everywhere because that reflects the sunshine. So, it's for helping keep your house cool, but it's not good for heating your house."
He made up the finish on the slab himself. Linseed oil, paint thinner, a little beeswax and a little carnauba wax, heated and mixed together. He poured it on straight after the pour and spread it with a squeegee. That took an hour or two for the whole floor. He buffed it at the end of the build.
"I can't say that about all my experiments, but this turned out great."
Nothing Left to Maintain
The copper sills are a joke he is enjoying, since copper trim normally means an expensive house.
"Most of the time houses that have copper trim on them are very expensive homes and I just thought it would be cool to do an inexpensive home with copper trim."
The black on the woodwork is not paint. It is shou sugi ban, charred and then oiled, which in Colorado solves a real problem, because ultraviolet light is what destroys exposed wood there. The stucco was colored before it went on. The color runs the full depth rather than sitting on top. Monday's post covers how all of it went on.
What it adds up to is a Colorado tiny home with almost nothing on its maintenance schedule.
"With the wood burnt, it will never need to be painted. With the sills copper, that should never need any repairs at all. The stucco is good for 50, 60 years. And then the roof is tin and that should last a long time. So, I don't expect any maintenance at all in our lifetime."
Check the Codes Before You Buy the Land
James raises this himself and it is the warning he is most insistent about. They live in an HOA, and between that, county zoning and local codes there is a lot that can land on a plan after the fact.
"You can buy a piece of property and be surprised with a lot of different things. And there's a lot of homework goes into this. So, don't just buy a piece of property and think you're going to build your dream because your dream might collide with the zoning laws and that's never pleasant."
His remedy is the same as his property-hunting advice, which is to be there first.
"Talk to the locals, make friends, talk to people that have done what you're thinking about doing. They are a wealth of information. This thing of independence is kind of a joke. None of us can really make it on our own. We need people in our lives and people that know what they're doing, people that have gone before us and they can help us a lot."
Zoning, HOA rules and building codes are local and they change. Nothing here is a statement of the rules in your area, so check with your own county as of the date you are reading this.
Forty Six Years and Four Houses
Asked whether there is anything they would do differently, James could not find anything.
"On this job, I would say it's as close to perfect as we could have gotten. We just really, really enjoy this house."
What he says they learned on this build is not about construction.
"We've learned to trust each other with the things that the other person is good at. We work together quite well as a team. I learned that lesson again on this project. I just let my wife do the things that I'm not good at and it sure does lower my stress."
Doreen's version of it comes from the other side of the same build.
"I would say too with every build that we have done together that I've learned to trust him more. He goes fast, but when it's all said and done, it turns out looking really, really good."
She is also the one who tells you what the job costs you. She is not softening it.
"I'd say a lot of people do not realize how much work it actually is. And you're going to be weary, bodily weary. It's kind of like running a marathon. It's not one the first mile, second mile. You got to run the whole full marathon. It's not going to be easy. And there are going to be times when you're going to question whether it was a smart thing to do, but you'll get there. And don't look at the whole project. You've only got to accomplish one little thing at a time. But as you accomplish one little thing at a time, lo and behold, a house gets built."
If you want the construction itself, we covered the build stage by stage with what each stage cost. For the land side of it, what to check before you buy raw land is the same argument James makes here. Another family doing this off grid in a harder climate are Bob and Savannah in Alaska, and you can see what we have filmed in your state.
FAQ
What does it cost to live in an off grid passive solar home?
James and Doreen have no heating bill and no electricity bill, because the house is off grid and the sun does the heating. Their only running costs are gas at about $85 a month and property tax at about $1,500 a year. That is on a house they built for about $39,000, sitting on 35 acres that cost right around $100,000 with another $17,000 to drill the well.
How does a pizza oven heat a house?
James built his pizza oven as the firebox of a masonry heater. Once the dome reaches around 600 degrees it burns off its own soot and then ignites the smoke, so it burns clean with no creosote. The exhaust passes through a 150 gallon stainless steel tank surrounded by about 12,000 pounds of sand, which stores the heat and releases it for days. He calls the principle a bell, as used in Russian fireplaces.
How much land do you need for a domestic well in Colorado?
James says that in Colorado you need at least 35 acres for what is called a domestic well. Below that, the state usually allows a household use only well, which means water for inside the house only, with no lawn, garden or livestock. That is the position as of October 2026. Water rules vary by state and county and they change, so confirm the current rules with your own county and the state before buying land.
What should you check before buying land to build on?
James advises moving to the area and renting for a year before buying anything, which is what they did. He says to check county zoning, local codes and any HOA rules before you commit, because a plan can collide with them after the fact. He also recommends talking to locals who have already built, on the grounds that they are a wealth of information.
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