Porch Day 4

It wasn't easy, but we finally finished the porch! It was a really horrible process building it, but we emerged victorious, and really, really proud of our work.

The cuts necessary for the plywood sheathing were actually relatively simple, even if they weren't easy. Sam had to use the skill saw because our table saw is too rinkydink to handle a full sheet of plywood, and so the edges weren't perfect, but they were totally good enough (the distinction between perfect and good enough is one that we are becoming increasingly comfortable with during this process), and screwing them onto the porch frame was actually really easy. 

And then we were done!

We were really, really happy with the result. I felt really proud of our work.

Porch Day 3

Okay, bright new day today. Time to set aside the frustrations of yesterday and make some diagonal runners. In point of fact, today was perhaps one of the most stressful days in the build yet. We just could not wrap our heads around these diagonal runners. It took all day to cut and place 2 pieces of wood. I was way too frustrated most of the time to take photos, but here are a few that I did take a moment to snap. Really, I'm too emotionally and mentally drained to write in depth about the process right now. Tomorrow we cut and place the plywood sheathing on the roof. Let's hope that's more straight forward. 

The good news from today is that the rain yesterday put the roofers behind schedule, so instead of coming on Wednesday 7/1, they'll be coming on Thursday 7/2. I think we'll really need the extra day to clean up before they get here. 

Porch Day 2

This is what the Tiny House looked like at the end of the day today. I know what you're thinking- it doesn't look that different from what it looked like at the end of the day yesterday. In fact, it looks like the only new thing on the porch at all are those three little pieces of wood against the forward wall of the house. Well, you're right. We started the day off with the realization that if we had beveled the tops of the boards which make up the edge of the box, we could lower the height of the porch roof a fraction of an inch without affecting the slope of the roof or the height of the porch's entryway. 

Why is this fraction of an inch so important? Because we're pushing things on two fronts: first, the porch is already at an 11 degree pitch. That's really shallow. Also, the distance between the top of the porch and the bottom of the window above it is only about 4 inches. In that 4 inches, we need room for the window, the metal roof, the window trim and the siding. So, yeah. We really want all the space in that gap, and to maximize the porch roof slope. 

So, we spent the day carefully dismantling the work we did yesterday piece by piece, putting bevels on the outside edges of the box, and reassembling the thing. Then we beveled and placed the ledgers. And then we ran into a brick wall. The porch roof isn't a simple shed, it's got a two hips in it where the sides slope down in a different direction from the front, and we need to have two diagonal runners from the ledgers to the outside corners of the box, they need to be beveled, with miter cuts on either side, and somehow need to be fixed at each end. 

And we have no idea how to accomplish these things. We worked into the evening trying to make the things, and eventually decided that we should just call it a night and start again in the morning. 

It wasn't a complete waste of a day, though. I got my new favorite tool from the hardware store this morning. It's called a bevel. It's crazy simple, and it allows us to scribe interior angles- meaning we can do more carpentry and less math.

Porch Day 1

Well, the exterior trim and porch materials are ready and it's time to get started building a porch! We had very limited information on exactly how to do this, so we mostly just made it up as we went along. For porch posts we decided to use our 4x4s, but we wanted them to be a little bit fancy, so we cut a bevel out of each corner to give the 4x4s chamfered edges.  

While Sam was doing this, I worked on creating a 3-sided box that would, in conjunction with the forward wall of our house, define the edges of our porch space. 

We used scrap from our 4x4s as nailers to help attach the porch to the forward wall of the house. Sam screwed them into the wall while I attached the box to our newly chamfered posts. 

And then we just lifted the box-and-posts up and into place, screwed it to the nailers on the house, and we had the skeleton of our porch in place. 

Not bad for a days work.

What We Do on the Farm When We're Not Building.

Great Stuff: Gaps and Cracks

We took a moment today to complete a chore that we've been putting off for a while now. Every place that we've had to melt away foam, we need to fill whatever void is left over with Great Stuff Gaps and Cracks expandable spray foam. 

We did this along both wheel wells, the loft beams, and the chimney hole. Now the inside of our house is littered with little pillows of spray foam which have expanded back through the holes we drilled in the wall in order to fill the gaps behind.

In other news, we've scheduled the roofers to come on Wednesday July 1st, so that gives us a firm deadline by which we need to have the porch built and the roof trimmed. Wish us luck!

Installing the Kimberly, Part 3: Framing the Cathedral Ceiling Box

So, today we installed the frame for the chimney hole. It was actually pretty straight forward, but required one of the more complicated wood cuts I've done so far. 

I know, it's not actually that complicated, but dammit, I made it from scratch, and I made it the right size, and it fit perfectly the first time. 

Here's Sam demonstrating how great it fits. It actually didn't have to fit perfectly the first time since I made it out of scrap lumber we had in the barn that was really weathered a little bit rotting away. Once we had the cut figured out, we had to go to Home Depot and get a 2x10 board and recreate the piece with that. But still. It fit right the first time (and the first time with the real wood), and I'm proud of it.

Here's our cathedral ceiling box, sitting nice and pretty in the hole we made for it. We had to take it out again because it's not time to install it yet, but it's good to know that it fits just fine and is in the right place.

Installing the Kimberly, Part 2: Cutting The Cathedral Ceiling Box

Okay, so it took us a little longer than expected, but we got our chimney hole cut. 

Sam courageously makes the first roof puncture

It actually turned out to be a little more complicated than we had initially thought. If you want a vertical square chimney box to go through a roof panel that's on a 45-degree pitch, you can't simply hold the box flush to the panel, trace around it and cut. You have to figure out what the area of the square chimney box is on the plane of the roof panel (a rectangle), and cut that shape out of the ceiling. You also can't cut the hole perpendicular with the roof panel, but have to cut it on a 45-degree bevel from the roof (since the roof is 45-degrees off of vertical, you need to correct for that so that the cut you make is vertical), 

Fortunately our jig-saw has a bevel option, so that we can position the blade at a 45-degree angle relative to the foot. We can then hold the foot flush with the roof panel and have the blade make a vertical cut. Unfortunately, we don't have a jig-saw blade long enough to go through both  skins of our SIP. So, we cut the first one out and cleared out the polystyrene just like we did for the wheel wells. My mom was there for that part, and took a video for us. I know we've had videos of me melting the foam core of our SIPs before, but here's another one, just in case you enjoy watching the process as much as I like doing it. 

Then we were able to drill holes in the roof at the base of the hole, and from the outside measure the appropriate rectangle on the outside skin of the roof panel. Once that was cut, it was just a matter of clearing out enough foam for us to install a wooden frame inside the hole the same way the SIP manufacturers installed wooden frames inside the holes they cut for the windows. 

We called it a day after that, and tomorrow we'll frame the thing. 

Skylights!!

They arrived!

Installing the Kimberly, Part 1: Troubleshooting the Chimney

Last night we had an amazingly productive conversation with Vanessa, our Kimberly Stove dealer from  Tiny House Big Life. She's really awesome. Yesterday morning I sent her an email to let her know that we're going to start our Kimberly install this week and asked if she had any pieces of advice for us. She set up a phone conference time for yesterday evening, and walked us through the entire process step by step. It turns out she wrote the installation guide for the Kimberly, so there's truly no better person to have on the phone to answer your questions. 

Armed with our notes from last night's phone conversation, we set out this morning to dry fit our chimney to our Kimberly Stove. Unfortunately, we ran into a problem right off the bat. After positioning our stove on the spot we taped out on the floor of the Tiny House, we tried to fit the first piece of the chimney to the back of the stove. It didn't fit. 

This didn't cause nearly the kind of the concern you might expect, as I was totally  confident that if we got in touch with Vanessa, she'd help us out. Really, she's raising the bar for customer service in my mind.  We did some research and looking at the product line from the company which manufactures the chimney pipe (BDM), we think we identified the problem. Even though the billing slip told us that we had been shipped a "Starter Tee" pipe, looking at the actual product in hand it appeared that we had a normal Tee pipe, which is fitted differently at the end. So we sent Vanessa an email with this information, the photo above, and my drawing below, asking her what could be done. 

We got an email back within the hour. Vanessa was traveling to a wood stove conference, and so wasn't able to chat, but instead forwarded our email to the inventor of the Kimberly stove, Roger Lehet from Unforgettable Fire. He wrote us back almost immediately explaining that the starter tee was actually a new product, and that prior to it being available, the way that Kimberlies were normally installed was to take a pair of avionic shears to a normal Tee, cut away the rolled edge about an inch in from the pipe, and fit the cut edge of the Tee pipe over the Kimberly exhaust pipe. 

We didn't have a pair of avionic shears laying around, so we took the pipe to a local metal working shop, and they were able to give us a nice clean cut on our pipe. But, when we brought it back out to the barn, we had a new problem: it still didn't fit. Further investigation revealed that the company which manufactured our chimney pipe is a different company from the one that Unforgetable Fire used to deal with. The old chimney pipe company manufactured a normal Tee which, when the end was cut off, fit nicely over the Kimberly output pipe. The normal Tee from the new chimney pipe company (apparently) does not. 

The good news is that the special Starter Tee from the new chimney pipe company is designed to fit with the Kimberly exhaust pipe. Vanessa was super awesome about the whole thing, and once she was out of her conference, was able to order a Starter Tee for us from the chimney manufacturer. 

Tl;DR: If your Starter Tee from BDM doesn't fit into your Kimberly, confirm that it's not in fact a normal Tee. If it is a normal Tee instead of a Starter Tee, don't cut into it, that's not going to work. Instead get it exchanged for a proper Starter Tee. 

We were able to continue working on the project without the proper starter tee by duct taping the normal tee into place and using that to figure out were the cathedral ceiling box should be placed. All this took a while, so after we had marked the location of the ceiling box, we decided to call it a night. Tomorrow we start cutting into out roof (yikes!)

Unhappy Delays

My grandfather, who aged so imperceptibly over the past decade we all thought he was immortal, passed away. We've stepped back from Tiny House work to spend some time with family.

Blocking Out the Floor Plan

While we wait for the bleaching oil on the exterior trim to dry, we've started on more more task that we'll have to figure out before the roofers arrive: cutting out the chimney hole! 

In order to know where to cut the chimney hole, we need to know where the wood stove will be. Because we're working in such a tiny space with such small tolerances, the only way to know exactly where the wood stove should be is to figure out where every thing in the tiny house will be. To this end, we bought several rolls of differently colored masking tape and blocked out the entire floor plan on the interior surface of our Tiny House. 

Having figured out where the base of the wood stove is going to go, the next step is to unbox the stove and dry fit it. this will help us translate the position of the stove on the floor into the position of the chimney's cathedral ceiling box on the roof. 

Exterior Trim, Part 1: Bleaching Oil

We've decided to hire a company to do the roof for us since we're so far behind schedule. What this means is that we'll need to have the roof trim installed and the porch built before the roofers can come. This means we'll need our roof trim and porch materials prepared. 

We're doing the exterior of the Tiny House in western red cedar. In most parts of the country, western red cedar weathers to a beautiful even grey. However, in areas close to the shore, salt in the air from the ocean reacts with the tannins in the red cedar and causes it to weather in uneven black blotches. The solution to this? A product called Bleaching Oil. Bleaching Oil prevents the salt in the air from reacting with the tannins in the wood, but unlike a wood sealer, allows the wood to continue to weather. This gets you the even grey tone in your exterior cedar that people have come to associate with Cape Cod, Nantucket, and other portions of coastal New England.

(For an interesting piece on the differences between red cedar and white cedar shingles that was helpful for us in our decision making process, check out this This Old House Article.)

Today is a hot, sunny day with relatively low humidity, and the forecast looks pretty good. So, we took the day to paint all of our exterior trim with Cabot Bleaching Oil. It'll take the next two days to dry, and then we'll need to pain the back sides of the boards. Two more days to dry, and then we'll be ready to build the porch and trim the roof. 

Raising the SIPs, Part 7: The Final Chapter

So, we finally placed the last of the SIPs- and let me tell you, they were doozies. The challenge was getting large, heavy panels (without skylights this time) onto the steeply inclined 12:12 pitch portion of the roof. Fortunately, I've got a big family, and so we were able to round up 10 willing and able bodied individuals to help us out. We never could have done it without their help. 

We used the same interior surface cleat system that we did with the 3:12 pitch roof panels, and it worked well- we didn't end up resting the panels on the internal cleats they way we thought we would, but they were completely necessary to provide handholds for the inside-lifting team. 

Apart from the added challenge of the steep slope and height of the panel placement, these guys followed the same pattern as all the rest of our panels. They were lifted roughly into place in about 30 minutes, and then we spent pretty much the rest of the day finagling them into exactly the right alignment and securing them in place.

 The last panel (where all of our previous mistakes came to a head) ended up being about 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch out of square, but considering that we had never done this before, we were pretty pleased that all our mistakes tallied up to only 3/4 of an inch. We ended up just filling the 3/4" gap with a lot of construction adhesive. It's on a face that buts up against the cheek wall, so it's going to get plenty of flashing when the roof is placed. Bottom line: a) we're not too worried about it, and b) it's a heck of a lot better than amateurs like us could have gotten using traditional framing methods. 

I forgot to set up a camera to capture the event either with time-lapse or video, but fortunately my dad had the presence of mind to take a bunch of pictures that pretty much give you a time-lapse like experience of the event. Below you can see them in video form, and if you want to take a closer look, a larger version of each image is posted below. 

Floor Team hands first panel off to Exterior Platform Team

Exterior Platform Team (assisted to by members of Floor Team) begins hand off of first panel to the woefully understaffed Interior Team (me & John). Far-left: Uncle Chuck coming to join the Interior Team.

The Exterior Platform Team continues the hand off to the Interior Team. Far left: Uncle Chuck and Jeff rush to the aid of the Interior Team.

The now 4-person strong Interior Team is able to accept hand off of the panel from Exterior Platform Team. Far right: Chuck and Sam watch without lifting anything. 

View of Interior Team during hand off. Member of Exterior Platform Team visible through the window

Interior Team fine tunes initial placement

Fine Tuning continues...

First Panel in place!

Checking the position of the ridge line

More checking the ridge line

Even more checking of the ridge line (I told you that most of the time involved in our SIP construction was dedicated to making tiny little adjustments)

Let's just check that ridge line one more time....

Ok, really, last time checking the ridge line. John checks his phone. 

Time to slap one that continuous double bead of construction adhesive and place the second panel (Note: construction adhesive applied on the first side before panel was placed, we just didn't photograph that part)

Floor Team lifts second panel

Floor Team bringing second panel to awaiting Exterior Platform Team

Floor Team begins hand off of second panel to Exterior Platform Team

Hand off continues. Note, again Interior Team consists of just me & John- by far the smallest members of the crew. You'd think we''d have learned from last time and had another person or two up there, but nope. 

Floor Team completes hand off of second panel to Exterior Platform Team

Exterior Platform Team begins hand off of second panel to Interior Team

Exterior Platform Team is in trouble when Interior Team can't really lift their fair share of the second panel during hand off. Floor Team quickly steps in to assist Exterior Platform Team, For a moment, it looks like we're going to drop the second panel.

Floor Team merges with Exterior Platform Team to narrowly avoid disaster

Situation stabilized with additional members of Exterior Platform Team now able to force second panel back into place, however the initial problem remains that Interior Team still consists of just me & John

Pete finally seeing the root cause of our difficulties which the rest of us somehow missed) moves to join the Interior Team

The Interior Team finally able to provide the upward thrust necessary to allow the Exterior Platform Team to push to push the panel towards the center line of the house. 

And finally, the last sip panel is pupped roughly into place

The interior team confirms that the panel is resting on its bottom internal cleat (just like we planned), and the heavy lifting is officially over. 

One last group photo, and we were able to let our lifting crew go get some lunch. 

While we let most of the lifting crew go after this last picture was taken, our day was far from over. Thankfully, Uncle Chuck (a professional builder) stuck around to help us figure out exactly how to get these last two panels into the best positions. It took us several hours adjusting the panels fractions of inches one way and then another before we got them into the right spots. Then we had to screw them into place. It was a full day of difficult work, but I'm really glad that all the SIPs are up now.