Remember lo those many weeks ago when the ground wasn’t covered in snow? Back when the blinding whiteness that surrounds us here in Cincinnati was merely a threat and not the unrelenting, seemingly never-ending reality we now face?
Niko Murrell remembers. He, like so many Cincinnatians, crowded into a home improvement shop looking for supplies to weather the impending storm. But unlike most of us, he found himself gripped by inspiration.
He wanted to build an igloo.
“I grew up in Texas, so I didn’t really see snow until I was a teenager,” said Murrell, who described himself as “a middle-aged engineer” in lieu of providing his actual age.
“I never really had the chance to play in the snow like the kids here,” he said. “An igloo was always kind of a bucket-list item.”
So when Murrell left Lowe’s Home Improvement that supply-gathering day, he took with him 80 shoebox-sized containers.
Niko Murrell of Evendale began his igloo-building journey with 80 shoebox-sized containers that he would fill with water from his hose. He layered those with wet snow as mortar.
Over the next three weeks, beginning Jan. 3, he spent his hours away from his job at Johnson & Johnson, where he makes surgical robots, filling those containers with water and shaping them into an igloo with a 9-foot diameter as its base.
He’d never done such a thing before, and so there were errors along the way. For example, his Google searches for homemade igloos showed him magical creations made of multicolored ice, and so he used food dye to color his first batch of 80 blocks.
Big mistake.
The food coloring Niko Murrell used in building his igloo slowed the freezing process, so after his initial 80 blocks of multicolored ice, he switched to clear ice to finish his bucket-list project.
“What they don’t tell you is that food coloring has propylene glycol in it, which is like an antifreeze,” he said. “So the first set of 80 blocks were colored wonderfully, but they took like five days to freeze fully.”
He switched to clear ice for the remainder of his build.
He also briefly forgot he’d need a door to enter his creation. That realization hit around the third layer of blocks.
“I cut out a hole for the door and pointed it to the southeast, because I figured if we were going to get cold air, it was going to come from the northwest,” he said.
Niko Murrell of Evendale spent more than two weeks in January 2025 building an igloo in his back yard. These photos provided to The Enquirer depict the build in various states of completion.
Aside from some trial and error, much of the work was monotonous: fill the shoeboxes, let them freeze, then line them up using wet snow as mortar. Murrell got assistance from Winston the Weimaraner (“a great helper,” he said) and a friend from Dayton who didn’t want his name published unless, as Murrell put it, it was “absolutely needed.” (It is not. This is just a story about an igloo.)
Winston the Weimaraner, 8 months, worked as Niko Murrell’s assistant as the Evendale man built an igloo in his backyard.
Murrell’s efforts drew attention from those who could spy into his Evendale yard.
“All my neighbors are probably thinking, ‘This guy’s crazy,'” Murrell said. At least one kid thought the project was cool enough to occasionally lend a hand.
If you’ve ever seen an igloo, you’ll know they’re domed at the top. Getting that shape isn’t as easy as you might think. Murrell acknowledges his turned out a bit more conical than he’d hoped.
Niko Murrell pokes his head through the top of his backyard igloo.
“The top ended up being kind of misshapen compared to the bottom, but it is sealed,” he said.
And quite big. Murrell can’t stand upright in it, though he’s 6-foot-5, so that’s asking a lot of an ice box. Still, the igloo is big enough to easily sleep a couple with a dog or even a family of four. Murrell feels confident in that estimate because he slept in it himself one night this week.
One night was enough.
“I don’t really need or feel the compulsion to sleep in it again,” he said. “Like, I’m a middle-aged dude. My bed is comfortable and warm.”
To get the full experience of his homemade igloo, Niko Murrell slept in his creation one nigh. While it was windproof and made comfortable by some indoor amenities, he said he doesn’t plan to sleep there again.
He’s proud of his creation, though – enough so that he posted it to Reddit, where commenters joked that he could rent out the “newly built studio” for a good $2,100 a month.
It’d be short-term living, of course – though maybe not as short as you might think. Murrell thinks the igloo will last a good month before melting with the start of spring, which meteorologists and history assures us will come, no matter how unlikely that feels today.
“I think it’ll be there for a while,” he said. “It may not be habitable, but it’ll stick around a bit.”
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Cincinnati-area man tackles ‘bucket-list item’ by building an igloo
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