There’s nothing tiny about the lives and stories that surround the people who have found have discovered the appeal of tiny houses. Bill Rockhill of Bear Creek Tiny Houses and his family share their stories and the stories of those whose lives they intersect. The houses may be tiny, but the stories are big.
The Oneida High School Tiny House Project moves forward. As the framing of the tiny house goes up, the carpentry and civil engineering students work together as a team and apply the lessons from the classroom to a real world project. Meanwhile, the video students continue to document the process.
Utica College students and instructors in the fields of physical therapy. occupational therapy and construction management stopped by Bear Creek Tiny Houses to see how tiny houses could be fit in their fields of study.
The Tiny House Project at Oneida High School is holding a public meeting on Wednesday, April 5, 2017 at 6:30pm. The meeting will be held at the school and will feature students, instructors and Bill Rockhill from Bear Creek Tiny Houses. The tiny house is under construction and will be on display that evening. For a look at what the students are up to, watch this story from WSYR Newschannel 9 in Syracuse.
Reporter Melissa Krull of Spectrum News (formerly Time Warner News) filed this report on the tiny house project at Oneida High School.
After a successful first meeting with Bear Creek Tiny House Big Stories, Bill Rockhill and the staff got to know each other while checking out the shop.
Westminster College students from Pennsylvania took a road trip to Bear Creek Tiny Houses in Woodgate NY as part of their school’s Tiny House Project. Bill Rockhill of Bear Creek Tiny Houses gave a lecture at the school last semester and invited the students to visit and see firsthand how a tiny house is constructed.
Bill Rockhill talks about his experience in learning the trade of carpentry, why we should teach all young people to work with their hands, and how he’s built over 200 tiny houses in an age of McMansions.
Bill Rockhill has been building tiny houses since 1993. It’s quite a departure from his start, working on big projects in Manhattan like Trump Park &Trump Plaza. Bill grew up in the Bronx working for his family’s towing business. Bill started his career in construction in 1979 when he was awarded an apprenticeship by the New York City District Council of Carpenters.
After working several years in New York City, he left in 1985 to spend 7 months on the road, traveling 25,000 miles. This was his first experience living in a tiny space and the great outdoors. When he returned to New York and his 39th Street apartment he soon realized he had fallen in love with life outside the city and relocated to the Adirondacks. In 1993 Bear Creek Carpentry was born.
In this episode you’ll meet the people who build the tiny houses at Bear Creek and the people they meet while spreading the word of tiny houses and the importance of the trades that build those houses.
When Bear Creek Tiny Houses made an appearance at Jay-K Lumber in New Hartford, New York on Wednesday, August 17, 2016, more than 1,200 people came out to visit Bill and take a tour of the tiny house. Local NBC affiliate WKTV News Channel 2 also sent a team out to get the story of the day in central New York.
Nanotechnology literally goes down the toilet! And that’s a good thing for tiny houses!
Most people think of high tech digital electronic applications when they hear about nanotechnology-and most certainly never think about how it can be applied to the busiest room in the house-the bathroom. More specifically, to the most used appliance in the house-the toilet!
Okay, some might argue that the television is used more, but some people use both at the same time! Before we stray too far from the story let’s get back to how nanotechnology is used for a toilet that uses no water. In fact, the nano toilet produces clean water and energy!
With the help from a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Reinvent the Toilet Challenge researchers at Cranefield University have developed the toilet that uses the human waste to produce clean water and enough energy to operate the toilet, to burn the waste and still have enough power left to charge a cellphone! The initial application for the toilets is aimed at providing better sanitation for areas around the world that have poor or no sanitation. But like many innovations (eg GPS-originally used to guide military missiles), commercial applications abound-from use at camps or on boats. And while some may install a Nanotech toilet in their house, the tiny house seems the more likely candidate.
Today, many tiny house dwellers who chose to live off the grid as much as possible resort to composting as a way of handling human waste. Bill Rockhill of Bear Creek Tiny Houses has been building tiny houses for more than 20 years and has installed plenty of toilets in tiny houses-many of which are composting toilets. “Composting is a lot of hard work. Many people start enthusiastically in their efforts, but in the long run, they often consider other options. That’s why when I install a composting toilet in a tiny house I often install a flange to accommodate a change in operation.” Installing a nanotechnology toilet offers another option to composting and adds to the sustainability concept that many in the tiny house world embrace.
“Tiny houses are the perfect application for many of the latest environment and space saving technologies-from solar panels to toilets”. Bill Rockhill will be at Jay-K Lumber at 8448 Seneca Turnpike, New Hartford on Wednesday, August 17, 2016 from 1p-6p. Also on display will be tiny house with many of the latest space saving and environmental friendly products including solar panels-sorry, no Nanotech Toilet-it’s not commercially available yet.