Itty Bitty

Two posts in two days?! It's a record! A miracle even! I guess I'm on a roll. I thought it would be fun to share with you our practice project; The Itty Bitty. (Stick with me, this post is a doozy.)

When we were first thinking about building a tiny house, we had some ideas about creating a mini music studio for me. We thought before we started building something small, we'd build something even smaller. Because, apparently, we are obsessed with small things. (Says the girl who just splurged on an original Polly Pocket on ebay. I might have a problem.)
Anyway, Matt's parents had an old trailer, that really was tiny, and we thought, why not? Let's build tiny... before we build tiny. Thus began the Itty Bitty. Part gypsy vardo, part covered wagon, all heart.

First we had to tear out the old wood floor, that was fairly rotten, and put in a subfloor with insulation, pretty much exactly like the one in the big tiny house later.

 We put a number of little token in the floor to represent the things we wanted for our Itty Bitty.
(a rock for stability, a penny for prosperity, a heart for love, etc. We did this with the big tiny too.)

 Father and son taking a break from the floor.
Next we started on the framing. This went really quickly because there was very little of it,  so it was really satisfying.

 Next Matt figured out how to cut rounded rafters so our roof would have a vardo-like curve. The ridge beam is a really nice piece of redwood that came with our several hundred year old beautiful reclaimed barn wood for the big tiny's floor.

 We originally thought we would have to cut scores into the plywood to make it bend over the roof, but thankfully we were wrong! It was thin enough that it bent easily, so we glued and screwed.

 We used corrugated tin roofing, because it is cheap, and it keeps the rain out. Boom.
We did have a little trouble with the overlapping; for some reason the waffle board that goes under the tin made everything not line up perfect. But like my choir buddies know, our general motto has become "It's fine." So, we decided not to worry about it.

 Here's the first pieces of sheathing going up.

 Look we have a window!!

 Matt thinks about all he's accomplished in the last month. He has declared it good.

I guess I didn't get a lot of pictures of us putting the siding on, but we used cedar fence boards and cut about half of them in half lengthwise, so that we could do board and batton siding. 

We also purchased tempered glass panes, and built our own windows. I was really not sure that we were going to be able to do this, but Matt was full of confidence. And rightly so; they turned out beautifully!! We build frames for them, and put squishy stuff (technical term) in the troughs where the glass sits, and then went around all the edges with silicone to make them water tight. There are two windows and both of them open, which is super nice, because that little thing can really heat up with two people in it!

 This is the beautiful door that Matt made, using plywood and split 2x4's.

I painted the door a lovely Ruby Port. 

( It looked pink at first, and I got really worried, but after a couple coats it was nice and luscious.)

I had so much fun building the Itty Bitty that I decided to go even smaller!! Unfortunately these houses are only for looks, but they are easy to make, and I'll sell them to you for the reasonable price of $42,000. Each.

 We were especially proud of the "speakeasy" we made for the door. So, you can only come into our tiny space if you know the password. (The password is ILoveClaireBecauseSheIsTheSmartestBest PersonEverInTheWorldAndDon'tYouForgetIt)

Yay!! The finished product! It took about two months to complete, which went by really fast, and was an awesome learning experience to get us ready for building the big tiny house.

It is even surprisingly big enough to hold all my girlfriends at my birthday party. Plus Rosie. 

Rosie fit very nicely.

Well, that's all for now. :) 

Cheers!

Wow, the last time I posted I told you about the floor. SO MUCH MORE HAS HAPPENED!!!!!! It actually looks like a house now! It's crazy! Ok, I'll try not to get too ahead of myself.
So.
We finished the subfloor and the next step was to have a good ol' fashioned wall raising party. That's right, ma and pa got in on the action, as well as ma- and pa-in-law. Melanie (my mom) and Lisa (Matt's mom) each got to hammer a nail into a wall frame (we would have let them hammer more, but as adorable as it was to watch them, it may have taken a while...) and we all got to lift frames into place. Here's the two matriarchs wielding their power over the doomed nails.

( Rick admires Lisa's two-handed technique.)

(Jim chuckles to himself.)

And here is the raising of the first wall. Huzzah! 

We used 2x4's for the framing and rippling biceps for the lifting.  The spacing between studs is 24 on center, which we chose instead of 16" mostly to cut down on wight. All of the window and door frames have hefty headers made of three pieces of wood sandwiched together to provide extra strength under the roof. 

Oh, did I mention it was Matt's birthday? Yep. He is enjoying this process so much that this is what he wanted to do to celebrate. Manual labor. 

You can tell he's pretty proud of his work.

Speaking of working hard, Dad and Rosie sure had a tough day of supervising.

At the end of the day most of the walls were framed and upright. 

Wow. It really was a sight to see. We could actually start to imagine what it was going to be like to live in! And whoa, is it tall! I didn't realize just how tall 13 feet is. That's a lot of vertical space, which feels so great when you're living tiny. 

Well, I guess I'll keep this post short, and try to come back real soon to keep you updated. 

Till then, Cheers!

Hello again!
We are making much progress on our tiny house, and enjoying (almost) every step of the way. I guess I wanted to talk about some of the stages we've gone through, so I think I'll start with the floor. (I may throw out some fancy construction jargon, to show off how smart I'm getting, so stay with me.

Because we bought a trailer that was built specifically for us, and specifically for a tiny house, we didn't have to do some of the more grueling work that other tiny builders have to do. When a person purchases a normal utility trailer they have to take out all the wood flooring, and install flashing, which is a hefty metal sheeting that goes on the bottom of the trailer to protect against rocks, and general travel debris. Our trailer came with no wood flooring, and the flashing already installed (hooray!) and also four jacks welded to the corners for easier leveling. I got to be a part of the beginning stages of building the sub floor, which meant cutting and installing large 2x6 boards to be placed upright in joist hangers, leaving enough room for insulation that we later installed, and then covering all that with 1/2 inch plywood.

Here's a (fairly) short video of  us preparing to make the first cut.

Burly men indeed! We are so thankful to have such wonderful, helpful friends and family members to make this process go fast and smooth.

On a side note, I'd like let to let it be known that I got to officially claim first blood from this building project. Look at this massive flesh wound!! I basically almost cut my hand off.

....It looked a lot worse in real life.... you could actually see it in real life....

Moving on from the 2x6's, we filled the spaces with 3" rigid foam insulation (this was mostly done by Matt, his father Rick, and our dear friend Tyler), and nailed on the plywood sub floor sheathing.

One of the best things about building your own house is all the fun little quirks you can add. As we were building the floor we had the awesome idea to put in a trap door to a secret nook, where we could hide all our precious loot. Because we're secretly pirates.

Alright, that's enough for one post. I'll leave you with one shot of me actually hammering something.
Until next time, Cheers!

Hi! Welcome to our tiny house blog! I finally sat down and decided to get going on this so we could share our progress with the world. And by that I mean, I moaned and complained about how hard the internet is, and my husband lovingly sat down with me and showed me how to work a blog.

So. 

Here begins the story of probably the greatest adventure he and I have ever tackled together.

We're not entirely sure when we decided that tiny living was in our future, but I have a feeling the notion began with one of my Pinterest boards. (Like many women between the ages of 19 and 59, I'm obsessed with pinning.) From there we started watching youtube videos of tiny houses and their eclectic array of owners, and began digging deeper and deeper into the world of mini abodes, until one day we grinned crazily at each other and said, "Let's do it!" and clicked "purchase" on a beautiful (as far as welded metal goes) custom-built trailer from Iron Eagle Trailers in Oregon. 

Here is Matt standing triumphantly beside our new house's foundation.

After looking at many tiny houses and their dimensions, we decided that the best size for us was going to be basically as long as possible. Matt needs office space to create his cinematic masterpieces, and I need a kitchen large enough to accommodate my spasms of master-chefdom. 24 feet sounded like it would accomplish those things, and even leave us with space for a washer/dryer-in-one (which we just purchased on Craigslist for an apocalyptically low price! Woohoo!) Even at 24 feet long, when we climbed onto our trailer it really hit us just how much we were about to downsize. I'v e always dreamed of living in a big old farm house, and this is not that. But, it's going to be awesome in so many ways. It will force us to do more outdoor living, and get rid of all our (my) unnecessary junk, which is going to be very freeing.

 Matt, who has lots of experience with woodworking but very little with large scale construction, began designing the interior of our future home, and the end result was perfect. He has been doing an amazing job researching, and teaching himself all the ins and outs of building your own house, and I couldn't be more proud of him. This is a side view of what the "office," kitchen, and shower will look like, plus the bedroom loft overhead.

Our pretty little home will have all of the necessary amenities, including a fridge, oven and stove, a full size sink, a couch with storage drawers underneath, a closet and combo washer/dryer under the stairs to the loft, a bathroom with a shower, galvanized water tank tub, and a toilet, which will probably be composting, though I wouldn't be against a nice flushing RV toilet... 

Our sleeping loft will be big enough for a king sized bed, if we feel like upgrading from our queen, and will have windows on either side, and a big skylight for stargazing. The skylight will open, so that we can go out on the roof, where we may eventually build a small deck, that could be removed for transportation.

Well, I've given you a lot to read, and I don't want to wear you out on my first post. (Also Matt said people won't read it if it's too long, and of course he's right. I myself have the attention span of a goldfish.) 

So that's all for today, and next time I'll post more pictures and tell you all about the beginning phases of construction. (Framing the walls was super exciting!)

Ok, well, until next time.

Cheers!