We’ve moved in!

Wow! We’ve been living in the tiny house now since late March, and WE LOVE IT. It’s not finished — we still don’t have most of our storage places finished, and our couch is full of power tools, but the basics are here! Our TH is living on a lovely little rented plot of land in Cocoa, Florida.

I realize I haven’t been updating the blog much — but I do post MUCH more frequently on our Facebook page, so I’d encourage anyone who wants to keep up to date to follow us there!

In the mean time, here are some more recent photos:

Quick photo update!

Hey everyone — Just wanted to make a quick post with some progress photos! If you’ve been following, you know we’ve finished the exterior, and now we’re tackling the guts. We’ve almost finished the electric (minus the solar system, to be added later), and the plumbling supply. To do next: propane plumbing & drain plumbing. We’ve put up a few walls & ceiling pieces because they’re less intimidating, but we really need to finish what’s in the walls before going further!

Exterior shot 1! The little box on the side of the shed is the power input, a 30A RV connection.

Exterior 2! Air conditioning compressor mounted to the front.

Exterior 3! You can see the on demand hot water heater mounted to the side of the shed.

The feature wall, stained cedar. The air conditioner will go on that bracket.

Shot from the living room to the loft — there’s another octagon window, currently covered with beadboard.

The bathroom is that framed room in the back.

The ceiling & walls are mostly beadboard, and will be painted white.

Our little electrical main panel!

The stairs! Currently upside down… welded together and painted copper.

Continuous insulation, window boxes, tyvek, and more!

Hey everyone! Since it’s been so long since I’ve updated the blog with any useful information, I’m going to give you all a massive photo dump & some explanations below — this should be really helpful in particular for anyone considering using steel framing! Steel framing is awesome, but it does come with some unique challenges that you should be aware of. Please see this former post if you’d like details on the framing itself!

Rob & Proton!

First layer of foam!

Looks like a space house…

Before adding the foam, we flashed the wheel wells to the sheathing!

Flashing details — a trianglar piece of wood under that flexwrap & window flashing tape

Rob installed the window boxes while I did foam!

Inside view!

The window boxes are just the right depth to be flush with the second layer of foam

Proton learning to climb ladders — don’t worry, we’re building her stairs!

Carnage

Our crazy furring plan involved lots of numbers

And diagrams…

We predrilled the holes for the long screws with a long bit

Just enough furring to keep the Tyvek on while installing the windows

Looking pretty slick!

Insulation

Because steel is a great thermal conductor, it really pays to use a technique called ‘Continuous Insulation.’ Basically, this means putting at least some of your insulation outside the studs, instead of putting everything between the studs as in typical wood frame construction. This is actually a great energy efficient technique for wood framing too, but it’s really essential when using steel.

We decided to put all of our wall insulation on the outside, leaving the stud cavities free for easy running of electrical, plumbing, propane lines, and even shelving in some key areas. Directly over the plywood sheathing, we applied 3″ of polyisocyanurate rigid foam, which has an R-value of about 6.5/inch. We did two layers of 1.5″ foam, layering the ends of the pieces so that no seams ran straight from the outside to the inside. All of the seams were taped with Tyvek tape so that the foam acts as an air barrier.

Window Bucks

At the same time we were adding the foam, we were building wood bucks for all of our windows. We wanted to do “outie” windows for a couple of reasons — 1) we’d have nice deep windowsills inside, which we love!, and 2) the flashing details are a bit easier. However, with the 3″ of foam, this meant that our windows wouldn’t be directly supported by the steel studs. Window bucks allowed us to “build out” the structural framing, giving our windows a strong place to sit. We used 2x8s, which provided a solid nailing surface for our windows (which have an integral nailing fin). They were also the perfect width to be flush on the inside of the framing and the outside of the foam (7.5″)! The only downside of the window bucks is their weight — we basically lost the weight savings we had from using steel instead of wood when we added these, since we have so many windows!

Housewrap

The next step was the Tyvek house wrap. This is a pretty straightforward, and we had gotten a great deal on a mostly full roll of Tyvek from Craigslist. By the last face of the house, we were cobbling together all the scraps we could find, but we had just enough to cover all the foam! Again, all of these seams were taped.

Furring

We used capnails to temporarily hold the Tyvek to the foam — but really, the furring strips were the piece that keeps the Tyvek in place. Ahh, the furring strips… these were a really interesting and challenging part of the plan. The purpose of the furring strips (0.75″ thick) is to lift the siding away from the house, providing an air space that allows for better drainage & evaporation of water that does get behind siding; this configuration is called a “rain screen.” The siding is then attached to the furring strips.

But in order to provide a strong base for the siding, the furring absolutely has to be anchored well, which means it needs to be directly connected to the studs. The studs are now under 3″ of foam and .5″ of sheathing — which meant that we needed really nice long, self-drilling screws! We ended up having to special order 5″ long #10 self-drilling screws, as these are not available at the local store. We were also worried about hitting the sheathing screws, so we did a crazy plan where we held each piece of furring up to the house before putting on any insulation, so we could choose where the screws would go. After the insulation and Tyvek, we had to measure very carefully to make sure each piece of furring was still aligned with a stud. This was even more complicated by us using both horizontal & vertical pieces of furring in different areas (the furring should be perpendicular to the siding direction, and we had a complicated siding plan)! Mostly, it went pretty well, but there were more than a few measuring mistakes as well.

Next post, windows & door!

The exterior is finished & I’m a slacker

Hey everyone! It’s been ages since I updated the blog, but we’ve made a lot of progress.

In fact, the exterior is totally finished, as of a couple weeks ago!!

I would encourage you all to follow the facebook page, as I post there much more regularly! I hope to add a bit more detail about the construction steps here soon, but don’t hold your breath. I’m happy to answer any questions that you have, just ask!

Installing the metal roof, and a note about building science

This post is about several roof related things:

• Installation of a roof window
• Installation of the metal roofing panels
• Some notes on vented vs unvented roof assemblies

Check out the previous post on how we did our roof decking, including a layer of rigid foam. Next step was to add the drip edge trim to the eaves of the house — fairly simple stuff. After that, we installed the roofing underlayment. We chose a peel & stick type, since that seemed easy, and it was high temperature rated for use under metal roofing. Ours was GAF StormGuard; pretty much like Grace Ice & Water Shield, but came at a discount with our roofing panels. It’s not too bad to install… pretty self explanatory.

The hardest thing about roofing was reaching everywhere! We did end up buying that 12′ ladder… sooooo worth it. I don’t know how we would have done it without it… we tried to save money a few months ago by buying the 8′, but it’s just not enough. Spring for the 12′!!

Roof Window Installation

We decided on a large roof window instead of a fixed or venting skylight. The basic difference is that it’s huge and can function as an egress. We had a window just like this in our little apartment in France and LOVED it. We ordered the flashing kit that’s made for the roof window (Fakro brand). I would definitely recommend that. Watch all the videos a couple times. There aren’t any English instructions (or any words at all) — these windows are really popular in Europe, so they just make picture instructions. There’s nothing terribly difficult, just a lot of steps. The hardest part was actually getting the glass back into the hinges after installing the frame — we didn’t pay attention to the mechanism when we took it out, and eventually we had to look up the patent to understand how it fit together. It’s quite a heavy window, so one person had to be supporting it while the other tried to make the damn things fit together. It was super frustrating at first, but now we’re pretty good at it.

We decided to put the roof on before finishing the sheathing to spare our poor subfloor anymore rain.

Peel & stick underlayment, and a little window flashing on the gable end wood.

Attaching brackets to the roof window

Roof window in place!

Some flashing details…

Flashing under the window requires roof to be in place.

It works!

We decided the jigsaw was best for making long cuts in the metal panels.

Screwgun!

Some of the screws were hard to reach…

Many positions were tested.

Finished with the back!

Proton & Rob in hanging out near the canal behind our house.

Now for the short side…

Gable trim!

We finally did buy that big 12′ ladder!

The Metal Roofing

The metal roofing panels came next! Actually, it’s kind of required to do some of this in conjunction with the roof window installation, so that all the flashing is properly lapped. You have to do a big of measuring, cutting, and hoping for the best.

As suggested by the instructions, we predrilled our panels on the ground — since we went with an exposed fastener type roof, it looks a lot better if all the holes are lined up neatly. I’ve read good & bad things about exposed fastener, but it definitely has a couple of big advantages — it’s cheaper, and it’s easier to install than standing seam. Although some say it’s more likely to leak, our roof came with a 40 year warranty, and as long as it’s installed properly, it should last. The exposed fasteners are basically wood screws with a neoprene washer to help seal them shut. Additionally, the thick asphalt peel & stick underlayment is self-repairing & provides an additional seal around the screw.  The roofing ended up costing about $600 total, which seemed great to us! It’s a beautiful metallic copper color and just shines in the sun.

As I mentioned, the hardest part was figuring out how to reach everything — the roof is only a 30 degree slope, but that’s a lot on a slippery surface 13 feet in the air. We were able to reach all the fastener locations either from the 12′ ladder, or by carefully crawling out onto the ridge from the roof window.

Finally, putting on the ridge cap was a bit tricky… it had the profile for a vented roof, so it didn’t sit super flat. Since the roof was slippery, Rob couldn’t figure out a way to screw in the fasteners without sitting on the metal… and he kind of ended up squishing it as he worked his way down… so the ridge cap is definitely a little bit derpy. Squished in the middle, then we tried to correct it, and it just got worse & worse. We’ll probably end up replacing it eventually, but for now it’s water-tight, and gives it that “home made” look….

Now that I’m thinking about it again, he should have been sitting on the side that was already screwed in, not the side he was screwing in… seems obvious now… gahh. Anyway, there’s a pro tip for you all.

Unvented  vs Vented Roofs

I wanted to address this topic because of a recent post from Little Yellow Door. I feel really bad for Ella having to tear down her entire ceiling! Of course, it’s a huge bummer when you realize you did something wrong and need to redo it. And I’m absolutely sure she’s not the only one who made an unvented roof assembly — in fact, that’s exactly what we did. Now I’m going to drop some building science on you that explains what makes ours (hopefully) work, and hers fail.

Remember learning about condensation and dew point? No? That’s ok, because you already intuitively know about the topic: Think about your nice cold beer on a hot summer day — there’s water just dripping down the sides of the glass; the beer inside is cold & the temperature outside is hot.  Well, the exact same effect can happen in your roof — if it’s cold outside and nice & toasty inside, water can condense out of the air and cling to the underside of your roof sheathing, resulting in mold. Condensation occurs when the air is colder than the dew point (which varies with pressure & humidity).

Basically, if we keep our roof deck warm, condensation won’t occur (warm is defined as 45 degrees F by buildingscience.com [1]). The easiest way to do this is to install rigid foam over the roof deck. The amount you’ll need does vary by climate — for Florida, we need a measly R-5, just .75″ inches of polyiso. If you live somewhere much colder, you’ll need thicker foam, which could cause trouble for height-limited tiny houses. We happened to be installing rigid foam anyway, as a thermal break for our studs! You can see in our last post, we used .5″ plywood sheathing, .75″ of rigid foam, and then another .5″ plywood as a screw base for our metal roof. If you do go this route, make sure not to add an interior vapor barrier. YMMV.

Here are a few more resources on the topic:

[1] Unvented roof systems report from buildingscience.com: http://www.buildingscience.com/documents/reports/rr-0108-unvented-roof-systems/

[2] Building Science Insights, Confusion about Diffusion: http://www.buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-049-confusion-about-diffusion

[3] How to Build an Insulated Cathedral Ceiling: http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/musings/how-build-insulated-cathedral-ceiling

[4] 2cycle2gether Tiny House: http://2cycle2gether.com/2011/02/tiny-house-building-science-the-roof/

[5] http://www.buildingscience.com/documents/confpapers/cp-0705-field-performance-unvented-cathedral-ceiling-ucc-in-vancouver

We’re all dried in!

Hi everyone! So, I obviously haven’t updated the blog in a really long time… like months. Sorry about that. Writing actually isn’t one of my favorite things to do. But, we’ve gotten a lot done in a past couple months! I’m going to try to do a big push this week and publish a lot of more specific updates…

• The metal roof is on!
• The roof window is installed!
• The 3″ rigid foam wall insulation is all applied!
• The house wrap is on!
• All of the windows are flashed & looking great!
• The front door from hell is installed and even opens & closes!
• Lots of furring strips are up!

That means that we’re all dried in! Yay!

So keep a look out for the new posts this week and feel free to harass me if you don’t see them! If you don’t follow us on facebook, I’d suggest you start! I tend to update slightly more frequently there 🙂

Updated design

Hi everyone! I realized that when I started this blog, our framing plan was not too filled in or useful… but since then, it’s really developed! We’re still using the same floorplan as shown in this post, but there are a few cosmetic changes.

Seriously, I don’t think we could have built this house without having a handy SketchUp model. It’s so useful to refer to for measurements, and it’s a great test platform for fitting pieces together without actually having to build something. Since we’re using steel framing, in my model a yellow piece denotes a “C” and an orange piece denotes track.

Framing – the south side

Framing – the east side

Framing – the north side (front door side)

Framing – the north side

With sheathing on walls and roof

With insulation and furring strips

Some siding on the furring

A siding layout and color possibilities

Siding layout and color possibilities

This was all done using the totally free version of SketchUp, available here. If you’re interested in learning more about how to make a model like this, I’d highly suggest watching the SketchUp tutorial videos, and Michael Janzen’s youtube series specifically addressing tiny houses.

If you’d like to download this model to play around with it, just search for “Space Coast Tiny House” in the 3D warehouse in SketchUp!

Sheathing & Roof

Hello again! I’m terrible at updating the blog, but we’ve made some progress – partial sheathing on the walls and roof!

Sheathing

We’ve got the sheathing up on the two longs walls. It’s been a trial and error process — attaching sheathing to steel studs is a lot harder than to wood. We finally figured out the best way by the very end…

First, use self-drilling screws, like this:

A self-drilling screw with a low-profile (lathe) head! These can be found at Lowe’s. These are the same thing we put the studs together with.

These are really sheet metal screws — so when you want to pass through wood first, you have a little problem. The screw drills really fast through the wood, and then the wood starts climbing the threads while it slowly drills through the metal. This isn’t so good — it can pull out nearby screws, rendering those holes you drilled useless, and you have to make more. We tried just pressing really hard on the screw gun; this had limited success….

Then we tried pre-drilling small pilot holes to help the screws drill through the metal – basically, the same problem, but we also had to spend forever (and lots of drill bits) drilling through the metal.

Finally, we used our brains — we pre-drilled holes through the wood, large enough for the screw shank to fit through, but not the head. This is the right solution! The screw is just acting as a clamp, holding the sheathing to the studs. Then we learned they make special screws to do this — they have little wings that keep the wood from engaging the threads; those wings (theoretically) break off when they hit metal. They only make these in larger sizes than we needed for the sheathing, but we did buy them for the roof (more below)!

We’ll finish the sheathing on the two ends soon, but wanted to get the roof on. The sheathing that’s out there has been rained on a lot, and it’s quite obviously getting pretty weathered. We’ve had a little bit of warping, but nothing too serious, and no delamination.

Roof Sheathing

Roofing sheathing is like more complicated wall sheathing — thicker, higher up in the air, and at an angle. Our roofing sheathing consists of three layers — 3/4″ rigid polyiso foam sandwiched between two layers of 1/2″ plywood. Since we’re using steel, we need a thermal break outside the rafters. The 3/4″ polyiso gives us R-5, which is enough for Florida. We’ll also be adding more insulation between the studs later. (Check out this cool and helpful post for more info).

With me in the loft and Rob on the ladder, we first lifted one piece of plywood and positioned it. We put in two screws to hold it in place while we positioned the foam (held by a nail) and the second piece of plywood. Then, we screwed the entire sandwich down at once using #12 self-drilling wood-to-metal screws (those fancy ones with wings). The wings are nice, but they don’t always break off… Rob learned how to finesse the speed of the screw gun to get the highest success rate.

Working on the roof isn’t the easiest thing — we only have a couple of 8′ ladders, and it’d be nice to have something taller! So far, we’ve been working over the loft, which has been really convenient. I have a feeling the rest of the roof is going to be a bit more challenging!

It’s really neat to sit up in the loft now that it’s got a ceiling — we’re really feeling what it will be like to sleep there! Especially with the HUGE roof window cut out, it feels quite spacious. And I only ruined one tool making the window (yes, it’s possible for a jigsaw to saw through its own cord 😦 ).

In other roof news, we decided to go with the copper metallic roofing. I went to pick it up in Ocala a little while ago, and it’s really beautiful!!

Rafters are up!

It was a busy month… I traveled to Missouri for my great grandma’s 99th birthday party, so we missed a work weekend (worth it). We’ve also been taking quite a few beach days, and it’s been so incredibly hot here that we just can’t work some days! My new printing press also arrived, so I’ve been busy printing some jobs for my business, Proton Paperie & Press.

But we’ve completed our rafters, which is a big step! Honestly, we thought they were going to be harder than they were, so maybe we were avoiding them a little bit… Here are some pictures, with more construction details below:

Attaching clip angles to the ridge beam for the first couple of rafters

Clip angle! This connects the ridge beam to the rafter.

Getting the ridge beam in place was surprisingly easy. It does help to have two people and two ladders.

The essential galvanizing spray.

At the top track of the wall/rafter connection, we use these bigger fancier clip angles.

Detail of the clip angle on the gable end.

We made our own clip angles from scraps of studs. Cheaper, but lots of work and paint!

All the rafters are cut!

Hello!

First, we built the ridge beam — for steel framing, this is a piece of “C” inside of track. Since our pieces were 10′ long, and we needed a 20′ beam, we staggered the joins by cutting one of the C pieces into two. It was very sturdy and not too hard to manage with two people. The first two rafters were attached directly to the gable end walls. Then, we lifted up the ridge beam, placed it, and screwed the rafters to it.

The rest of the rafters help support the middle of the ridge beam — they’re connected directly to the beam with a clip angle on one side, and directly to the top track of the wall with a different clip angle. We made all the clip angles ourselves out of left over pieces of track and “C”. This was a bit of work, but a lot cheaper and less wasteful than buying premade ones.

We were a little worried that we weren’t including horizontal ties to prevent the house from “spreading”, like is recommended in steel framing guides (these would make the cathedral ceiling filled with joists)… but most of the span tables for rafters in guides start at 24′ and go up  from there. Since our house is MUCH smaller than that (~8′), we decided to go ahead and try it our way. It seems extremely stable — another win for tiny!

View down the ridge beam. The big break on the left side will hold our (giant) roof window.

More cute Florida wildlife!

My greatgrandma Irene and me!

We’re currently working on sheathing the sides, then we’ll get the roof on. We’re trying to decide on a color for our metal roof! What do you think, blue or metallic copper?

Wall framing complete!

Rob and I finished framing out all the walls yesterday! We had quite a few pieces to add since our last post… studs we had left out to make screwing easier, window supports, the other gable end, the loft etc.

The finished framing!

We used ratcheting straps to pull this piece into perfect square before attaching the loft. They work surprisingly well!

Not screwing up when screwing up. Seriously theses screws were kind of a pain to install — because of in-line framing techniques, we were always screwing inside a stud.

We used an I-beam configuaration for the loft joists to resist bending.

Just a few more pieces…

Tiny house selfie!

Cutting out the window rough openings is easy with a jigsaw! To start a side, cut a curve around the corner, then go back and take the last bits off.

Steel plates are useful for attaching pieces when the screwgun won’t fit into a small space.

Up on the loft measuring!

Loft is awesome! I won’t be able to stand in it for long though!

My turn with the screwgun… Rob’s elbow was hurting from too much use.

Proton enjoys the lack of walls.

We also added a couple of pieces of sheathing last weekend, with the help of our friends Casey & Eric (who is a screwgun master). This weekend, we finally figured out what the jigsaw is perfect for — cutting out the window rough openings in the sheathing.

Our painted subfloor is holding up great! It’s been raining almost everyday, but there hasn’t been any lamination or warping.

Up next, roof rafters (I’m a little scared)!