Finally, it looks like a house!

Look!! We have some walls!!

Rob and I have been working on framing the walls in the comfort of our garage for the last few weeks. This past weekend, we were finally able to put them up! They are a bit heavy, and it’s difficult impossible to manage measurements and placement with only two people. Luckily, we were able to find some magical internet friends!

Thanks a lot /r/321!! With the help of Cheryl, Price, Amanda, Ellen, Mike, Casey, Eric, Ronnie, Adam, and David (I hope I got those all right… and I can’t forget Brandon, Jade, and Bear), we got all four walls standing and braced. We also celebrated a birthday, and our dog Proton made a friend!

I’m so excited — it really seems like a tiny house now!

Standing in one of our big windows!

The first wall is placed…

Ladders were needed…

thanks r/321!

Halfway there…

A storm was threatening us all afternoon, but it never rained.

Happy birthday Jade!

Steel Framing

I’ve had a lot of people ask me why we went with steel instead of wood… it definitely has advantages and disadvantages, but overall, I’m very happy with our decision.

The good…

• Ease of use: The steel is soooo nice to work with — none of the pieces are warped or twisted like with wood, and it really seems like you can get things exactly right if you’re willing to do careful measurements. We were amazed how well everything fit together when we put the walls up.
• Recyclability: Steel studs are made of largely recycled materials, and the scraps (or the entire structure eventually) can be recycled. [1]
• Termite resistance: Termites are a big deal down here — we didn’t want our entire house structure to get eaten.
• Strength & weight: A steel stud is lighter than a similarly sized wood stud. The difference isn’t huge since we’re using 18 gauge steel (some people use the lighter 20 gauge, but this doesn’t meet wind load requirements for our area), but the steel has more strength for its weight.

The bad…

• Price: I’ve heard that steel and wood are comparably priced — let me tell you, that’s not true around here. I found only one local company selling 18 gauge steel studs, and they were about twice as much as lumber. The fasteners are also more expensive.
• Possible rust issues: Things rust super fast down here… we don’t think this will be an issue with the galvanized studs, but it could be. Everywhere we make a cut or hole, we use a cold galvanizing spray to protect the bare metal.

Besides that, steel just seemed really cool! I worked on iron and steel for my entire PhD and postdoc, so it’s somehow more personal to me! If you’re considering steel, check out some of the references at the bottom of this post, and definitely consult the Prescriptive Method for Residential Cold-Formed Steel Framing [2] for load tables and lots of helpful diagrams.

Another consideration for steel framing is insulation. Steel acts as a much better thermal bridge than wood, which means that standard “between-the-studs” insulation isn’t very effective. [5] The best method to deal with this is to use continuous insulation on the outside of the steel. This changes the design a little bit from the typical tiny house, but it leaves the space between the studs free for easy plumbing, wiring, and even shelving. More on that in a few weeks…

A finished wall sitting in the grass

Our garage has a nice flat floor flor laying everything out

Galvanzing spray is awesome and very necessary!

These are the abrasive wheels we use with our cut off saw to chop the steel — the one on the left used to be as big as the one on the right!

Proton’s helping!

Hand seamers are useful for bending pieces of track

Headers can be made using an I-beam style (as we did), or a box style.

Aviation snips are put to their limit with the 18 gauge steel.

We usually tried to create a box, square it, and then add the studs in the middle

Vice grips are totally worth the $20

Lots of sparks — use eye protection!!

Leveling & attaching the scissor jacks

We finally got our scissor jacks on the back of the trailer so that it could be leveled before the walls went up. We decided to attach them using bolts instead of welds — that way, we can remove them for transport to get better ground clearance.

In order to have the bolt heads be accessible (so they don’t turn while you’re tightening the nut), we had to go through several layers — the trailer itself (a 6 inch hollow piece of steel), the floor framing, the subfloor, and the bottom layer of track of the wall. This required super long special-order 3/8″ bolts:

When they arrived, we saw they were only threaded on the bottom bit, and they were a bit too long (you don’t get to be very specific in lengths when you get to foot long bolts), so we added some spacers too. Since the holes we had cut in the steel track were rough & large (so they’d fit over the entire nut), we went back and added steel plates to strengthen things, then we caulked around the edges to prevent water penetration. When the walls go up, we’ll still be able to access the bolt heads from inside the storage area in the couch.

Rob tightening a bolt

Lots of caulk around the steel plates

We do plan to add two more scissor jacks in the front — those corners are noticeably bouncier than the back ones now.

We have a little bit more framing to do (some studs we left out for ease of screwing, loft, etc), but luckily we got most of the heavy pieces in place! More importantly, we made some local friends that I hope we’ll see a lot more of 🙂

 

References

[1] SSMA — Green Building

[2] Prescriptive Method for Residential Cold-Formed Steel Framing

[3] Highly recommend this book: Steel Frame House Construction (also includes a copy of the Prescriptive Method)

[4] Buildipedia article

[5] IMPROVING ENERGY PERFORMANCE OF STEEL STUD WALLS, ORNL

Subfloor v2.0

In my last post, I detailed a few problems we were having with our subfloor…

The tarp-tent was a total fail, and we took it down after a few days… the wind kept blowing down our cement bucket poles, and small holes meant that water was still getting in (side note: never buy a 30’x50′ tarp, it’s completely unmanageable)… the wood couldn’t dry when the rain stopped, because the tarp trapped it in. The last straw was the termite family we saw munching the veneer in one of the corners. We decided to try our luck with the open elements, but the waterseal didn’t really stop the delamination which occured from being rained on everyday, and eventually it got so bad that we realized we just couldn’t salvage this floor:

This time, we’ve used some of the plywood we had designated for our sheathing. It’s rated Exposure 1, which theoretically means it can weather being rained on quite a bit… but we’re now paranoid, and we know that if this second subfloor fails, we might really just give up.

So, we decided to go a bit farther, painting it with Olympia Rescue It! wood & concrete resurfacer. It’s pretty thick stuff with a nice gritty texture. It can even fill holes up to 1/4″, which was nice since some of the plywood had some big knots. Although we’ll eventually be covering it with something else, it requires a tint to mix properly… so we chose an exciting color that should make us feel energized to look at. Can you believe they call it Muted Mesa?

After getting all the screws out of the old subfloor, we had to pull it up. This was initially a bit of a challenge, since we conveniently glued it to the framing. To cut between the layers, first we tried the jigsaw…

You know which blade we went with… THE UGLY

Yeah… no. We keep trying to use the jigsaw, but we haven’t found it’s magic application yet.

Our old friend the circular saw came to the rescue!

And then it electrocuted me…

Just a little bit. There was a worn part of the sheathing on the cord, and it zapped me in the lower leg. I felt a bit tingly for a few minutes, but I’m alive…

Luckily, beyond the first board, we didn’t have to do much cutting. Usually if we cut the glue on  one side, we could pry up the rest of the board. The glue was apparently working well on some parts, but (luckily) not so well on others.

Everything looked pretty decent underneath, although there was some water sitting on the insulation in a few places — all near the breaks in the subfloor, where warping had allowed water to flow in. Bad… but not that bad. We let it dry for a few hours in the sun.

Finally, we got the new boards on! They are only 15/32″, instead of the 3/4″ we had before. There is a noticeable difference in sturdiness & flexibility, but since we’d used 16 OC joists, it’s still workable.

We also learned that we’re supposed to leave a 1/8″ gap between the sheets to allow for a little bit of expansion & contraction (we didn’t do this on subfloor #1)… but again, we’re paranoid, so we also filled in that gap with Rainseal caulk. And then we filled in every other gap and screw head everywhere with it as well. That will hopefully stop water from getting into the framing & insulation at all.

We’ve been very hard at work on framing the walls, from the comfort and safety of the garage (yay ceilings). We’ve got those mostly ready to put up, but they are a bit much to manage with only 2 people. So, we’re hosting a house raising BBQ next weekend! We don’t have any nearby friends yet, but we’ve managed to recruit about 15 people from our friendly, local subreddit, r/321! I’m really looking forward to meeting everyone next week and getting our house to the point where it actually looks house-like!

My tomato plant now! See the two tomatoes! Disregard all the empty branches that caterpillars went to town on!

Snake! There are many friendly snakes here in Florida.

Baby picture of the tomato plant, which my friend Lane brought to me on his visit!

How not to build a subfloor

Today’s lesson is on how NOT to build your subfloor! As I mentioned earlier, I had this super great idea that we’d just use really nice oak plywood for our subfloor, do a cool faux hardwood look on it (ala this), and then we wouldn’t have to buy a real floor!

Yeah, there are a couple problems with that idea…

First of all, I wanted nails to hold the plywood down, since they are a lot cooler looking than screws. However, it turns out that nails are really inferior to screws for the purpose of holding plywood down flat. Rob already knew this, but I was sure nails would be fine. They weren’t.

Second, I was being a real bitch about keeping the floor in perfect condition which, as you may expect, is really hard to do during construction. I kind of yelled at my friend a little bit when I messed up a bit of the veneer, and then I felt like an asshole. This was just the first of many problems though — sweat made stains, little splots of wood glue, etc, were impossible to avoid.

So, I’m thinking that I’ll just go ahead and finish the thing, stain it, seal it, etc… but since everything takes longer than it should, I had to go out of town for a few days before I got the chance (which is a story of another debacle for another day). We’re like, ‘Ok, let’s just put the tarp on it. That will totally protect it.”

Did I mention it’s the rainy season here in Florida? I come back from my trip, and we lift up the tarp:

Rusty nails, delaminated veneer… generally, a shit show. It looked a lot worse than in the pictures before it was able to dry a bit. Apparently these tarp things aren’t really waterproof, and water had pooled and seeped through. It was at this point we decided to rethink everything, and realized this was going to be a true subfloor, not a floor.

We thought about removing these pieces entirely… but after pulling all the nails, we realized they were glued down really well, and they were not going anywhere without some serious damage to the floor framing and insulation… so we decided to keep them and carry on. We put a ton of screws all over to get things flat. Luckily, the damage was mainly concentrated in one area, which is going to end up under the kitchen cabinets. We cut off the super bumpy veneer with a utility knife.

Then we had to figure out how to protect what we had left… we rigged up this super sketchy tarp tent out of some concrete (btw, way harder to mix by hand than they make it sound), buckets, poles, and rope.

We also put super wood-filler on the part of the plywood where we had removed the veneer (and enjoyed our crazy hot fort for a few hours).

We also bought water-sealing liquid for the plywood. It says to wait until you have a clear forecast for 24 hours before applying. Since rain was forecasted everyday for the next two weeks, things didn’t look good. But after our trailer sat for a lovely 36 hours under the tent with no rain, we decided to chance the forecast and go ahead and put the sealant on (it did turn the wood a lovely warm color!).

That was last night. As I sit here, there is a huge thunderstorm, rain falling all over our 18-hour-old application of the water-seal. We have such a good sense of timing… I’m taking consolation in the fact that there is so much wind that I’m sure our tent would have blown over anyway, had we been using it. I’m not really sure what the next step it. We literally have no idea what people do to protect their half-finished construction projects from the rain.

So kids, buy exterior grade plywood for your subfloors! And seriously consider some kind of magical inside space to build your house in…

 

Friends!

A couple of weeks ago, our friends Lane and Hannah came to visit. They were awesome enough to help us out with the tiny house between beach visits, and they were extremely helpful, even though we were doing kind of boring stuff.

We hadn’t finished all the L-bracket attachments, so we were working on getting those finished, as well as cutting the insulation to go between the floor joists.

The rigid foam insulation cuts really easily with a utility knife, and it’s very nice to have two people to work on each piece, one on each side of the trailer. Also, I recommend cutting a little smaller than you need and filling in the gaps with the canned spray foam (much easier than shaving off a piece that’s too large). But be careful! We were cutting a thin piece, and I was stupid and cut the shit out of my thumb. While sweat was definitely already a structural component, we’ve now got blood and tears as well! I wasn’t allowed to help much for the rest of the day…

We’re used 2 1/4″ of rigid foam insulation (one 3/4″ piece and one 1 1/2″ piece), even though we had 2 1/2″ of space. I would definitely recommend leaving a little wiggle room– between the canned spray foam to fill in gaps and the waviness of the flashing, this was the perfect amount.

Lane was the canned spray foam master.

It did whatever he wanted… for me, it seemed quite wily.

It expands a lot while drying! Don’t worry, it’s easy to cut off the extra with the utility knife.

Creative use of scraps…

Little gaps aren’t a big deal.

We heard the canned stuff never comes off, so we wore classy trash bag outfits!

We also managed to get most of the subfloor (that Rob and I had cut earlier) attached.

We used a long piece of steel flashing as a circular saw guide. This worked extremely well.

Measurements for the wheel well pieces… we only cut one wrong! It was salvagable, we just had to flip it.

We finished the inside corners of cuts with a handsaw.

Beautiful!!

Placing the first piece permanently…

Glue it down!

Lane is moving a cut piece, while Hannah & Rob cut some insulation.

You might have noticed that our subfloor is pretty nice stuff! We chose oak plywood with the intention of finishing it as faux hardwood plank, and using it as our real floor… for a number of reasons, that didn’t really work, and now we just have a really expensive subfloor. More on that later….

Did I mention we have really cool wildlife in our backyard?

Lane and Hannah are master lizard trappers (and releasers)

Cranes in the canal that runs behind our house.

Thanks again to our awesome friends who were so helpful!

Flashing & attaching

I can’t even guess how many times we’ve been back and forth to Lowe’s and Home Depot… part of the trouble with having no idea what we’re doing is that we often omit some crucial component from our shopping list, or run out of material, or break a tool…we’re definitely making slow but sure progress, and most of the time it’s even fun (hopefully our neighbors aren’t too sensitive to curse words)!

Aluminum flashing

As I mentioned in the last post, we built the floor frame in three main sections. We decided that flashing each piece independently would be a lot easier than the alternative — connecting them together, lifting and flipping over the entire frame, and flashing it as one giant piece. We’re adding pieces of overlap flashing at the joints between the major sections… unfortunately, this meant that we didn’t buy quite enough flashing and were delayed another couple of days (we don’t get much work done outside the weekends, since Rob has an actual 9-5ish job).

The aluminum sits nice and flat while you screw it in.

Almost done! But we ran a little short of flashing…

It got a little bubbly once it was on the trailer…

Doing the flashing is not too difficult (we’re using 20″ wide aluminum rolls)… but it’s maybe impossible to get it totally flat. It’s especially bubbly in the middle section of floor, which was apparently very slightly off square when we screwed in the flashing — when we hammered it into place between the two end pieces, the flashing went a little crazy. Hopefully it won’t matter too much… we have a 2″ overlap between sheets, and the rigid foam insulation should diminish any serious bubbles.

Attaching the frame to the trailer

We’re using a couple of different attachments to permanently affix the house to the trailer. Our trailer has handy 1/8″ thick flanges running along the side which provide our main attachment points. We’re using 3/8″ x 1 1/2″ lag screws to come up through the flange into the wood. These go along each side, except in the wheel well section.

After placing & clamping the frame, we drilled 1/4″ holes down through the wood & steel.

The holes in the wood act as pilot holes for the lag screws (which actually come up from the bottom).

Then, we enlarged the holes in steel to be 3/8″.

A broken 3/8″ drill bit and some stripped screws…

Proton hanging out in the shade

Hand tightening the lag screws to check our placement.

Our second method of attachment — L brackets.

Second, we’re using L-bracket strong-ties to attach each joist to the two main steel decking beams that run the length of the trailer. We’re alternating directions on these (or more accurately, applying them in random directions based on where it’s easier to sit).

Now, some handy advice I wish we had had before starting to drill (thanks YouTube)… steel trailers are really hard to drill through. These few things will make your life so much easier:

• Use the right drill bit! I highly recommend a cobalt one (titanium was pretty much useless). We bought a second after breaking the first…
• Go slowly — it seemed like using high RPMs would speed up the process, but it doesn’t.
• Use a drilling fluid!! We didn’t buy anything fancy — we just put a little motor oil in a water bottle and poked a small hole in the top. Instantly made drilling 100x faster.

You may have noticed that we haven’t leveled our trailer yet… because of the brilliant way we decided to attach the scissor jacks, leveling at this stage would be pointless — our bolts need to go through not only the trailer, but also the floor framing, subfloor, and steel studs. Yay us! Hopefully leveling once we get the subfloor on won’t present a problem.

Floor framing

We had a slight set back before we could really get going on the build, but we have made a lot of progress since my last update!

Rust problems!!

Just a couple weeks after our trailer arrived, we noticed that there was a significant amount of rust developing on the bottom of some of the pieces:

Needless to say, this was pretty disappointing… we live fairly near the coast, and things rust here quickly, but this was pretty ridiculous. I had to spend several days under the trailer removing rust (with a phosphoric acid-based cleaner). I then sprayed a cold galvanizing spray on the metal (which seemed to have escaped being painted properly) to protect it. Then I learned that only latex based paints can be put over galvanized metal, so I had to do a brushed-on latex primer, followed by a rust resistant black enamel spray.

This was a lot of work that I didn’t anticipate, and I got way too familiar with the view from underneath the trailer (including helpful doggie):

I talked to Tiny Home Builders, who we ordered our trailer from, about this problem… and they were very responsive and apologetic. They gave us a free lifetime membership to their video series on tiny house building (I’ve just a watched a couple so far, but it seems pretty good), and they agreed to pay for the rust removing and painting supplies (unfortunately, I didn’t ask for quite enough; I didn’t realize how many cans of spray paint it would take!). They also said they’ve talked to manufacturer and will be ramping up their quality control measures.

Floor framing

Once that was taken care of, we started on the floor framing. I really didn’t want to do any wood framing, or have a floor frame at all… a lot of people end up putting the insulation between the joists & decking of the trailer, saving a few inches. However, the more I learned about thermal bridging, the worse of a solution this seemed. If you don’t have an insulating layer outside of steel framing members (including steel trailer beams), heat transfer can be really significant, reducing the R-value of your insulation between members by more than 50% [1]. There’s no real way to isolate the steel trailer from the inside of your house without doing some kind of framing and insulation above the deck — at least nothing reasonable I could come up with — so I succumbed to the idea of a wooden floor frame (thermal bridging exists with wood, but is much less severe).

We’re using 2×3 members for the joists, saving an inch over regular 2x4s. They seem to be plenty stiff enough @ 16″ on-center, and we’ll be putting 2 1/4″ of polyiso insulation between them, giving us a floor R-value of 14.4. We built three main pieces – one on each side of the wheel wells, and one in the center:

Cutoff saw is awesome!

1/3 down…

Circular saw is useful when you need to make some changes to the plan…

We built the two ends first, positioned them, and then built the middle to fit exactly

Triumphant finish!

The extra piece that sticks out a few inches near the wheel well will support our front door — since we’re doing thick continuous insulation outside the framing, and we’ll have an out-swing door, this will allow the door to be flush with the siding.

I’ve got to say, working with wood is a little bit of a PITA — a lot of the pieces were twisted, not straight or level, etc… I’m hoping that the steel studs will be easier to deal with in this respect.

In progress…

We’re almost finished with the aluminum flashing and attaching the frame permanently to the trailer — I’ll have more updates on that later this week!

References

[1] IMPROVING ENERGY PERFORMANCE OF STEEL STUD WALLS, ORNL

Dropping dollars

This week I’ve been ordering a lot of building materials (and cleaning out the garage so that they have a place to stay)…

You may be wondering, how much does a tiny house cost? I’ve heard it’s possible to build a house of almost all salvaged materials, saving a lot of money… Unfortunately, weeks of searching craigslist and local building salvage places hasn’t turned up many significant finds (I did get a nearly full roll of Tyvek for $40)! Since we really want to get going with the build and have some pretty specific requirements (tempered windows, steel studs, etc), we’re going with mostly new materials for the structure. Our goal budget for the house (including solar power) is $30,000, most of which we’ve saved in cash so far… although I don’t know the final prices of everything yet, this will allow us to use some nice materials, but isn’t totally crazy. You can follow along with our actual spending on this Google doc.

You’ve probably heard that if you spend a lot (over $2500) at Lowe’s or Home Depot, you can send your quote back to the ‘bid room’ and get a better deal! My experience is that it’s kind of true… I gave the same materials and windows list to both Home Depot and Lowe’s, totaling about $4300.

Home Depot quoted me a whopping $7 off. Whoo-hoo.

Lowe’s, on the other hand, has been awesome. I really have to give a shout-out to Greg at the Melbourne store (window department) — he’s been super helpful with all the recommendations, and he’s been working with me on getting my quote. Although their windows were about $120 more initially (exact same windows, Jeld-Wen is sold at both stores), he agreed to match Home Depot + 10% off, and ended up doing even better than that. On the rest of the materials, he got me another ~$200 off, for a total savings of over $500!

Being an Atlanta native, I was biased towards Home Depot at the beginning, but Lowe’s has really won me over. You can also get nice 10% coupon for Lowe’s by picking up a ‘mover’s packet’ at the post office, or signing up for their mover’s program.

Unfortunately, it’s been raining a lot here (so $100 of our budget went to a really big tarp), and we haven’t done much more than move the trailer to it’s build location in the backyard. We’re hoping to get started on the real stuff this weekend, now that we have $8000 of materials sitting in the garage…

 

The trailer is here!

We’re just getting back from a wedding in New Orleans (it was awesome seeing our friends from college!), and our trailer from Tiny Home Builders was delivered today! Unfortunately, we didn’t take down quite enough fence, so it’s only made it to the side yard so far. Anyway, initial impressions of the trailer are very, very good. Every measurement I’ve taken is extremely true to what was expected, and the quality of every piece looks great. I’m excited to finalize the measurement now — although all the measurements I was given turned out to be valid, I didn’t know details like where the wheel well falls (112″ from hitch end to wheel well start, 64″ well, 64″ to the other end). Here are some pictures!:

Taking measurement!

The tires and some of the wiring

Overlooking the backyard where hopefully the trailer will eventually be…

It comes with lots of fancy stuff to hook it to your truck and make sure it doesn’t secretly sneak away

In other news, I’ve been window shopping (haha). Windows are actually really frustrating to buy — you can’t see the prices until you go sit in a store and have the salesman play with his computer for an hour… and if you decide to change the sizes, all bets are off (good luck even figuring out what the possible sizes are). Additionally, Florida has different approvals than most other states, so half of what I can find online isn’t available here. For someone like me who likes to try lots of different combinations, it’s torture.

But at this point, I think I’ve figured it out… we’ll have a total of 13 windows, 4 of which are fixed. At first, we priced out laminated impact windows — these are now required by Florida building code unless you have storm shutters, and it seemed like a good idea for a house that drives down the highway… but the salesman talked me out of it (he said they aren’t really that great, but they are crazy expensive), and we’re going with tempered glass instead. Those 5 cute clerestory windows turned into two wide ones, because they won’t make awning windows less than 20″ wide. White vinyl (you can choose white or beige here, yay), which I will make the best of. We should be ordering these in the next few days; I’m currently pitting Home Depot against Lowe’s to see who will give me the best deal!

Next, we’ll be doing the floor framing, but that may have to wait… we’re headed to another wedding this weekend for Rob’s cousin Kolby!

EDIT: Rust appeared after just a couple weeks! Please check out our later post to see what we’ve done about it, and the Tiny Home Builders response.

The design

This SketchUp model gives an idea of the design of the tiny house, although many details are yet to be decided:

Although we’ve taken a lot of inspiration from other tiny houses, we decided to start from scratch, without buying a plan. Time will tell whether or not this was a terrible decision, because neither of us knows much about construction. We are engineers… just not the right kind…

Dimensions: 8.5′ wide, 20′ long (plus trailer hitch ~4′), 13.5′ tall. The livable space fits within the wheel wells, at 82″ wide. The main floor ceiling will be 6.5′, and the loft ceiling will be about 3’9″ at the peak. The utility cabinet, which houses our propane, extra water, and batteries for solar will sit on the hitch end. We’re using a 20′ trailer from Tiny Home Builders.

Framing: We plan to do light gauge steel framing instead of wood. Not only is it lighter and stronger, steel is recyclable and true.

Insulation: With steel framing, thermal bridging is an issue, and some of the insulation needs to sit outside the framing — in our case, all of it will! We plan to use 3″ of rigid foam insulation outside the framing, leaving the space between the studs free. This will allow for much easier wiring and plumbing. Plus, we can put tiny shelves between the studs for extra storage!

Kitchen: We will have a full range and oven, a sizable sink, and a mid-size fridge (which sits in the island). We love to cook, so we’ll have lots of counter space as well! We’ll have a dish draining cabinet over the sink.

Heating and Cooling: Being in Florida, AC is really a necessity. We will have a mini-split system with the inverter option; very energy efficient. We’re considering adding this really beautiful propane fireplace, but we’re not sure it’s worth it — if we do, it’ll go between the two big windows on the ‘front door’ side of the house.

Loft & Stairs: We have been unsuccessful in teaching our dog to climb a ladder — so we’re building in stairs. Although they’re big, we’re using all the extra space inside, with several drawers and even a combo washer/dryer hidden beneath. Our loft is big enough for a queen size bed, and we’ll have storage for our clothes just at the top of the stairs.

Bathroom: We’re using a composting toilet (bucket style, not one of those huge commercial ones). The shower is decently large at 3×2′, and will be tiled in beautiful, sparkly mosaic. We plan to have propane powered on-demand hot water heater.

Living Room: We’ll have a large, deep couch at the front of the house, which doubles as a guest bed. The white table folds down from the wall, creating a desk or a dinner table.

Power: Eventually, we’d like to run on solar power. Our shed roof gives plenty of room for panels, which will be facing south. Most of the windows of the house are on the opposite side, facing north — in Florida, this makes a lot of sense.

Siding and Roofing: We haven’t decided on siding yet, but we love the look of reclaimed barnwood and metal, like this, this, or this!

Doors & Windows: Although those little porches on the ends of tiny houses are just so cute, we really wanted a full length sofa/bed… so our main entry will be on the side. We’ll have a removable porch that spans almost the length of the house, which can be stored while traveling. We will have a second egress in the loft area — a roof window (not a skylight!). Roof windows open up a full 45 degrees, and are totally awesome. Our apartment in France had one, and we fell in love with it — in our opinion, attic rooms are totally underutilized here in the US.

What do you think?

Breaking ground

It’s finally happening! We are really going to do it — build a tiny house.

After modeling countless designs, reading tons of build blogs, and generally being obsessed over tiny houses for the past year or so (well, mostly me), we are finally starting on our biggest project yet.

I’m Erin, and I’m building a tiny house on a trailer, along with my husband, Rob, and my dog, Proton. I’m going to be recounting the details of our build here, from breaking ground to our first move!

We’ve recently moved from France to Florida for Rob’s new job, and we got really lucky finding a build site! After looking at a few industrial warehouse spaces, we found out that a family friend had a house for rent about half an hour from Rob’s office… and it has a huge backyard! Even better, our friend makes furniture for a living, and offered to leave us quite a few handy tools, and several piles of wood scraps.

Although our trailer isn’t ready yet, we prepared for it’s arrival by taking down some of the chain-link fence surrounding the back yard. Rob was not convinced that my method of tugging on the steel poles was going to be productive….

But in the end I was triumphant! And pretty bad-ass — notice the big concrete chunk at the bottom!

We still have one more section of fence to remove, and then we’ll have plenty of room to maneuver our trailer into it’s temporary home. We ordered our 20′ trailer from Tiny Home Builders in mid-March, and it should be ready any day now. Can’t wait!!