ABOVE: Matt Bury gets to work setting up a newly-delivered tiny home for the Sherburn Tiny Home Community. They are now up to seven of the 19 available spaces being occupied, with two more slated to be coming in the next month.

SHERBURN – Around a year after putting his idea into action, Matt Bury’s Tiny Homes project in Sherburn has found its footing and continues to grow.

Bury started the project after experiences in managing long-term rentals and research into modular apartments. When he finished working for a tiny home company in Tennessee, Bury came back to Sherburn, purchased the land at 301 South Prairie Street for $40,000, and got approval from the Sherburn City Council.

A year ago, the project was in its infancy. The sewer and water had not been reconnected yet, and he only had two homes to display for interested parties. Now there are hook-ups for 19 tiny home spaces, and seven of these spaces are currently occupied. Five of them were homes purchased through Bury’s provider, while two brought homes of their own to settle on the land. There are also plans for two more homes to move onto the land within the next month.

“There’s a lot of people interested in it,” Bury said. “I think there’s a lot of pent-up demand with it. I think people don’t really like moving in the winter, so now that the weather is good, the phone’s ringing a lot more, and it’s hard to keep up with that side of it.”

The lot has a gravel road on each side of it. On one side, homes face the road diagonally. On the other side, they are rotated 90 degrees and face horizontally to maximize space.

“The ones on the parking lot side, easier to get a bigger one in,” Bury said. “Over there, we gotta parallel park them. It works better for the smaller ones.”

One of the tiny homes on the lot functions as an Airbnb. Bury said he chose to do that when considering the size of the tiny homes.

“With the tiny house, where it’s so much smaller, if you want to have people over, it’s a little bit harder,” he said. “I thought it’d be nice to have one of them kind of set aside, where people could, you know, if they had family come over something, that they could have some extra instead of everyone having a spare bedroom.”

In the past few years, before she retired, current resident Julie Neubauer would pass by Sherburn frequently as she would commute from Sioux Falls to the Twin Cities and back. Reaching the next phase of her life, she heard about the tiny homes project and called Bury.

“I was looking at living in my vehicle seriously,” Neubauer said. “I wasn’t willing to do an apartment. I hit it off with Matt really well. What was most important to me is that I was in a community. I wanted to be in a kind and caring community. It just felt like a perfect fit.”

When she went to move in mid-March, it was during the snowstorm, and she said Bury was there to help her. Living in a tiny home, she said it is peaceful and quiet.

“That will let you make it your own, so you have a sense of agency over your own life that you don’t have in an apartment,” Neubauer said. “The one thing I’m finding is huge support in this tiny community.”

After looking across America for a community to start her retirement in, Neubauer said Sherburn has been good for her in multiple ways.

“I’m learning about the community of farmers,” she said. “This is not accessible in the Twin Cities, Duluth or Grand Marais. Being in this community, across this area between here and Blue Earth. ‘How many dozen do you want?’ And I can call ahead and they’ll have them ready for me. Same with the beef, whatever I’m looking for, they’ll have it ready for me at the store. You don’t get this someplace else.”

Looking forward, Bury said right now his focus is on the tiny homes, but he’s considering ideas for the future.

“This is kind of my primary focus, getting this [project] filled up with people,” he said. “Tentatively talking to the city about some of the other houses. There’s quite a few houses in town that are abandoned. It would be cool to clean some of those up, revitalize them, have people use it and bring more people to the community.”

For more info on the Sherburn Tiny Homes, visit sherburntinyhomes.com or call 763-370-7166.