Side Punctures

While we're waiting to hear back from the roofers about whether or not we should install the skylights with the velux flashing kit or wait for them to do it with their own custom made flashing kit, we've decided to start making out side punctures.

Apart from the windows (already made by the wonderful folks at SIPs of America as per Joe Coover's outstanding sketchup model), our Tiny House will have 4 additional side punctures. One for each of our three HRV units and one for the water intake panel. These have to be made before the house is wrapped in Tyvek so that they can be flashed just like the windows will be later on down the road. 

Using the floor plan we had taped onto the floors and walls inside our Tiny House to figure out exactly where each puncture would be located. We had to take into account not only the size of the hole needed, but also the size of any exterior and interior grilles.

Then we set to work cutting into our beautiful SIP walls. Yikes! This was actually much less nerve racking than it might have otherwise been. Once you've cut a hole through your roof, a hole through the wall seems a little less daunting. 

The water intake panel is rectangular, and so that was relatively easy to accomplish. The HRV installation instructions called for a 6.3"diameter circular hole. To accomplish this, they recommended using a 6.3" hole saw. Let me tell you right now, no where (and I mean no where) carries a 6.3" hole saw. You can get one online, but you have to wait for it to deliver, and it's an upwards of $50 investment. Instead, we decided to purchase a $3 compass, draw a circle on our wall, and cut it out with our jig saw.

The only complication with that plan is that we don't have a 4.5" jig saw bade, so we had to make cuts from both the inside and the outside of the wall. Lining up these cuts so that they were both in the exact same spot was tricky. Sam was clever and used a thick drill bit to drill straight through the center of the hole on the inside skin out through the outside skin, then tied a pencil to a piece of string and then tied the other end of the piece of string to the drill bit still anchored in the wall. By carefully making sure that the string was exactly the right length, he could circle around the drill bit with the pencil and mark the exterior wall where it needed to be cut. Then out came the jig saw, and we cut the hole away. 

Ta-Da!

We got all three HRV punctures and the water inlet puncture done in about one day's worth of work split up over two days. Not too shabby. 

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.

Raising the SIPs, Part 6: Raise the Roof!

So, today was finally the day we got the first two roof panels up. It turns out that the first two panels were actually pretty easy to put into place: we managed it with the help of three cousins and some blocking. 

The firs thing we did was measure and snap a line across the portion of the roof which would overhang the side of the tiny house, then we screwed two pieces of blocking onto the panel along this line so that the panel could rest on the tops of the wall, and the blocking would keep it from sliding over the edge of the wall and come crashing down to the floor far below.

Then Team 1 picked up the panel and handed it off to Team 2, who were already positioned on the staging that Sam and I had set up next to the Tiny House for this purpose. 

The staging was really amazing to have- especially for this higher roof placement. It belongs to my cousin, but he was awesome and let us borrow it so we could put our roof up. 

Once Team 2 took possession of the roof panel, Team 1 climbed up into the sleeping loft area and helped lift the panel the rest of the way up into place. 

Although I think that because of the relatively flat pitch of the roof (14 degrees) we could probably have just sat the panel on top of the walls without any problems, I'm still glad we included the blocks screwed into either corner of the panel: this blocking kept the roof panel from sliding down from its perch, and if nothing else will be a great feature to include in the next two panel installations (the 12:12 pitch roof will be much more difficult, and the blocking will be the only way we accomplish it, I think). 

We repeated the process with the next roof panel, and that was it: our panels were up. We were able to let our lifting help go less than an hour after they arrived. To say that the whole process took only an hour would be incredibly misleading. We spent the next several hours playing around with the blocking and the ratchet straps trying to maneuver these panels into exactly the right position. That seems to be a recurring experience with the SIP panels: the big exciting work takes almost no time at all, and then for the rest of the afternoon you're left taping them together trying to get them perfectly positioned down to the fraction of an inch. 

But, we finally got them into place, glued, screwed and nailed them down, and we were left with the ceiling to our sleeping loft. 

Loft Beams

We figured that having the loft in place would be a big help when placing the roof panels, which means we need to place the loft beams to place the loft. The beams will be the first thing that we've installed that will be visible in the finished house, so we took a little extra time to sand them before the installation.

The actual installation was pretty simple- we followed the process that Joe Coover describes for placing loft beams in a SIP Tiny House here. It worked great. At the end of the day we threw an extra sheet of OSB over the newly installed beams and viola- we had a loft! 

1. 

Raising the SIPs, Part 5: Troubleshooting the Cheek Walls

Two more panels up today- and although they were small, they made sure we worked for it. Today we installed the "cheek walls" to the Tiny House. A cheek wall is the name for that section of wall that will form a triangle between the less steeply pitched dormer roof and the normal roof pitch. It looks like all the small mistakes we didn't notice we were making up until this point decided to make themselves felt, and unlike the rest of the panels, these two didn't just slip perfectly into place.

So we (well, mostly Sam- we only have one ladder inside the Tiny House, and he's taller and stronger than I am- so I was relegated to the role of photographer/gopher for most of the day) set ourselves to the task of bringing the two panels into alignment with each other. 

Fortunately, the displacement between the two panels wasn't too bad, and with the help of his trusty bar clamps and a good old ratchet strap, Sam was able to bring the ends together.

Shortly after this photo was taken, we had to disassemble the whole clamp/strap rig in order to apply some construction adhesive between the panels, and then reassemble all the clamps that the strap to keep the panels in place while Sam nailed the hell out of them. Once we were done, they were securely fastened in the correct alignment, and we were pretty proud of ourselves.  

Raising the SIPs, Part 4: The Gable End

We finished raising the SIP walls with the forward gable end. The video below is a time-lapse of the process, which I think demonstrates the time we spend on each part of the process nicely. For each of the walls, the actual raising of the SIP took very little time, followed by an hour or so (two hours in the case of the first wall we raised) of fiddling with it to get the placement just right. The ratchet straps, our 4' level, and several sledge hammers have been key in these adjustments. 

Now that we have all the walls up, the only SIPs we have left are the four roof panels. We're going to wait to get those up until after we have the loft joist installed so that we can have a platform inside the house to stand on as we get the roof panels into place. That'll be our next action step. 

Raising the SIPs, Part 3: The Forward Wall

Sam will have more on this process in a bit, but I just wanted to post this photo: we've got all the side panels up (and over the wheel wells sucessfully) and we're moving on to the forward (and final!) wall. 

Raising the SIPs, Part 2: Preparing the SIPs for the Wheel Wells

So, when I last left you we had gotten the first three SIP panels up on our trailer, and the next step was to prepare the next sections of wall to go over our curved sill plate above the wheel well of the trailer.

We started by cutting out a stensil we had preppared for ealier (before we put the flexible sill plate over the wheel well) by holding a scrap of OSB flush against the subfloor sheating and tracing the wheel wells onto it. We had two stensils, one for the right wheel well and one for the left. We were careful to lable which was which, as well as lableing front and back on each one. Sam used our jig saw to cut along the tracing, which then gave us a peice of wood with a curve that perfectly mirrored the curve of the wheel well. We could use this to mark where we would have to cut our SIP panel skin so that the panel will slide over the wheel well nicely. 

Now, it actually turns out that there were two panels on each side (so a total of four) which we would need to cut curves from: a 12-inch long panel and an 8-foot long panel. (The long walls of the SIP panels were designed this way so that no individual peice would be wider than 8'6" when flat packed onto our trailers since loads wider than 8'6" need an oversized load permit to drive on the roads). We started working on a 12-inch panel first. We measured out how far from the start of the panel the wheel well started, marked that distance on the bottom of our panel, and then lined up our stensil with the bottom of the panel at that mark. We scribed a line along the edge of the stensil onto the skin of the OSB and cut along that mark with the jig saw. We then did a rough foam removal, below Sam is using a chisel to clear away some of the foam.

We only cut through one side of the SIP because the inside skin will slide along the inside of the wheel well sill plate and rest on the subfloor sheathing. From the inside, you won't even be able to see where the wheel well is. 

The next step was to fur out 1.5" of foam in from the cut end of the outside SIP skin. (This opens up the space that the wheel well sill plate will occupy). Professionals use a Foam Cutting Tool for this job, which is a peice of electrically heated wire (like you see on an electric stovetop) in the shape of a rectangle, the width of a 2x4, with an adjustable depth stop. This device will melt away the foam insulation from a SIP perfectly to the depth you set it to. But we're not professionals, and we didn't really want to by a tool that would really only be useful working with SIPs. So, instead we improvised with a hand weeder and a blow torch. 

It worked great! We didn't get the same kind of precision that you could expect with the proper tool, but we're planning on drilling into the OSB all around the wheel wells and injecting spray foam in there to fill the gaps up anyway, so this doesn't bother us too much. 

Having found a system that worked, we repeated the process on the larger panels. 

Now we've just got to reassemble our lifting force and get these panels up! We plan on raising them exactly as we did the last two.

***EDIT***
One very important mistake that we made and didn't realize until we were trying to set this panel can be seen in this photo clearly: You can see that we furred out the foam an inch and a half in from the cut skin, but we left the 2x4 at the same length as the skin instead of cutting it down the 1.5" to match the foam. BIG MISTAKE! We tried to set the panel like this, and were wondering why we couldn't get it to rest on the sill plate properly... well, once we realized that it was because there was this inch and a half to 2x4 in the way we felt pretty dumb. Cutting it down was a mess (we had already put construction adhesive over every thing) and bent one of our jigsaw blades. Fortuantely, our lifting crew was SUPER AWESOME, and put up with all of our ridiculous mistakes even though it was a cold and rainy day our and they all wanted to go inside and get some lunch (as did we). The good news is that eventually we got the 2x4 cut to the right place and got the panel on properly.

Raising the SIPs, Part 1

OK! BIG DAY TODAY: 

Having conquered the challenge of the Sill Plate and the Wheel Wells, we moved on to the most exciting part of our build yet: raising the SIPs! The day started early, with us checking our materials, counting out our SIP screws, and making sure that absolutely every thing was ready for when our lifting crew arrived. 

My amazing family started to show up around 10 to help out. These are only the Early Birds, we ended up having about 6 to 8 people around for any given part of the lifting, although folks drifted in and out of the work site all day. I wish I had been able to get a photo of all of us.

The first wall was definitely the hardest: without any other parts of the structure to support it, it had to stand on its own (or rather, with the help of two support braces), and it had to be perfectly level and plumb since it was the wall to which all the other walls would be erected to match. Thank goodness my Uncle Chuck (Carpenter Extraordinare) and his Magic Laser Level were there to help. Seriously, every one was amazing, but without Uncle Chuck, I don't think we could have gotten this thing up. 

Here's my first experiment with Time Lapse photography, which captures the first wall going up: actually getting the wall vertical takes up maybe the first 5 minutes of the experience, the remaining two hours were spent making tiny little adjustments in the walls positioning to make sure it was exactly centered, exactly level, and exactly plumb. 

We finished getting the first wall in place and secured around noon and we sent the lifting crew back up to the house for lunch.  While our hard working lifters got on with their day, we prepped the first wall to recieve the second. This involved drilling holes in both the standing rear wall and the incoming side wall panels so that the electrical chases would run from panel to panel...

... and predrilling the standing rear wall at 12" intervals where our giant 6" SIP screws would go to hold the two walls together. 

Once we had both the standing rear wall and the two side panels prepped, we called the troops back. Fortunately, these next walls were much easier as we just had to marry them up to the rear wall. Because we had spent so much time and effort to make sure that the rear wall was perfectly level and plumb, once we got these walls to line up with the rear wall they were also plumb and level. It took about half the time to set a side wall as the time it took to set the rear wall.

That's not to say that it was perfectly straight forward: 

It turns out that the side walls had taken a slight bend since we picked them up from SIPs of America, but with a little frig-rigging, we were able to straighten that out. Pictured above, my cousin Janie casually holds the wall in place and checks her phone while two other cousins jump up and down on a peice of 4x6 lumber to put pressure on the top of the side wall to bend it outward. When this proved not to be enough, my dad stood beneat the two cousins on the plank and started wacking the wall with a sledge hammer. Not seen in the picture is Sam, who is  screwing the SIP screws into the side wall through the rear wall from the bottom up as we slowly bring the side wall more and more in line with the edge of the rear wall. It all sounds really chaotic and difficult- but it wasn't really. Every one was laughing and having a good time, acutally. It took us maybe an hour to get this wall up, set, and screwed in place. The third panel followed easily. 

Once we got both side walls up, we sent the lifting crew home for the day. Their work was done. These three panels together were really steady, holding each other up against the wind, so we didn't feel the need to get any more up that day. Also- it was getting late and we still had one job left: it was hammer time.

Driving 12d ("12 penny") nails every 6" along the inside and outside skins of the all 3 panels at the level of the sill plate was perhaps the most grueling part of the entire day. Our hands, wrist and forearms ached more and more with each strike of the hammer. Even the thrill of using my great grandfather's hammer to buid my own house wasn't enough to dull the pain. But we got through it, and finished the work day with a well deserved rest inside the beginnings of the Tiny House. 

We knew we would have a breif respite from all the lifting and nailing tomorrow since before we can fit the next panels on the sill plate, we need to prep them from going over the wheel well- but that's a different kind of effort, more mental than physical as we problem solve and trouble shoot. So, I'm going to get to bed now. Nighty' night.