iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 02/10/2026

🪵 He learned through jobs in construction, logging, metal fabrication, heavy equipment, and as an auto mechanic. 🛠️ Today, he builds out-of-the-ordinary things full-time for his YouTube channel, Grind Hard Plumbing Co. Play, it turns out, can be a career. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 02/10/2026

🌲 His rotating treehouse was almost an accident: he designed it to hang from the roof and flex with the wind. Looking at the drawings, he realized nothing would stop it from spinning. Now, it turns 360 degrees with a hand crank. 🔄 ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 02/10/2026

Ethan Schlussler found school rigid, so he learned by building. 🔨 🚲 For 2 years, he pedaled a homemade bike elevator up to his treehouse bedroom. He started with an old bike and a water heater counterweight, then tweaked the gear ratio and added a pulley to ease the climb. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 30/09/2026

The metal roof feeds a filtered drinking-water cistern. Bottles in the cordwood walls throw colored light everywhere. 🍾 Built over 2 to 3 years for $30K to $35K in materials. He builds round for less structural guesswork. She lives round because it feels like a hug. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 30/09/2026

Six months later, the Hermitage was done: 213 sq ft, a living roof, a reciprocal roof structure. Fourteen years on, they live in the Tea Cozy. About 800 sq ft of straw bale, cordwood, and cob. A sunroom warms it passively. An Amish wood cookstove heats the floor. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 30/09/2026

They had one winter to get a roof overhead, and almost no money. 🌀 In 2012, Danielle Williams and Hassan Hall arrived in northeast Missouri. Hassan designed a round earthen home from pallet wood, recycled bottles, local clay, and cedar for cordwood walls. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 25/09/2026

Benito, a blacksmith, made nearly everything in his house, from the sink to the door handles. Oso bought a used sawmill, milled dead trees from a burned forest and raised a straw bale home with friends. The walls went up in a day. Four generations have now built in this dirt. 🧱 ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 25/09/2026

Their first straw bale building is still standing. Around it grew more than a dozen small earthen structures. Two of their three sons came home with their partners and are raising kids here. Friends live in some of the huts too, trading labor for a roof. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 25/09/2026

Athena Steen grew up on Santa Clara Pueblo, where if the family needed a room, they built it from mud. Almost 40 years ago she and Bill took that to an old adobe homestead in remote Canelo, Arizona. No money, no jobs, young kids. 🏜️ ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 17/09/2026

We asked her about the frustrations of early dome builders. She explained that in the '60s people built domes out of wood, which meant sealing joint after joint. Fabric has made all the difference. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 17/09/2026

When we visited @PacificDomes in Ashland, Oregon, Asha had stopped sewing: her team fabric-welds the covers. The domes shelter families, glamping sites, greenhouses, climbing structures, and events. In 2013, NASA raised a 44-foot one in Hawaii to test life on Mars. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 17/09/2026

In 1979, Asha Deliverance sewed her first geodesic dome on an old Singer sewing machine. 🧵 She finished in time for it to become her second child's first home. Friends wanted domes too, so she kept sewing. In 1980, she opened the country's first retail dome company. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 15/09/2026

Then Jason spent three more years stacking cedar rounds and recycled glass bottles into thick cordwood walls. When the sun hits them, the house glows with color. Six years in, it's still not finished. They hope to move in this winter. Jason says the rest cost under $50K. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 15/09/2026

He and his wife Sunni moved into a tiny shack on the property and started building their forever home without buying a single piece of wood. They bought a sawmill. For three yea they cut, milled, and dried lumber from their own trees: beams, boards, all of it homegrown. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 15/09/2026

At 50, Jason Fine quit his union boilermaker job, cashed out his retirement, and bought 29 acres of cheap land in the Missouri Ozarks. 👷🪵🍾🛖 ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 10/09/2026

Gutters and a first flush system clean the roof water: 80,000 liters a year, used at home & in the garden. 💧 Composting toilets on every floor separate urine at the source, feeding the plants. 🌱 The natural pool cleans itself with plants & gravel. Frog stairs included 🐸 ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 10/09/2026

Only then did he restore it, so the home worked with the mountain instead of against it. ☀️🌬️ Big windows and a sun antechamber catch winter warmth and push it through the rooms. In summer, wind is funneled through the house to cool it. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 10/09/2026

To Roman poet Ovid, "everything changes, nothing perishes." Emmanuel Pauwels took on the outlandish project of reviving a hilltop ruin in the Spanish Pyrenees. It came back better than it ever was. Before rebuilding Cal Guerxo, he spent a year watching sun, wind, rain & snow. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 09/09/2026

The Atri Nature House is an all-wood A-frame on slab rock, off-grid. The building is a solar collector: every ray feeds a plant or a person. Grapevines and fruit trees thrive inside. A fifth season. Greywater and sewage filter through worms and volcanic rock until clean. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 09/09/2026

It started by accident. 20 years ago, Anders put up a greenhouse to keep the rain off the log home he was building. It worked so well he never took it down. The shelter became the house. Years under glass gave him a new idea: a house designed from day one to be part of one. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 09/09/2026

For 20 years, Anders Solvarm dreamed of a self-feeding solar house, framed in timber (treated with vinegar so it won't rot) instead of metal. His A-frame greenhouse home is a full-cycle indoor homestead. It pushes what "off-grid" can mean in a climate as harsh as Sweden's. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 03/09/2026

A mountain of leftovers became a Dr. Seuss-ish bodega anchored by a boulder. He moved tons of soil to bring back an old lake & carve a natural swimming pool, fed by gravity from rain caught on the rooftops. 🚧 🏚️ 🔨 🧌 @thomasmlambo ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 03/09/2026

Today, almost every structure, path & piece of furniture out there is built from what somebody else threw out. Pallet wood. Retired polycarbonate metro signs. Mismatched windows. Rescued floorboards. A forgotten stack of floor planks became a woodland sauna. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 03/09/2026

In 2021, Copenhagen pushed "King-of-Trolls" Thomas Dambo out of his old hangar to make room for a highway. 🧌 So he took the whole workshop & moved onto an old farm outside the city. A no man's land became his Wonderland Homestead: & the hub of his artist-maker business. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 01/09/2026

Hundreds of families still live inside that rock. Thea's rooms were never built. They were emptied. Soft pale tuffeau worked by hand, a façade at the front & nothing but hill behind it. She takes us through all four homes, her neighbors' places, then the town. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 01/09/2026

Bourré is about one square mile wide. Underneath it run some 350 miles of tunnels, spread across seven levels. The rock came out of that hill centuries ago to build the châteaux of the Loire. What got left behind was a second town, in negative. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 01/09/2026

She grew up in Manhattan. She now lives inside a hill, a limestone boulder hollowed out over centuries, with 400 km of old quarries turned into homes. Since she moved to Bourré, Thea Carini has restored 4 troglodyte homes, one after another, all carved into the same hillside. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 27/08/2026

They opened the classroom into a home: tin-and-horsehair ceiling patched by hand, insulated, a pellet stove under 14-foot ceilings. What they left alone: graffiti in the cladding, names etched into wall panels, the school bell pulley. Their architecture office is in there too. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 27/08/2026

They found it down the road: a 19th-century one-room schoolhouse in Weare, New Hampshire. Vacant 15 years, on the market 7, zoned commercial until the owner finally had it rezoned residential. Brick & granite, structurally sound, hollowed out to an empty shell. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 27/08/2026

An abandoned building is never fully empty: it's just waiting for someone who can read what's carved into its walls. In New Hampshire, Kreg & Danielle Jones weren't looking for a home. They wanted a project big enough to take on with their 18-year-old son before he left home. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 25/08/2026

Summer runs backward, curtains shut by day & windows open at night. The kitchen follows the same logic: corn flour & dried beans, tortillas & tamales over wheat bread, produce canned, pickled, fermented & solar-dried on-site, cheese from the village co-op's herds. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 25/08/2026

Straw bale walls & an earthen floor, laid by hand, plus a few dollars a month to tie into the village micro-grid. No mechanical heating or cooling, just a routine: insulated curtains open on sunny winter days to load the floor with heat, then down at night to hold it in. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 25/08/2026

20 years ago, Dan Durica went looking for a place with the good parts of city, suburb & countryside & none of the weight. He found a village in northeast Missouri, @dancingrabbit, & built the house himself. 💵 $15,000 total, solar & batteries included; 🌾 $50/month for the land. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 21/08/2026

A grotto living room where parakeets fly under a skylit dome. Secret bookshelves opening onto hidden pantries. A "living well" channeling cool, fragrant plant air indoors. An underground fishpond, because why not. Dark and damp by definition? Not here. Link to video ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 21/08/2026

One experiment became a labyrinth of domed rooms, tunnels & courtyards. Zachi builds in ferrocement: wire mesh + thin cement plaster, moldable into almost any shape. But the real move is quieter — keep the insulated core small, let the soil temper the rest. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 21/08/2026

Underground doesn't have to mean dark, & it doesn't have to mean a bunker. Twenty years ago, Zachi & Allison Anderson started digging into a hillside in Grass Valley, California. Heat, cold & fire risk above; steady, temperate ground below. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 18/08/2026

A Roosevelt & a Reagan agreeing one wooden boat was worth keeping. Private donors matched it; unions & volunteers put in 15 years. Aboard with Ford: the fantail chair built around his grandfather's leg braces, & the sons FDR gripped so the country thought he could walk. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 18/08/2026

After FDR's death in 1945, it drifted through owners (Elvis, no less, bought it at auction in '64 & gave it to charity), rotted, & sank in the SF Bay. Sold to the Port of Oakland for $15,000. Then FDR's son James lobbied President Reagan, who earmarked $2.5M to save it. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 18/08/2026

Ford Roosevelt grew up on stories about the boat where his grandfather, FDR, ran the country. By the time he was grown, it had sunk. The USS Potomac was FDR's "Floating White House" (the one place he could move freely without the world seeing that he couldn't walk). ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 14/08/2026

They trained students to help finish before the winter rains: clay plasters inside, an earthen cob floor underfoot. Locals swore hempcrete would never get permitted; in 2016, theirs became CA's 1st approved hempcrete home, & Neil now helps others design their own. Links below ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 14/08/2026

Convinced they'd been priced out of California, they found a rundown Gold Rush-era property above 2,500 ft outside Nevada City & spent 2 years in a fifth wheel trailer, observing the land before building. Hempcrete was so light that they raised half the house in just 5 days. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 14/08/2026

Can you get a roundhouse of hempcrete, cob & lime permitted in rural California? 🐚 Most houses are built to seal the world out, but Neil & Stella built one that breathes: walls of hemp, lime & sand that resist fire, earthquakes & mold while keeping the air inside clean. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 13/08/2026

Around it, nothing is decorative: orchards, gardens, a fish-stocked pond, cattle & the goats their daughters raise, show & sell — they've bought their own cars with the profits. Self-sufficiency built with engineering discipline, not survivalist fantasy. 🪖🏡🐐🌅 ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 13/08/2026

The house came first: an underground, double-walled & double-waterproofed shell Josh engineered to shrug off floods & tornadoes. Passive solar keeps it warm; one wood stove heats the house + the water at once. It's already taken a direct tornado hit — without a scratch. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 13/08/2026

Before Conway ever picked up a shovel, he'd already spent years living underground: one of four men crewing a Titan II nuclear missile silo for the Air Force. Whether that's where the idea came from, even his son isn't sure. Conway never said. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 06/08/2026

Today: winter crops grow in his sunken greenhouse, a carved cellar stores the harvest, pigs & chickens feed him, & horses help overgrazed land recover. John feels purpose now, thinking long term. When the right systems are in place, life gets quieter & more manageable. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 06/08/2026

📍 2.5 acres of raw northern Arizona land — $1,800; 🚐 4 years in a campervan, systems before shelter; 🌧️ Land shaped to catch the monsoon rains; ☀️ Solar power + improved soil & homegrown food; 🛖 A $13K cabin, built almost entirely by hand — fully paid for. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 06/08/2026

"More structure, less pressure." That's the motto John landed on after a layoff left him with $6,000 in savings — & having lived on the street as a teen. Instead of rushing to build a house, he started with the systems that make a home possible. ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 04/08/2026

Inside: oak timbers, kerosene lanterns, a homemade airboat: a mine shaft crossed with a train depot. Out back, craned in piece by piece onto hand-laid track: a 58,000-lb caboose. Conway died in 2018. His son, Zane, has spent years restoring it room by room. ⛏️ ⛰️ 🚂 💛 ↓

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Nicolas Boullosa @faircompanies.com · 04/08/2026

For decades, he worked mostly alone: an engineer from Missouri's lead mines carving a home into a mountainside: no permits, no architect, his son growing up alongside him. 🧱 A foot of steel-reinforced concrete; 🌬️ Air drawn through the earth: cool in summer, warm in winter. ↓

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