Ahh... I've fallen behind in blogging again... So, I'm going to revert to an old standard of mine: post the photos I've got now, and write the story of what's going on in them later. Check back for updates on this post some time around the beginning of August.
Ahh... I've fallen behind in blogging again... So, I'm going to revert to an old standard of mine: post the photos I've got now, and write the story of what's going on in them later. Check back for updates on this post some time around the beginning of August.
Ahh... I've fallen behind in blogging again... So, I'm going to revert to an old standard of mine: post the photos I've got now, and write the story of what's going on in them later. Check back for updates on this post some time around the beginning of August.
Ahh... I've fallen behind in blogging again... So, I'm going to revert to an old standard of mine: post the photos I've got now, and write the story of what's going on in them later. Check back for updates on this post some time around the beginning of August.
After the mad dash to get everything ready for the roof measurements and underlay, we've been able to set our sights a bit lower down and now that the side punctures are complete, we can start to work on weatherproofing the exterior walls. The first step in that process has been to lay down a strip of double-wide protecto-wrap (otherwise known as off-brand Grace Ice & Water Shield) along the base of the tiny house. This covers the trailer fascia, the subfloor, and all the joins at the base of the SIPs; and while it may look like a simple job, I spent an entire half day with a rubber hammer and a roller, working the rubberized adhesive into the irregular surface of our Tiny House, making sure that the two really married together. By lunch time, my wrists and hands were aching- but I managed to talk Sam into giving me a hand massage over lunch, so that was okay. :)
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.
Hurray! It's roof day! It's technically roof-prep day. The roofing company we've hired makes two visits: during the initial visit the roofer puts down underlayment and takes measurements. He (or she, I suppose, but I don't know if there are any women working for this company) takes those measurements back to the company's facility where they custom make your metal roof sheets, and then when they're done with that, they come back and install it. Today was our underlayment and measurement day. Doesn't the house look nice with underlayment on the roof?
My favorite part of the day though was that the man who was measuring our roof is actually from the next town over from North Stonington. When we told him we were going to be moving onto a property on Clarks Falls Road, his first response was "Oh- will you be near the Palmers' farm or the Bills'?" I love that we're moving into a town where people ask your address in relative terms of proximity to family farms. We chatted about the property in North Stonington, and when we said that we didn't know what we were going to do for water since we won't have a well, he told us about a spring on the side of the road about 3 miles away from our property that people have been using for years for their drinking water. While I know that there are a fair number of concerns about using water that just comes out of a pipe on the side of the road, it's still nice to know that there is a super local/accessible source of free water for us when we get to North Stonington.
After we finished the porch yesterday we started on the roof trim, and worked all day today to finish it. Thankfully installing the roof trim was waaaay easier than building the porch, and we were able to finish before sunset this evening. We took the next few hours to do a thorough cleaning of the barn before the roofers get here tomorrow so that they'll have space to work. We are soooo lucky that they had to delay a day, because we never could have finished all of the work in time for them to arrive this morning. It just couldn't have happened. The extra day has been absolutely necessary. Tomorrow: roofers come!
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.
So, because the time has come to get a door made for the Tiny House, we have to pick out flooring. I know, at first glance that doesn't make much sense, but it turns out that in order to make a door, you need to know how high to make a door, and in order to know how high to make a door you need to know how high off your subfloor your flooring will be, and in order to know that, you need to know what you're using for flooring.
We investigated several different options, and it really came down to Cork vs Bamboo. In the end we decided to go with engineered bamboo because it was a) much cheaper than cork and b) deals with changes in humidity and wet locations better than most cork options (and pretty much all the semi-affordable options). Dealing well with changes in humidity was a really important factor to us because we'd like to use one flooring throughout the house which means that we'll be using it in the bathroom. That may not work out, but we figure that if things start to go south we can always put a vinyl flooring on top of the existing wood flooring in the bathroom (which is only like 10 square feet anyway), so even if we have to tear it out it'd be worth it to give it a shot. In the living room, we'll have the opposite concern: heating the tiny house with a woodstove in the winter can really dry wood out, so having the engineered stuff will definitely help there as well.
Here's a photo of the bamboo we've temporarily settled on. It's actually a lot less red in person (looking more yellow than anything else). It also has the most phenomenal texture- which I think is maybe the real reason why I wanted it.
And for tone comparison, here's a quick shot I took at Home Depot.
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.
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.
Getting the sill plate up and over the wheel wells was by far the most technically challenging task we've faced in this tiny house build so far. The method that our go-to Tiny House Sip Construction expert, Joe Coover, recommended was to find a "flexible 2x4" and bend it over the wheel well.
Well, we looked all over Home Depot, and I couldn't for the life of me find any type of 2x4 that I thought was flexible enough to bend. What we find was this fabulously bendy PVC material that came in 1x4 planks. Doubling up on these gave us the exact dimensions of a 2x4.
In order to figure out the angles at which each of these boards would need to be cut, Sam traced the wheel well and the dimensions of our sill plate material onto a peice of scrap OSB, and then used ~The Power Of Math~ (I'll try to get more details on this process later) to figure out that we needed about a 44-degree cut on each of the end of the 2x4 which would but up against the flexible sill plate, and at both ends of the flexible 1x4s.
A few cuts later and we tested the flexiblility of the PVC board over the wheel wells for the first time. We found that they were a little too stiff to bend. Fortuantely, Joe Coover came to our rescue (again). His flexible material had been slightly too rigid as well, and he found that by scoring one side of it and heating it up, he had been able to bend it over the wheel wells just find. We didn't really have any good method of heating up our PVC, but we could score it, so we figured out how to use the depth-stop on our chop saw and gave it a go.
As you can see here, it worked like a charm and the 1x4s bent over the wheel wells beautifully.
The next step was to figure out where to cut the other end of the flexible boards. I wish we had some really sophisticated method for getting this right, but unfortunately, it was just a big game of guess-and-check for us: one that twice ended up with us cutting a board too short. But by going slowly, shaving down each board by ever smaller amounts and checking the fit after ever cut, we got there.
At the end of the day, I was immensly pround of our work. We bolted the flexible boards to the wheel wells to keep them in place, and we secured the sill plates on either side to keep the boards properly bent. I think it turned out great.
OK- we got back on track today and started our sill plate. The first part of the process was to measure and mark out the lines we would use the position the 2x4s that will make up the sill plate.
It's really imporant that these lines make a perfect square, so we triple checked them. After measuring in from the sides 4.5" on each face and marking lines, we checked to make sure that these lines formed 90-degree angles to each other: first we double checked to make sure that each length was the same as it's counterpart across the trailer. Then we pulled what's called a "3-4-5" triangle on each corner: if one leg of the triangle is 3' and the other is 4', then (if the angle between those two legs is 90-degrees) the hypotenus will be 5'. Fortunately for us, each of the corners made great 3-4-5 triangles. Finally we checked the diagonals across the trailer. They were equal. We were square.
This meant we were ready to start the next part of the job: actually placing the sill plate. Today we kept it easy and just did the portion of the sill place that didn't involve the wheel wells. No angled cuts, no curves to negotiate: just putting a (hopefully) straight piece of wood down on a straight line and securing it there. The most difficult part was figuring out where to drill holes for the trailer attachement bolts to go, but this didn't take too much extra work. We just placed the 2x4 next to the bolts, marked where they were on the length of the wood, measured how far in from the edge of where the 2x4s would sit the bolts were located, and marked that spot on the wood. Then we got to "drill, baby, drill" (the only time I've endorsed that course of action).
Tomorrow we'll have to start problem solving and figure out how to get the sill plate over the wheel wells.
