Walls up with dads help

The walls are up! Thanks to dads for their help- Randy and Bob- with finishing the walls on this beautiful Saturday. Follow the pics below to see the progress we made to completion of the walls. Woohoo, we’re going to raise the roof next!

Almost there, just one last panel to close up the walls:

The panels so far have not fit perfectly, so we’ve had to make some on the spot changes- like scooping out extra foam to make room for the 2×4 nailers: Snaking the electrical wiring through the panels: Taking in the view from our bedroom window, yay:Walls complete, time to cover the house in tarps:

Starting to look like a box on wheels…

The walls keep going up, and it’s really looking like a house! Jeremy has been hard at work the past couple days, with lots of help from Randy, Matt, and others. The house raising has not been progressing quite as fast as Jeremy thought it would, but he says slow but steady is good. It has only been a week since the SIPs were delivered, so I’d say we’ve made fairly fast progress! Thanks for all the encouraging words, keep them coming. Next steps: finish the last of the walls, and figure out how to hoist the roof panels up.

We Have a Floor and Walls!!

It is SUPER EXCITING to see our tiny house move from being a dream and a drawing on paper, to being a reality! This week that happened, as we installed the floor and started raising the walls. A huge THANK YOU to all the family and friends who helped us build this weekend. More good photos to come soon, but here are a few (if you helped out this weekend and took photos please send them to us, thanks!).

The excitement started when a big tractor trailer from Pennsylvania barreled down the road with our SIPs (structural insulated panels).

We had been nervous about how heavy and bulky the panels would be to unload. It turned out most of the panels could be lifted by two people, except the large (20 foot) floor panels required four people. In an hour we had all the panels unloaded.

Later that day another delivery of the lumber that fits between the SIPs arrived, along with housewrap, nails, and other goodies. After doing some other materials and tools shopping, we were ready to embark on the big build weekend.

The first step of raising the house- logically- was the floor. There are two large floor panels, each 4 foot wide by 20 feet long with cutouts to fit between the trailer’s wheel wells. The bottoms of each floor panel were covered in Grace Ice and Rain Shield to prevent water damage, and then metal flashing to prevent critters from chewing into the house.

Then pressure treated wood was nailed down to provide a barrier between the metal trailer and the SIPs. The 2×4 lumber was installed along the edges of the panels, and we lined the wheel well openings with a rubber membrane to prevent water infiltration. After that, the tricky part was figuring out how to connect these two large panels and move them into place on the trailer. We spent quite some time wrangling with the panels- jacking them up, pushing them together, etc…. How many guys does it take to fit the floor onto the trailer??

Eventually we faced the reality that we needed to cut a panel down slightly so they would fit between the wheel wells. Jeremy’s Pop (Randy) expertly sawed down a panel, and then we dropped the floor into position!

Lastly, the SIPs fit together with cam locks that we locked into place. While the floor took longer to install than we expected, it was very cool to walk on our floor for the first time.

Next we prepared for the walls. While the floor was being done, others were preparing the roughly 75 pieces of 2×4 and 2×6 lumber that fit between the panels. This required measuring and cutting, and gluing and nailing some pieces together (such as posts and headers). We also started putting some of this lumber into the panels- which required a liberal application of spray foam sealant and nails to secure the wood.

With the floor in place, we installed 2×4’s along the perimeter of the house for the wall panels to fit on top of. We measured the position of the wood, then glued and screwed them into place on the floor. While this was being done, others worked on the tricky task of fitting the wall panels over the wheel wells. This required careful measuring, and installation of bolts to secure the wall panels to the wheel wells.

Finally we were ready to put the first wall panels up, and boy were we ready! With all the prep work we had done, raising the wall panels and fitting them into place went quite quickly. The installation required application of spray foam sealant, construction glue, nails, and 6 inch panel screws. And voila, we had walls! The walls continued to be installed, with Randy putting wiring into the electrical chases along the way. Here is the start to our tiny house!

Many many thanks to all the help and support we’ve had so far from family and friends with raising up the house. We have learned a whole lot about building and SIPs so far, and though there have been minor challenges we’ve made a lot of rewarding progress on our tiny home. I don’t know what other words to use besides ‘really exciting’ for how it feels to see our house take shape, envision living in it, and know that we’ve built it with family and friends.

House Design

The Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs) that will make up our walls, roof, and floor will be arriving next week- and then we’ll get busy raising the walls of the house! In the meantime, here are some drawings and a video to show what the house will look like. Jeremy created all the drawings using Google SketchUp, and the design is based off of tiny houses we’ve seen online and our imaginations.

The house will be approximately 8 feet wide by 20 feet long, with a 3 foot porch by the front door. There are 7 windows to provide plenty of light, a storage loft by the front dormer, and a larger sleeping loft in the back of the house.  You can see the exterior of the house below, with the green showing the trailer. Note that the house will actually be built a foot further down on the trailer than this drawing shows- we realized this will balance the weight of the house over the trailer axles better, even though it will cut into our porch a little.

You can see from the drawing that the back of the house looks like it has a large dormer, but the roof is actually almost flat with trim on the side of the house to simulate a dormer. This is so the house won’t look like a box, while giving us plenty of headroom in the sleeping loft. Thanks Tumbleweed for this idea.

Below is a side view of the inside of our house. When you walk in the front door you enter the ‘great room’ (aka living room) which will feature our tiny sofa. Further in is the kitchen, and there will be a small table that folds out from the wall to eat on. Past the kitchen is the bathroom, which will have a tub/shower, compost toilet, and a storage closet. Above are the two lofts, for sleeping and storage. We’ve kept the layout of the house as open as possible, so that we’ll have the freedom to utilize the space as we see fit.

Now here’s our smiling faces, showing off our trailer and how the house will be laid out on it. For now you’ll have to use these drawings to imagine the house, as we’ve been imagining and dreaming…. but very soon it will start taking shape!

Trailer Prep

Thank you Amy, compost toilet maker and deep thinker, for helping to launch our blog! And a huge CONGRATS on graduating from grad school a couple weeks ago! We were sorry to see you head back to Oregon but wish you the best of luck with finding a job and all the new adventures coming your way.

Over the past several days we have been doing lots of ordering materials for the house, which we are learning is a time consuming and very important part of the building process. We have now ordered windows, a front door, cedar shingle siding, and structural insulated panels (SIPs) which will make up our walls, roof, and floor. You’ll be seeing all of these on our blog in the coming weeks, as we put them together!

The construction work we have been able to do while waiting for these materials is mainly preparing the trailer for the house (we also worked on building a compost toilet box, which Amy is sitting on in that first photo- more on the humanure in a later post). Our 24 foot trailer came without wood decking, so that we can prepare the trailer specifically for our house. We purchased pressure treated lumber to install on the metal trailer frame, which you can see in the photos below. This wood will provide a foundation for the house to rest on, a barrier between the SIPs and the metal of the trailer, and breathing room between the bottom of the house and trailer. It will also help secure the SIPs to the trailer.

And here we are, putting in the first screw of the house!

Below you can see the layout of the pressure treated lumber on the trailer. There are thin strips of wood running along the metal cross pieces of the trailer, topped by larger pieces of lumber that run the length of the trailer. The wood is screwed together, and we will install bolts so that the wood is secured to the trailer frame. Later the floor SIPs will screw into the pressure treated wood.

We were quite pleased and tired after getting the wood down on the trailer.

Lastly thanks to my dad, Bob, for visiting and providing advice on the trailer decking! You’ll be seeing more of Bob as he helps out with other parts of the house, and because he just retired- CONGRATS DAD!!

Coming very soon: We’ll share the drawings of the house, so you can see what it will look like. Leave a comment if you have any house questions, or requests for upcoming blog post topics.