Do you remember that many weeks ago, when the ground was not covered with snow? When the blinding whiteness that surrounds us here in Cincinnati was only a threat and not the ruthless, seemingly infinite reality with which we are now confronted?
Niko Murrell remembers it. Like so many residents of Cincinna, he penetrated a hardware store in search of necessities to endure the approaching storm. But unlike most of us, he was grabbed by inspiration.
He wanted to build an igloo.
“I grew up in Texas, so I really saw snow when I was a teenager,” said Murrell, who described himself as “a middle -aged engineer” instead of mentioning his real age.
“I never really had the chance to play in the snow like the children here,” he said. “An Iglo was always a kind of bucket list item.”
So when Murrell left Lowe’s Home improvement that day, he took 80 containers the size of a shoe box.
Niko Murrell from Evendale started his Iglo-Bouwreis with 80 containers the size of a shoe box that he filled with water from his snake. He covered it with wet snow as a mortar.
The next three weeks, from January 3, he brought his hours out of his job at Johnson & Johnson, where he makes surgical robots, filling containers with water and transforms it into an igloo with a diameter of 3 meters as a basis. .
He had never done anything like that before, and so there were mistakes on the way. For example, his Google search assignments for homemade igloos showed him magical creations made of multi-colored ice cream, and therefore he used food dye to color his first batch of 80 blocks.
Big mistake.
The dye that Niko Murrell used when building his Iglo delayed the freezing process, so after his first 80 blocks multicolored ice, he switched to clear ice to complete his bucket list project.
“What they don’t tell you is that food dye contains propylene glycol, which looks like an antifreeze,” he said. “So the first set of 80 blocks was beautifully colored, but it took five days before they froze completely.”
For the rest of his construction, he switched to clear ice.
He also forgot that he needed a door to enter his creation. That realization became around the third layer of blocks.
“I cut a hole in front of the door and directed it to the southeast because I thought if we were getting cold air, it would come from the northwest,” he said.
In January 2025, Niko Murrell from Evendale spent more than two weeks building an igloo in his backyard. This photos provided to The Enquirer show the construction in different condition.
Apart from some trial and error, a large part of the work was monotonous: filling the shoe boxes, freezing and then listing them with wet snow as a mortar. Murrell received help from Winston de Weimaraner (“a great helper,” he said) and a friend from Dayton who didn’t want his name to be published, unless it was “absolutely necessary.” (It is not. This is just a story about an igloo.)
Winston de Weimaraner, 8 months, worked as an assistant to Niko Murrell while the Evendale-Man built an Iglo in his backyard.
Murrell’s efforts caught the attention of those who could spy on his Evendale garden.
“All my neighbors probably think:” This man is crazy, “Murrell said. At least one child thought the project was cool enough to give a hand occasionally.
If you have ever seen an igloo, you know they have a dome at the top. Getting that shape is not as easy as you might think. Murrell admits that he has become a little more conical than he had hoped.
Niko Murrell puts his head through the top of his igloo in the back garden.
“The top was a bit deformed compared to the bottom, but it is sealed,” he said.
And quite big. Murrell cannot stand upright, even if it is 1.80 meters long, so that requires a lot from a cool box. Yet the igloo is large enough to easily let a couple with a dog or even a family of four people sleep. Murrell has faith in that estimate because he slept in it himself this week.
One night was enough.
“I don’t really need the need to sleep in it again,” he said. ‘For example, I am a middle -aged guy. My bed is comfortable and warm. ‘
To experience the full experience of his home -made Iglo, Niko Murrell slept in his creation for a while. Although it was windproof and made comfortable by a few inner facilities, he said he did not intend to sleep there again.
However, he is proud of his creation – so great that he posted it on Reddit, where commentators jokes made him rent the ‘newly built studio’ for no less than $ 2,100 a month.
It would of course be a short -term life – although perhaps not as short as you would think. Murrell thinks that the Iglo will last a good month before he will melt with the beginning of spring, of which meteorologists and history ensure that they will come, no matter how unlikely that today feels.
“I think it will be there for a while,” he said. “It may not be habitable, but it must linger a bit.”
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: a man from the Cincinnati region is tackling ‘Bucketlist item’ by building an igloo