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!

Subfloor, Part 1

This morning we started by throwing out all the work we did yesterday, which was frustrating. But the end result was much better, and so by the end of the day we felt pretty good about our progress.

The problem was that yesterday we didn't have a table saw yet. This left us with several options for cutting the insulation by hand, none of which resulted in a very straight cut. We also were stuck in the mindset that we had to insert our insulation into the C-channels in our trailer in layers like a layer cake (this is the method we saw demonstrated on the Tumbleweed DVD). The problem with this is that while the C-channels were 1" wide and 3" off the flashing of the trailer, the weld points along the bottom of each one made the interior channel height more like 2 3/4". We had 1" thick rigid foam boards, and so we ended up cutting two 1" wide strips, sitting them in a C-channel (filling up the first 2" of channel height), and then cutting a third 1" wide strip in half  to make it +/- 1/2" thick in order to fill up most of the additional 3/4" of space. The end result was a bunch of wavy, loose fitting strips, which probably wouldn't have insulated the floor very well.

Enter Jeff. Jeff is Sam's uncle, and a builder by trade. He swung by this morning, and decided we could do better. Fortunately, with the addition of a table saw and Jeff's tutelage and assistance, he was right! Jeff had the brilliant suggestion of just cutting the 1" thick foam board into 2 3/4" wide strips, and turning them on their side in order to fill our C-channels. Immediately, this improved the quality of our insulating job 100-fold. He then helped us cut and fit the rest of the insulation into the trailer, and by the end of the day today, we had a very well insulated subfloor.

Lessons learned: use the appropriate tools for the job, and always trust the wisdom of an experienced builder. 

Foundations

A good topic for my first post! When you build a tiny house, your trailer is your foundation. And if we were starting from scratch - i.e., with a non-tiny-house-ready trailer - there'd be a lot more work. But our BWISE custom trailer from Tumbleweed came ready with flashing welded to the bottom of the trailer. And so we're almost all ready to build. Our first job was settling into the site and leveling the trailer with stabilizer and support jacks.

Leveling the Trailer

Next we started putting insulation in. We're using layers of 1" polyisocyanurate board. But they're too rigid to squish under the I-shaped joists. So we've cut strips to fill the under-joist space. Unfortunately, the under-joist space isn't quite as tall as the 3+ inch depth between joists. So we had to cut some strips in half to make things fit.

Just after we finished, an experienced friend stopped by and mentioned we might have put some construction adhesive in to hold the strips in place. We might go back and do that later, or use some expansion foam insulation (which we're told is pretty glue-y). Hopefully the strips will stay put overnight - it's windy in the barn these days!