Tiny house Plan B is in full swing! We have found a different piece of land in the Middlebury area where we will park our house for the winter and finish off the inside of the house. We’ll continue searching for a longer term spot to move the house to in the spring, and move into the house! Weather permitting (knock on wood) we’ll have the house hauled to Vermont later this week.
Happy Thanksgiving all!!
Well, our tiny home is still sitting in New Hampshire despite our hopes to move it to Vermont this weekend. Here’s what Jeremy thinks of that:
Nonetheless, we still move forward and are figuring out a plan B for exactly when and how our home will move to Vermont. We’ll keep you posted!
There are of course still more shingles to hang (now in the snow, rather than shinglin’ in the rain), as there will always be more work to do on the house! Jeremy took the whole week off from work to get lots done on the house, and with many hours of help from my fabulous dad they got lots of shingles hung. Thanks also to Jeremy’s dad, David, for helping install the propane lines inside the house- for the heater, range, and hot water heater.
Jeremy has been mastering the art of weaving shingles, here on the inside corner where the utility shed meets the house:
The lesson I learned this week is that when it’s 30 something degrees out and you’ve got shingles to hang, you’ve just got to keep moving to stay from freezing. That means unfortunately that working as a team doesn’t always work so well, because it may involve too much standing around. So even though it’s less efficient, running up and down the ladder for shingles, caulk gun, etc. actually works in your favor by creating body heat. I also learned this week to wear two hats, two scarves, and two pairs of wool socks! This all works until the sun starts setting behind the trees, and then you’ve got to call it a day. I’m glad that soon we’ll be working inside the house!
Despite the cold, we’re still smiling and loving our tiny house!
Laura’s asked me – her mom Ida – to guest blog this week, so she can have a rare week off of blogging. I love her posts and expect you readers do too; don’t worry, she’ll be back soon.
Their nickname for me this weekend was “Gimme.” Gimme is an imaginary character that looks like a red blob in the United States of Tara Showtime TV series that Laura likes. She thought I looked like a blue Gimme because I wore a blue rain poncho over my winter coat to protect my coat from tears or other damage. By the time I left, they were both really into it: “Gimme, bring me a shingle half an inch wider than this one;” “Gimme, I need the nail gun,” etc. I felt special.
It’s all about shingling at this point, and the cedar shingles look great! Of course Laura and Jeremy thought, or at least hoped, shingling could be done quickly and of course it’s taking longer than expected. They worked on that all weekend, with help from Laura’s dad Bob and me. Jeremy will continue working on the house all week, and Laura will return for the weekend. On Sunday morning, November 16th the Tiny House will move to its new and permanent-for-now location near Middlebury, Vermont where they live now.
What’s involved in shingling? A lot of fiddling around, if you ask me. Sort them by width, make a row of varying widths, line them up just so, and nail them in with a nail gun (fun fun fun!) or manually. Then make another row staggered above that and keep going. Their water phobia drives all decisions as usual. The main goal of all the outer layers seems to be not to let any water in, which makes sense as letting any water in to a tiny house probably would wreck your living space pretty effectively. So applying the annoying Tyvek tape (it rips too easily) was another task that had to be completed before those shingles could go up. And the shingling slows way down when you have to go around wheel wells and other obstacles like windows, doors, and corners.
On Sunday a friend stopped by and said he’d been reading up on shingling. Apparently the professionals do it in teams – one ‘stacks’ the shingles and the other nails. Laura and Jeremy had been working separately up until then, but tried the team approach and it really seemed to work. I’m amazed they’re not screaming away at each other by now, but they’re mostly working beautifully together on this awesome project.
When I asked them for highlights of the building process, Jeremy quickly replied: “Spending our first night in it.” Very sweet.
There is now a definite autumn chill in the air, and we were graced with some drizzling rain this past weekend. This makes for building challenges, but luckily we also had some excellent help and morale-raising this weekend. Thanks to my dad for shinglin’ in the rain with us- without his encouraging words we wouldn’t have stuck it out as long as we did on Saturday! And thanks to Randy for coming out to work on our electrical stuff.
Even though due to the rainy weather we didn’t take too many build photos this week, we have had some exciting moments. First, we are now super motivated to finish the outside of our house because we have a move date! No, not a ‘move in’ date… We will be having our tiny house hauled from Dublin to the Middlebury area by a wrecker truck on Sunday, November 16. Just 12 days away, eek! The pics below show the shingling progress we made this weekend, and there are many more shingles to be hung very soon:
Lastly, Jeremy and I spent our first night camping out in our new home! It was rustic like camping- sleeping bags and pads on the floor, etc.- but it was plenty warm with our little heater and it did feel like a big moment. It was nice to wake up in the morning in our home, for the first time… Witness our rustic candle light below (resting on the only furniture in our house, the compost toilet!):
Night night folks, until next week.
Go Tiny 