Inside a Pro Athlete's Mind-Blowing Tiny House Paradise

Was it scary? Absolutely, every part of the way. We've put drying racks throughout the house that are disguised. I knew because this was a home I was going to live in full-time, I wanted to add something that involved some storage. I've been a Team Canada athlete, competing on the world stage while living the tiny home life off-grid. This is a very important piece of the house. My name is Hayden Mayer. I've been a Team Canada speed skater for a little under the last decade here. It's been a very big part of my life. I'm a two-time world championship medalist. Welcome here to my tiny home, a little outside of Calgary on a big cattle ranch. I lived in a regular bungalow for rent in Calgary near the Olympic Oval, which is our major training center for the sport. Prior to moving out here, I had already started to integrate myself a bit into the community. I was coming out and helping on a couple of the big 100-plus-year-old ranches out here and starting to learn. The opportunity came up for me to build a tiny home and place it out here. A couple of years ago now, I made that move. I believe it was summer of 2024 that I moved out to the ranch full-time. I was actively training full-time when I made the move. I've been a Team Canada athlete competing on the world stage while living the tiny home life off-grid. This has been a dream for me. It's pretty awesome. This is my tiny home. It was built by Summit Tiny Homes located in Vernon, British Columbia. Awesome team of guys and gals over there that specialize in building premium tiny homes for U.S. and Canadian customers. The tiny house is 38 feet long by eight and a half feet wide. Including the lofts, it's roughly 400 square feet, which is plenty of room for what I need to live. Let's start off with the storage shed next door to the house. I do live fully off-grid here and this is kind of the power plant behind my lifestyle. The shed is 20 feet long by 10 feet wide. I had it built a couple hours south of where I live right now on skid so it is fully movable if we were to relocate the house. I had it built to match the home itself and the tanks that you're going to see inside here shortly were actually built into the shed because they're so large. So if they ever need to come out, we have to blow the shed open. Let's go to the inside of the shed and take a look at what's going on in here. So again, the first thing you're going to notice when you come in looking at the ceiling is our spray foam insulation. It's exposed on the roof but it does go through all the walls and the floor. On the right hand side here is our sewage tank. It's 1,700 imperial gallons so it's a little over 2,000 US gallons. On my left side is our freshwater tank. Same size, 1,700 imperial, a little over 2,000 US gallons in here. Directly in front of me you're going to see an EG4 18 kpv solar inverter. So this is a 50 amp inverter from a fantastic company called EG4. I believe it's a 14.7 kilowatt hour 48 volt wall mount battery on the bottom, again by EG4. Nothing too too exciting back here but you'll see this is our backup generator that's tied into the inverter. We don't really control it outside of keeping it fueled which it's not because it's the middle of the summer and it doesn't get used at all. The inverter will call for power from it and it will auto start the generator as needed. Coming around the front side of the house we've got a picnic table, kind of a must-have when you live on a ranch with this kind of a view. This is where we eat a lot of meals during the spring, summer, and fall. I built a little tiny porch. It's really nothing fancy. It's easy to move but it's enough for our steps and our barbecue. Same thing living off-grid, you try and utilize the barbecue as much as possible. A part of that comes down to living tiny. You know messy kitchens are a lot messier in a tiny home than they are in a normal house so the more cooking you can do outside the better. We went with the cedar shingles, the green kind of sage green siding. From across the fields it's actually quite challenging to even see the house in the first place which is exactly what I wanted to do. That's the outside of the house for you. How about you guys follow me on to the inside and we can get into a more detailed tour. Right now we're standing kind of in the primary section of the house which is our kitchen living area. This is the boho model from Summit's range of tiny homes. So I think for the boho right now with Summit tiny homes you're looking at around $180,000-$190,000 range and that's for your finished house. This would kind of be one of the big features that I added on. Typically this is either a blank space or just a countertop but I knew because this was a home I was going to live in full-time I wanted to add something that involved some storage. So we've got a countertop with three bench stools that we can eat at followed by four cabinets underneath the counter for storage. So this is just kind of an assortment of storage over the wheel well of the trailer. And then most importantly to me is where do you put your shoes when you come into a tiny home? So there's not a mud room so we have them built in a shoe closet right at the entrance into the side of the counter. So this has actually been a really handy addition and I'm very happy with how it's been functioning for for me living here. Switching over to the kitchen side of the house the above counter cabinetry was something I added on. I wanted visible storage for all of our pottery and plates and bowls and glassware and such. And then our stove is a little mini 20-inch unique propane stove. All the appliances in the our own propane outside of the fridge that's electric. One of the really nice things I can appreciate about working with a custom tiny home builder that's been doing it for so long is they really have a way to utilize every square inch of the space because they have so many minds that have been doing it for so long that are putting thoughts into every project. Kick plates are just MDF. In this house they're all additional storage so we have Tupperware storage and whatnot underneath the counter. You might not think much of it but every square inch counts. Farmhouse sink very fitting considering the environment we live in. Pretty simple subway tile backsplash with a wood countertop. And then this is kind of my coffee bar. I own Hayloft Cafe which is a high-end mobile espresso bar service here in Calgary. So coffee's pretty important to me and this happens to be a spare set of our equipment that we use on some of our coffee carts so it gets to live here. Above the coffee bar is something that Summit built for us. We've been collecting ceramics now for a few years from different places all over the country, different places I go, different artists I find and such. So everything on that wall is handmade by a Canadian artist. Moving slightly farther down the house we've got a couch with some more storage underneath it into the stairway that'll lead up to a loft we'll show you in a bit. Behind these doors is our propane on-demand hot water heater so that's the hot water for our showers our sink and everything and then we've got additional storage in there as well. More cabinetry, more drawers into the steps and even a little pop-up cubby into the one step that had no other use. This is a very important piece of the house is our wood stove. I custom designed myself basically a stand for the stove to sit on because this is actually the wheel well for the trailer that's behind here so if you come around to this side you'll see that the wood stove sits flush on top of the wheel well for the house. This was designed to kind of hide that away and act as wood storage as well as a stand for the stove to sit on. So if you want to follow me upstairs we can go take a peek at kind of the primary loft in the house. To us it's kind of used as a secondary bedroom if we have guests come by. The dogs sleep up there most nights but it's still a fantastic space to have access to. We just don't have a ton of secondary use for it at the moment. So this is the loft space you have to be careful not to smoke your head on the ceiling like I just did. Fit a full-size queen bed in here and a pretty beautiful skylight that's enjoyable to come and look out of on clear nights particularly during the summer. So even if we don't sleep up here much we certainly come up to enjoy the view. Coming back to what would be the front side of the trailer on this side you've got our washer dryer combo that's ventless. This guy is pretty freaking awesome. In the winter it draws quite a bit of power on the dry cycle and so we do try and avoid using that when we don't have the sunlight to power up our batteries. And then this is just a a coat closet that we use right at the entry. If we don't use this as a dryer you might be wondering how we dry our clothes in the winter especially considering you can't go hang them out on the fence. We've put drying racks throughout the house that are disguised so we can hang clothing through the living space and the heat that comes off of our wood stove dries the clothing easily overnight. So pretty awesome they work great. When we don't use them they fold back in and are pretty well invisible. You'll see our secondary loft up here for us it's storage for extra clothing you know winter jackets printer all the stuff that doesn't need to be down on the main level. From the kitchen area we walk kind of straight into the bathroom. So we've got a plumbed in toilet so normal toilet like you'd see at any house in the city. Farm style sink with a mirror and twin lights. Under sink cabinetry we added cabinetry above the toilet just for extra toiletries and stuff that we didn't want outer to be seen. Again clutter is a lot more of a problem in a tiny house than it is in a regular house because you don't have very much living space and you see everything at all times. So having as much put away as possible is pretty critical to us. We did put in a small compact bathtub with the shower. Who doesn't love a bath once in a while and you can always have a shower in a bath you can't have a bath in a shower so it was nicer to at least put that option in there which has yet to be used but we've got it. This is kind of the last main section of the house this is the primary bedroom. Full height ceilings which is fantastic they're higher clearance than a normal house so tons of breathing room with our stacked windows. Huge amount of natural light looking out onto the crop fields. His and hers dressers with three drawers each and full sized cabinets I suppose. We've got his and hers laundry baskets hanging on each side of the cabinets so off the floor and out of the way not collecting dust again very important in a tiny home. And then we're both you know living kind of more of a western lifestyle I work part-time in agriculture and we have a lot of jeans so we've decided instead of them taking up space in our drawers we've put hooks on the walls and we've got all our jeans kind of hanging there out in the open. It's been very public in the media over the last year and a half that funding in amateur sports at least in Canada has been struggling you know athletes across the board don't make a lot of money in amateur olympic sports. When COVID hit I decided to try and start my own business just to make enough money that I could supplement my sport funding so I could focus more on on my career so I bought a 1978 Citroen 2CV truckette from France and put an espresso bar in it and we reached a point about two years ago where I decided we needed to build something bigger so we could tackle large-scale private events and festivals and stuff and that's kind of where our big red barn comes into the picture. All right so welcome to Hayloft Cafe. It's one of the largest mobile espresso bars in the country at the moment. It's about 22 feet long by eight and a half feet wide and it was built by Summit Tiny Homes which is the very same tiny home builder that built my house. We wanted it to stand out but to look authentic. One of the most important things that you know being a year into owning this cafe that Summit Tiny Homes actually brought into the build was using cedar siding the full way around so what that's done is it's allowed the building to actually age over time to look like an authentic old you know Alberta based red barn. We put a lot of focus into bringing you know Summit's quality in their builds. Follow me inside and let's take a peek at the cafe. So definitely not your ordinary food truck. We certainly went above and beyond to try and make it our own. It's built exactly like a home would be built so we didn't have to work around all of the limitations that building out a bus or a van would have. The entire building is spray foam insulated so we can operate year round even through an Alberta winter. All of our custom cabinetry was placed exactly where we needed it to go. Custom countertops had all the mounting points for all of our equipment to stay in place. We're able to basically roll up to an event and be set up and ready to serve coffee within 15 or 20 minutes. Coming on to the back of the trailer this is kind of our sink and kitchen area. Obviously required by most provincial health authorities to operate a mobile food service so we have a double basin sink for hand washing and dish washing. Underneath the sink hidden in the cabinetry is our wastewater tank so we actually have a custom built 110 gallon wastewater tank that's hidden underneath this whole countertop area so that allows us to run for a day or two at a busy festival without needing access to a sewage dump for our grey water. We've got a 100 gallon water tank that again was custom made by a plastic fab company. It's hiding underneath here at the entrance so it's a long low profile custom built water tank. This guy right here hidden behind these massive cabinets is how the entire cafe is powered. I kind of had to think outside the box and we decided to go electric so this entire cafe is powered by EG4 batteries and inverters. We'll open these cabinets and we'll see we've custom built all this to house six EG4 wall mount batteries. All six batteries are tied into two EG4 18kpv 50 amp inverters. We can go almost a full festival weekend without touching shore power or a generator. I suppose the last thing to point out is going to be our handy propane heater by Martin. This thing's pretty handy during the winter months. We do operate year-round because we are built like a house so again spray foam insulated from floor to ceiling. We have plexiglass inserts that go into the windows to keep the cold out when it's particularly chilly. I honestly couldn't be happier with the build that we've got here. We get a lot of comments from the general public about you know how unique this is and how awesome this is when it pulls up to an event. The big red barn on the street is definitely a head turner. Spared no expense when building this out and wanted to make it as user-friendly as possible. It really makes life easy for the whole crew. Altogether there's nothing I would do differently about my life the past five years whether it's starting a business, moving out of town to live tiny, going off-grid. There's really nothing at all that I would change and was it scary? Absolutely every part of the way. Building a business is scary, you're taking risks, making investments, you don't know if you're going to get the returns. Going tiny, you're throwing away all this extra space, you're throwing away the comforts of being in town, being a walk away from a gas station or a grocery store, you're all your utility access when you're going off-grid. Those were all very scary steps if you break them down and I think that there's a lot of people that are following this channel that are probably sitting there thinking about making that move for themselves and you know if you're on the fence I would say go for it. There's no world where you can prepare yourself enough ahead of time. This channel is flooded with different people's tiny home journeys and everybody's got a different house, a different story, a different utility setup. Everything is unique and that's because it's unique to you. This setup is unique to us. It might work for somebody else but maybe something different works for you. So I think just go for it would be my words. If you like this week's episode please make sure to like, share, and subscribe and check back soon because we have new Unique Home Tours publishing all the time and if you'd like to join our team and get access to members-only content and unique perks make sure you click on the join button below.